@Chris Cox: I didn't mean post professionals who probably answered your surveys, but cinematographers and the like who currently simply deliver JPEGs of their desired look as far as I know, not colorists and effects artists using Photoshop to generate their look. But I'm no expert on those workflows, and I completely agree, a third party solution for LUT export is probably the best way to implement such a workflow.

@c.pfaffenbichler: Most professionals are still working predominantly in a semi-destructive way (i.e. using layers). Smart objects are too much hassle for most things (especially not being able to see your changes in context when editing them), so keeping an original layer and re-applying a filter is still very common.

Seeing that Blur Gallery can export a channel, that actually makes it quite useful, contrary to my initial assessment. Even though the interface is currently not optimized for this, it looks like Blur Gallery is a great quick and easy way to generate layer masks for color corrections.

@TLL..: Professionals will always buy their software. And those people who don't won't make that decision dependent on the licensing model. Very few of those who pirate programs are actually lost customers who don't buy software because they found a way can get it for free. It just doesn't work that way even though many companies would like to think it does. Most people simply wouldn't buy the software if piracy was not an option, with price being the deciding factor. The question is simply how spread-out the transition area inbetween is. I don't have Adobe's research data, though, so I can't comment on their specific case (I'd guess Photoshop is one of the most pirated programs, though), but I don't think threatening them with piracy is going to be that effective, they probably have someone who does nothing else all day than figure out smart ways to optimize these kinds of things for maximum profit

Just as a side note, in some cases piracy actually works in a company's favor. Microsoft owed much of its market dominance in their early days to the fact that unlike the competition their software was not copy protected and thus became much more widely used than comparable solutions, leading to much higher sales than copy protection could ever have given them.

Don't get me wrong, I am in no way defending piracy here, of course, I just think it's interesting from a strategic perspective. On the other hand, Photoshop is quite well known and doesn't have any real competition, so that probably defeats my point. Anyway, moving on.

I had a chance to play with the Beta again today for about an hour, and here are a few more things I found (again, a mixture of bugs, features I had hoped for, quirks etc. that I noticed and jotted down as I went along):

• The new in-place/on-canvas filters like Blur Gallery use an OK/Cancel button combination to exit the semi-modal state, which is inconsistent with all the existing semi-modal tools like Crop and Free Transform (which continue to use the checkmark system).

• Panel groups can no longer be collapsed by double clicking in the free area next to the tabs, only the tabs themselves. Not sure if that is intended behavior or a bug.

• Most panels seem to be docked below the Brushes panel by default for some reason so that showing any of these panels will also automatically bring up the much larger Brushes panel.

• ExtendScript Toolkit always crashes when switching to the "Fonts and Colors" tab in Preferences. This behavior can be reproduced every time. Unless this is related to a specific configuration, I can't imagine how this could have slipped through during QA/internal testing.

• There is currently no documentation for the APIs for the new Deco patterns, at least I was not able to find any, but I guess this is going to change in the release build.

• The Displace filter is still stuck in the early nineties (no preview, not accepting channels but using separate map files etc.). Displace is one of the most used filters in photo post production and image compositing.

• When placing files, it is never made 100% clear to the user which files/file types are linked to and which ones are embedded. An option to choose and possibly even a links panel like in InDesign and Illustrator would be useful.

• For placed videos (which seem to be linked to rather than embedded), the link seems to consist of just an absolute path (heard about this problem somewhere else, didn't have a chance to verify). I'd suggest storing both relative and absolute paths and if one fails to match, try the other before requesting a manual relink.

• The properties panel displays an unnecessary vertical scrollbar for Curves adjustment layers that just scrolls down to some empty space below

• The Timeline panel flyout menu has lost the "Document Settings" command. There now seems to be no reasonably obvious way to set the overall animation duration. There is also no "Trim Animation to Work Area" command. New layers seem to always use some kind of default duration, not the duration of the current timeline sequence.

