Photoshop turns 30 years old, and in honor of this most feared of millennial milestones, Adobe has released a major update for Photoshop on both the desktop and the iPad, bringing substantial improvements to a few key features, as noted in its announcement blog post.

Adobe Photoshop CC 2020 (Desktop)

Adobe kicked off the updates with an impressive improvement to its desktop iteration of Photoshop with an improved Content-Aware Fill workspace, updates to the Lens Blur tool, a slightly updated UI and a number of bug fixes.

Content-Aware Fill Workspace Improvements

The biggest feature improvement to Photoshop on desktop comes to the Content-Aware Fill tool. Specifically, the workspace, where you can now “Apply” multiple fills and iterate as many times as you want before you click OK and accept your results.

This improvement comes straight from customer-feedback, according to Adobe.
“One of your top requests was to stay in the workspace to refine fills that need multiple CAF iterations—imagine removing something from behind many tree branches, or other tricky scenes with visual diversity,” explains Clark “To do that, we now enable you to break the fill region into sub-parts to give you more iterative control to achieve a more realistic fill.”

You can still use the standard automatic Content-Aware Fill feature under Edit > Fill, but the workspace is getting to be much, much more usable thanks to updates like this.

Lens Blur improvements

Another major improvement in this update is the Lens Blur tool, which now relies on the GPU of your computer, rather than the CPU. As seen in the comparison images below, offloading the processing of the Lens Blur tool to the GPU dramatically improves the realism of the edit through more refined edges, more accurate bokeh (thanks to specular highlights) and an overall sharper image that looks more pleasing than edits process with the CPU.

“The results are created by an algorithm the [Photoshop engineering] team built by studying first the principles of physics and how light interacts with objects in the real world,’ says Photoshop Project Manager Pam Clark in the announcement post. ‘It is carefully tuned to simulate a 3D environment to create the most realistic results possible, while also consuming the least amount of computing power so you don’t burn up your machine.”

UI and Performance

Adobe has also added support for the new dark mode in macOS Catalina, with all of the new system dialogs matching the light/dark mode settings you have turned on at the system level.

Other improvements throughout Photoshop CC 2020 include improved mouse control, with better responsiveness when panning and zooming across an image, particularly with larger documents.

Adobe Photoshop for iPad

Adobe is delivering on that promise today with the first of “a continuous stream” of feature updates that the company has planned for the tablet version of the app. Thanks to the fact that Photoshop on iPad is built on the same code base as Photoshop on the desktop, Clark says that Adobe is able to “add new features with deep and rich capabilities and high-quality output that matches that of the desktop very quickly.”

Object Selection tool

Object Selection, first debuted for the desktop at Adobe MAX 2019, is making its way to the iPad with the same functions, options, and settings you’re already used to. Unlike Subject Selection—which was added to the iPad in December—Object Selection is better suited for images where there are multiple objects to choose between or only a part of something or somebody that you want to select.

Type settings

Adobe has also updated the Type settings within Photoshop for iPad, bringing a number of controls over from the desktop version. Specifically, Adobe has added type layer, character and options properties within the Type settings. ‘This includes tracking, leading, scaling, and formatting things like all/small caps, super/subscript,’ reads the announcement. Adobe says Kerning will ship in a future update.

The updated versions of Photoshop is live for Creative Cloud subscribers.
More info on Adobe Blog.