Ultimate Guide to All The New Features of Photoshop CC 2015.5

PHOTOSHOP CC 2015.5 IS HERE! With each update of Photoshop we get a few new tweaks and updates. This article/video will cover all the important and useful updates in the latest and greatest version of our favorite photo editing application. This is THE Photoshop tutorial that will bring you up to speed in no time with all of the new and important features of Photoshop CC 2015.5

1. Face- Aware Liquify

Brand new to the Liquify feature in Photoshop CC 2015.5 is the Face tool. The Face tool will automatically detect faces in your photo and allow you to adjust individual features on a subject’s face simply by pushing or pulling little handles that appear on screen. It’s pretty amazing! This feature will be the calling card for many retouchers very soon to reconstruct faces and change the look of models and photo subjects all around the world. Check out the video above at the 00:59 second mark to hear me talk about how you can use this feature right away.

2. Select and Mask Workspace

This is a pretty deep feature so you may want to check out the video above around the 6:38 minute mark to see how I use it. The Select and Mask Workspace has replaced the Refine Edge dialog box from older versions of Photoshop. Go Select>Select and Mask and choose the Quick Selection tool in the tool area to the left and simply paint over what you would like to select. There are also lots of ways to refine the edge and other tools you can use to make selections. Again, check out the video above to really watch me dive into this brand new, very deep tool set in Photoshop CC 2015.5.

3. Match Font

If you need to figure out what this or that font is in an image, all you need to do now is draw a tight selection around one line of type and go Type>Match Font and Photoshop will give a pop up that will suggest similar fonts and even selections from TypeKit that you can choose to use.

4. Content-Aware Crop

The Crop tool now has the option to “Content Aware” in the control bar at the top of the screen. Tick this on and rotate the crop to straighten your photo, or even extend your photo on a couple of the sides and when you commit the crop Photoshop will use Content Aware to fill in the areas that would be transparent. It works remarkably well!

5. Adobe Stock Photo Integration

Go File>Search Adobe Stock to open the Adobe Stock Photo website. Simply log in with you Adobe User ID and run a search to find a photo you would want to use in your project. Click on the photo and select “Open Preview in Photoshop”. The image will be brought right into your open document in Photoshop and when you decide that you want to license (buy) the image simply right-click on that layer and click on “License Image…” to automatically use one of your image credits on Adobe Stock to buy the image. It’s really that fast and easy!

6. Embed Color Profiles on Export

Now when you export a PNG or JPEG image via File>Export>Export As… you can choose to include the color profile from Photoshop as well. This is a great little feature.

7. On-Canvas Glyph Alternatives

When you have placed a glyph in a block of text, you can now simply highlight the glyph and a little pop up will appear and show you additional or alternative glyphs that you could use in that place with that particular typeface. NOTE: You can disable this feature if it gets in the way by going Preferences>Type>Enable Type Layer Glyph Alternates.

8. 3D Printing 3MF Format

I wish I knew and had more experience with 3D printing so I knew just how much this could help folks who 3D print from Photoshop. The 3MF or 3D Manufacturing File format should allow you to print your Photoshop creations on a 3D printer or open them and work on them in an application like Microsoft’s 3D Builder. 3D is so cool.

9. Artboards Enhancements

There a few new improvements with the artboards in Photoshop. You can now duplicate a layer or layer group into another artboard. You can also change the background color or even give an artboard a transparent background. There are also additional things that you can include if you export an artboard as a PDF.

10. Photoshop is Faster

Adobe claims that Photoshop is much faster, files will open faster and things like Content-Aware move up to 3x faster and the type preview menu will populate up to 4x faster. I haven’t compared it to older version of Photoshop, but faster is good!

11. Working with Adobe xD (Experience Design CC)

You can copy assets from Photoshop right over to the new Adobe Experience Design application (that whole Project Comet thing) and easily pair Photoshop with this new and powerful user interface building tool.

12. Adobe Portfolio

Go to https://www.myportfolio.com/ and you can setup your very own portfolio website hosted through Adobe. It looks like it is essentially included with your CC subscription. Check out the pricing tab and see both pricing options. This looks pretty nice. The only thing I wonder about is a custom domain name, currently your URL would be “myWebsiteNameHere.myportfolio.com” which is fine if you just need to get something online ASAP, but a little less than desirable for a really professional look.

13. Lots of Other Little Things

1. Photoshop app will download up to 65% faster.
2. You can revert to the legacy Photoshop CC 2014 behavior for the Healing Brush tool in Preferences>Tools>Use Legacy Healing Algorithm For Healing Brush.
3. Document layer count is displayed in both the status box and the info palette.
4. Info panel can now display composite (all layers) values.
5. Oil Paint filter now works on lower-end graphics cards (GPUs).
6. There is now support for GPU reliant features in Photoshop over remote connections.
7. General speed and overall improvements to all the content-aware features.
8. Small color swatch size is again available in the Swatches panel.
9. Divide slices option has been boosted to allow for 100 slice divisions in either direction.
10. Brush performance has been improved.
11. Text layers are further optimized.
12. Crash prevention should be better due to improved detection of graphics cards that give Photoshop problems.
13. You can now add keyboard shortcuts to toggle brush pressure controls, size, and opacity.
14. You can also add a keyboard shortcut to toggle Airbrush mode as well.
15. Multi-touch: It now takes a three-fingered swipe to step backward or forward in history states.
16. Color Adaptation is enabled by default in the Fill dialog.
17. 3D, 3D Printing, Oil Paint, Render>Flames, Trees, and Picture Frame are all now unsupported on 32-bit platforms
18. The Photoshop-Behance integration is no longer there. Clicking on File>Share on Behance now takes you to the Behance site.
19. The Select and Mask Workspace has fully replaced the Refine Edge dialog box from earlier versions of Photoshop.

Keywords: Photoshop CC, Photoshop CC 2015.5, New Photoshop Features, Face Aware Liquify, Select and Mask Workspace, Match Font, Content Aware Crop, Adobe Stock photos, Color profiles, On canvas glyph alternatives, 3D printing, 3MF file, Artboards, Speed up
Photoshop, Make Photoshop Faster, Adobe Experience Design, Adobe Portfolio