• The segments in the animation timeline are a very vibrant color (at least on a wide gamut monitor). Ideally, they should at least match the color palette established by the blue selection highlight color, the ok buttons in the options bar and the render progress bar (which I really like). Strongly colored UI elements affect the perception of color in the image. Autodesk Smoke/Flame does a great job of using a non-obtrusive color palette in its interface.

• The "Set Current Time" dialog box that pops up when double-clicking the timecode display in the bottom area of the Timeline panel does not support pressing the escape key to cancel if the text field has the focus. Pressing Tab doesn't seem to change the focus either. Pressing down on the OK button, holding and dragging out of it doesn't hide the selection in the text field, but the escape key now works as expected. The return key works as expected in all situations, no matter which control has the focus.

• The "Split Clip" button doesn't seem to work well with the undo system. The corresponding menu bar item (Edit > Undo Split Clip) is sometimes grayed out. Switching to another application and back to Photoshop seems to re-enable the menu item in some cases. The grayed-out menu item obviously also blocks out the use of the corresponding hotkey (Cmd+Z in the default configuration).

• Dragging transitions to clips sometimes has no effect. I can't give a specific combination of things that cause this behavior, but it seems to be a per-document issue. If it kicks in, transition dragging doesn't work at all, i.e. it is always all segments in a particular timeline that don't accept transitions, not just individual ones. The dragging process happens as expected, but basically, the segments don't highlight under the mouse, nor do they accept the transition.

• Keyframe interpolations are limited to "Linear" and "Hold". A minimalistic "Smooth" option would be really useful, and it wouldn't have a noticeable impact on the complexity of the video timeline feature for novice users. I'm no AE expert, but I believe it has a feature called "Easy easy" keyframes, too, giving you smooth interpolation without manually adjusting the bézier animation curves.

• The horizontal scroll bar on the Timeline panel always shows some extra empty space, like the Properties panel for Curves. There is also no obvious "Zoom Timeline to Fit All" function (a toggle between 100% and the last zoom position would make sense, I think this is also how Avid implemented it in Media Composer).

• 3D layer rendering still isn't really a background thread and almost all interactions with the applications cancel the render operation.

• Vector shapes unfortunately only support plain vector outline strokes instead of allowing the user to apply any of the brush presets (or even use any of the settings inside the "Stroke Path" command, which would enable things like smearing using vector shapes). In my opinion, that is really the missed opportunity for additional usefulness that vector support in a pixel-based application can offer. I know the vector shapes feature is aimed at designers who don't want to switch between Photoshop and Illustrator for every single vector task, but that would have been a way to make that feature much more relevant for more than just the screen design demographic.

• The beta doesn't ship with the Pixel Bender filter, which I hope is going to change with the final build. That filter needs some work compared to CS5 (supporting the AE user control fields, supporting high-resolution images at least in CPU mode, channels as input images, color management issues, etc.) The CS5 release still feels very much like Alpha software (Pixel Bender Toolkit is even worse).

• The 3D camera has no on-screen widget to specify depth of field distance settings or even locking them to an object (similar to an aimed camera in compositing programs and 3D software). The sliders are also sometimes quite laggy, ideally all sliders should be completely interactive with only the render lagging behind. A slider that sticks jumps around while the software is rendering can be quite frustrating for a user (Lightroom has had that problem for a long time).

• The "Sketch" render presets seem to give incorrect results (i.e. results that have nothing to do with the 3D object, just a bunch of semi-random shapes and rectangles. The render button is also completely disabled. There also seems to be no way to activate the "Sketch" setting except through the presets.

• The fact that Content Aware Move allows the user to change the Adaptation setting after the fact is not very discoverable and inconsistent with both the other tools and apparently even the behavior of the Mode setting on the same tool. I'd suggest giving the tool a pseudo-modal state like the crop and free transform tools instead.

• The lorem ipsum command is called "Paste Lorem Ipsum". The use of the term "Paste" here is potentially confusing since it has nothing to do with the system clipboard. "Insert" would be a better choice of words in my opinion. Also, the same command inside InDesign is called "Fill with Placeholder Text", so you may want to consider using that for cross-application consistency.

