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Photoshop CC 2014 New Features

June 17, 2014 by
Everything new is new again

This morning, Adobe announced and shipped the 2014 release of Creative Cloud, which includes a new version of Photoshop CC! It has the most enhancements for designers that I've seen in years — which is a great thing!

At 1pm Eastern time (10am Pacific), Adobe is hosting a live event about the release (tune in here), and they’ve posted a list of what’s new in Creative Cloud here. Be sure to click through to the blogs and videos about the individual products.

Below is my roundup of the new features — you’ll be able to learn everything about them in the upcoming update to my book from O’Reilly, Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2014 edition.

While this is a comprehensive list of new features, look for a far more descriptive version in my upcoming review for Macworld magazine, which will be posted as a separate blog entry and link to the full story in late July or early August 2014.

  • Redesigned dialog boxes
  • New blur gallery filters: Path and Spin Blur
  • Typekit access from font family menu
  • Searchable font menu by name or attribute
  • Instant font previews on existing text
  • Better smart guides show helpful spacing info about the elements in your document
  • Sync layer comps with updated layers
  • Layer comps accessible in document placed as a smart object
  • Linked smart objects
  • Convert embedded smart objects to linked and vice-versa
  • New Package command for gathering linked content
  • Better color blending with content-aware tools
  • Editable scripted patterns
  • Place scripted patterns along a path
  • Perspective warp
  • Editable masks for Camera Raw’s Graduated and Radial filters
  • Export web graphics with Generator and export to a subfolder
  • 3D printing and print preview
  • Faster upsampling via Image Size dialog box
  • Faster Smart Sharpen filter

There are also tons of little changes in Photoshop CC 2014, the direct result of Adobe’s customer-feedback initiative called Just Do It (JDI). Here’s a partial list: You can unlock a background layer by single-clicking its padlock icon (hooray!), you can turn the Color panel into a Color Picker that’s always open, you no longer have to unlock a background layer to add a vector-based layer mask to it, you can create gradients with a single color stop, and the process for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud is simpler and now includes workspaces, keyboard shortcuts, and menu customizations, and a whole lot more.

What Adobe removed
Unfortunately, Adobe removed some useful panels because they were Flash based, including the Mini Bridge, Kuler, and Adobe Exchange panels. The Oil Paint filter also went the way of the dodo bird in this version due to outdated code (easy come, easy go!).

darkness