Adobe Photoshop CS5 Boldly Empowers the Digital Artist
So I've been playing around with Adobe's lateset version of Photoshop that will be coming out in the next month, CS5, and I have to say that I think it represents a bold, dramatic and fundamental shift in digital art creation.
Context & Ripple Effects
Thomas Hawk's hands-on with the not-yet-shipped Photoshop CS5 lands at a charged moment for Adobe. Since 2008, when ReadWriteWeb warned that Adobe was quietly assembling an online empire, the company has been pushing its tools beyond the desktop box, and the March 2010 demonstration of Content-Aware Fill by Bryan O'Neil Hughes gave this release its marquee feature: texture synthesized by the software rather than painted by hand.
The wider syndication — Technology Review, CNET, Adobe's own blogs, plus 9to5Mac flagging that Flash Professional CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas — shows a vendor hedging on two fronts at once. Apple's exclusion of Flash from the iPad has been a running public fight since January, community posts have flagged Flash Player 10.1 battery drain on the Nexus One, and Hawk separately argues that Adobe's 1996 bet on Windows as its primary development platform is now backfiring against Apple's ecosystem.
First-order effects
- Digital artists gain algorithmic editing — Content-Aware Fill removes objects and synthesizes backgrounds without manual cloning — when CS5 ships next month, raising the baseline for what counts as skilled retouching.
- Adobe's CS5 launch now carries cross-platform stakes well beyond Photoshop: Flash Professional CS5's promised iPhone app export and HTML5 Canvas output are direct answers to Apple's iPad Flash lockout.
Second-order effects
- Competing image editors face pressure to match Content-Aware-style synthesis or cede the 'automatic retouching' pitch to Photoshop, while plugin and tutorial ecosystems built around manual techniques lose part of their value proposition.
- The Flash-versus-HTML5 split forces Adobe to maintain parallel output targets, raising engineering costs just as device makers like Apple treat the Flash runtime as unwelcome — a squeeze amplified by documented battery complaints on Android hardware.
Third-order effects
- If synthesis features keep replacing manual craft, the professional retoucher's moat shifts from technical execution to art direction, and creative-tool pricing migrates toward whatever layer owns the algorithms.
- A protracted platform war could push Adobe from selling a single runtime toward shipping multi-target authoring tools, fragmenting the 'write once, run anywhere' premise that made Flash central to the web in the first place.
The trend: Creative software is absorbing algorithmic image synthesis while the platform layer beneath it fractures between Apple-controlled devices and open web standards, forcing Adobe to hedge across both.