• On the 2008 generation MacBook I was able to test this on, Liquify always launches in CPU mode (1 pixel black border around the preview image). Not sure if the GPU in that system is simply not supported. I suggest showing an unobtrusive information note somewhere (maybe below the settings), like "GPU acceleration for this filter is not supported on this hardware configuration". Like the "Efficiency" setting in the document window status bar, this would help users identify potential performance bottlenecks on their systems. The black border is just not very discoverable.

• The improvements to text (paragraph/character styles etc.) would make a glyphs panel like in InDesign and Illustrator a logical addition (saves unnecessary copy & paste operations).

• It seems that multiple clips in the Animation Timeline cannot be trimmed at the same time, even if they are both selected.

• The "Show Asian Text Options" checkbox seems to have disappeared from Preferences. Things like the Warichu option still seems to be Illustrator-only, even though it is incredibly useful for other things beyond what it was intended for (movie poster-style credits are the most popular example, but there are many more). Also, it seems illogical that you would have to choose between either of the text engines available, but I guess this is required by historical engineering decisions.

• Panels still can only be docked to the edges of the primary monitor. Docking is not available on secondary monitors. On Windows, docking only works inside the main window, no matter on which screen. I know this is standard behavior, but I never really understood the logic behind that.

Hope this is useful.

@zarafan: If a manufacturer actually sells a pen tablet that doesn't work seamlessly with Photoshop, that should be an indication of what the quality of that product is. I don't blame Adobe for not supporting some cheap consumer tablet that even if supported would most likely have tons of other issues, especially considering that 99% of all Photoshop users exclusively use Wacom products. But I don't know any specifics about your case and I don't have time to research it right now.

Here is a new update with a few smaller things I found:

• The Animation Timeline doesn't yet support Alt+dragging clips to duplicate them
• Free Transform only supports rotation values between -180 and +180 for smart objects. That is a senisible range for still images, but as soon as it is used for animating transforms, it prohibits more than one revolution. There is a workaround, though (make one revolution, nest into a second-level smart object, clip off the last frame to avoid it being repeated twice, duplicate the one-turn animation a bunch of times). Might cause problems in the future if at some point someone decides to add a motion blur feature, though.
• Inconsistency: Horizontal palettes can only contain one group of panels, whereas vertical ones can have multiple
• It is still impossible to dock document windows next to each other in one window with the application frame switched off. Since panels can currently be docked together (at least vertically), this is inconsistent behavior.
• By default, the Timeline window shows a button "Create Video Timeline" with a dropdown button next to it that allows the user to "Create Frame Animation". There is no lack of space in the empty panel that would make it necessary to group these commands under that menu. Separating them out into buttons would save a click. Also, this placement of a "new something" button is inconsistent with those in other panels, where it is placed in the panel's toolbar (though arguably those are all "new item" buttons).
  And lastly, there is no obvious way to completely remove an animation system of either kind from a document, so novice users might be a little irritated by the fact that they can't get the panel back to the initial state after they clicked the button by accident or out of curiosity (except through the undo stack of course).

I would use that feature a lot if it wasn't global, but right now I can't hand a PSD file to another computer and rely on it looking the same. Other people can't use it in an InDesign layout. Even if I wanted to match results of a highend compositing software, I couldn't possibly import the PSD into that same highend compositing software because that will obviously assume that this setting wasn't on in the preferences. I have heard people who work in highend VFX say they don't use that option in Photoshop because "that checkbox is weird".

When I do composites for print, I mostly do them in 16 Bit Adobe RGB. I know about the advantages and disadvantages of working in a non-linear color spaces. Getting things that should mathematically be blended in Add mode (fire, any kinds of light, glows) to look correct takes much longer, and Screen is basically just a clumsy hack that was invented to counteract that problem but only gets you so far.

Having to switch to a color space with linear gamma or even 32-bit float mode is just annoying and leaves you with either twice the memory comsumption (which can make quite a difference for large documents with hundreds of layers) and only a subset of filters available, or a lot of clumsy smart objects that can no longer be edited in context. Another workaround I have used in the past before we had Smart Objects and 32-bit-float mode was sandwiching layers that are manually converted to linear using the gamma slider in Levels inbetween two adjustment layers with opposing gamma values that temporarily converted the document to linear and then back. But that totally circumvents Photoshop's color management of course

Plus, that checkbox in the color management settings is quite dangerous for people who have no clue what it does because if someone activates it by accident or without realizing that it is a global setting that doesn't get saved into the PSD file or because they heard someone say "you should always work using linear gamma", will end up with files that will always look wrong on other computers, or even on their own system if at some point that setting is turned off again.

By the way, totally unrelated, here is another feature request for a future release: Could we please have the color range selections from Hue/Saturation in Select Color Range? I always question my sanity when i merge Hue/Saturation layers with extreme brightness adjustments in differece mode just to make masks out of those selections.

Well, in the current state, the feature is close to useless to the people it is aimed at due to its quirks, but dangerous for people who don't know the full implications of it and activate it nonetheless. But the problem is not that it allows them to work with linear color in cases where they shouldn't, but that their resulting documents will render completely differently on other systems, and existing documents will look different on theirs. I've heard people nickname it the "Enable Microsoft Word Mode" checkbox for that reason.

I second Yelnats1's suggestion to make it either a per-document or per-layer blending options setting (or both), possibly with the existing checkbox acting as a global default. In that scenario, if somebody knows nothing or only part of the story (not sure which one is worse) and activates it, they are only doing something that is theoretically mathematically incorrect, but the final file they arrive at will still be consistent across Photoshop installations. Just like if someone changes the default working CMYK space to something absurd. It is certainly a bad idea (in fact, much worse than always working with linear blending as far as I am concerned), but at least it is predictable. No need to remove the feature.

Besides, being able to work in ways you theoretically shouldn't frequently opens up new creative possiblities or solutions for exotic problems. I have seen people who used the good old Extract filter to create borders around their photos. And I'd have to prototype this, but being able to adjust the blending gamma might actually turn out to be a useful creative tool that makes it easier to get the layer blending just right (I think some software packages even offer blend curves to control the compositing result).

As far as Timo is concerned, I have to confess I have no idea who that is/was, but I agree it is a good thing to have one less website spreading false claims.

Thanks for your reply. I knew about these other options, but that is exactly my point. Conceptually, from a user's point of view, modifier keyes should alway go to the current user action instead of the current tool.

Modifiers only ever have an effect in conjunction with a certain direct user action. In case of a tool, most of the time this is a pointer event in the document canvas (the tool being merely current isn't enough to trigger anything), for menu actions, it is a menu command invocation (either directly through the menus or using a shortcut), in dialog boxes, it is often a click on a button or a similar widget (the ubiquitous Cancel button/Reset button toggle is an example). A user would always expect the modifiers to be applied to the most immediate action they are performing. Someone performing a trackpad gesture that modifies the display of the document and thus isn't affected by or is itself affecting the behavior of the current tool, most likely doesn't have a tool in mind, if that makes sense.

In most cases throughout the application, this is already handled that way. If you hold down the option key and click a menu item, the option key is always applied to the menu action, no matter what other things are going on in the UI. And if you press Cmd+Shift+S, you would expect the Shift to go to the shortcut, not the current tool, the current panel or anything else.

Even for other mouse events, this is common behavior. If you hold the option key and scroll the mouse wheel with the pointer being positioned over a document viewport, the application will currently zoom it instead of scrolling. If you hold down the Command key instead of Option, it scrolls the viewport horizontally (with no modifier, it would scroll it vertically). The application is not performing a temporary tool switch during these actions as far as I can tell based on UI feedback. Consequently, according to your logic, these modifiers would have to be absorbed by the current tool and not applied to the user input from the mouse wheel.

My point is simply, a user would expect that holding down the shift key would to go to the rotation gesture, not the current tool, since the gesture is the action they are currently performing. However, it is certainly everything but high-priority issue (how many people really need constrained canvas rotation on a laptop on a regular basis, and the workarounds you mention work perfectly fine of course). I also imagine that it would require some medium-complexity rearchitecturing of some of Photoshop's tool system to fix that and those resources could definitely be spent in better ways. I just thought it might be something worth pointing out.

Wow, that is really, really unfortunate. All existing shaders are going to be completely useless. Will the CS5 version of the plug-in at least still work in the CS6 release build?

Actually, it asks you the first time you press Cmd+H, and depending on what you answer is, it will either assign Cmd+H or Cmd+Ctrl+H.

My problem is that Photoshop currently won't accept Ctrl+something as a shortcut for a menu command, it only allows the Ctrl key to be used in combination with the Cmd key. I was just mentioning the "Hide Photoshop" command as an obvious example where someone might want to use it. You currently cannot customize shortcuts so that Cmd+H is "Hide Photoshop" and Ctrl+H is "Hide Extras" since Ctrl+H is not accepted as a shortcut by the shortcut editor, even though Cocoa theoretically supports it. There aren't many unassigned two-key shortcuts left in Photoshop, and allowing the Ctrl key to be used as a separate modifier would open up a whole new set of possible options, at least on the Mac platform. If it was up to me, I'd also allow Spacebar+Something to be used, but I realize that some users might find that confusing. Another possible solution would be something like the Marking Menus Autodesk are using in Maya and Sketch Book Pro.

vdenn: Spring 2012 is the official word from Adobe. Most of Adobe's recent "Public Betas" have been basically feature complete, meaning it is probably a matter of weeks now.

midsoul06: Maybe opening the file the way you did the first time triggered a bug where the file format plug-in wasn't loaded yet, or where the wrong one was being used, who knows. Or if you have your additional plug-ins folder in the Preferences set to the CS5 one for example, you might get all sort of weirdness of that kind.

Either way, that kind of thing is quite common when working with Alpha/Beta software or any in-development stuff. I once got to see a raytrace render where an object reflected its own surface due to a bug in the shader code, that was kind of interesting, too. I think on Lord of the Rings when doing their first crowd sim tests, they had some agents simply run away from the battlefields since the instructions they built in Massive (a crowd simulation software) missed a certain case in the control logic.

By the way, I found some new semi-weirdness: When invoking any of the on-canvas filters, you can actually show any of the panels you want through the menu. Only the Navigator panel is fully functional as far as I can tell, though, the other ones are mostly disabled (except the 3D-Panel, which is reused in Lighting Effects to display the light list, and the Properties panel, which displays the filter parameters). The "new" button in the Character Styles panel doesn't show as disabled, but ignores any user input. The layers panel does show the temporary 3d layer created by Lighting Effects, but doesn't allow you to show or hide any layers for now (would be great, though). The toolbox asks you if you want to cancel the filter if you try clicking any of the tools (even the zoom, pan and canvas rotation tools), but clicks on the color well, quick mask and screen mode currently don't offer any functionality (though I think that changing screen mode shouldn't be locked when working with an on-canvas filter). The Histogram panel actually seems to work fine and updates live when you make changes, but all the items in the flyout menu are grayed out, so you are stuck with the way you configured the panel before entering the filter for now.

Since the on-canvas filters each have their own secret hidden workspace, showing/hiding any panels will actually persist between invokations of the filter, which is quite cool. I don't know if things are going to stay that way in the final release, but I'm happy to see that working with the panels during an on-canvas filter is theoretically a possibility for the future. Especially being able to show/hide layers, checking the histogram and looking at channels individually seems like a great idea. Also for things that accept filters, being able to paint on and edit channels directly from within the filter (like in Lens Blur or Displace if they get updated to the new system in the future) and seeing the preview update live seems like a great idea.