From a John Nack’s post, through to a Business2.0 story.
From what I can see (but obviously not experience until it ships!) prepress people making masks (deep etches in AU magazine speak) are going to drool at this feature.
The Photoshop engineering team is going to have operators fall at their feet as gods: just like the healing brush.
Ship it!
But do you have the urge to drop back in to Adobe just so you can do the demos? That would be an indication of one cool upgrade!
… but I can still get to demo Photoshop @ Microsoft; just on Vista 🙂
I probably get to use Adobe products in a production environment more now @ Microsoft than I ever did for Adobe. My last 3 years at Adobe, I spent my time in MSExcel (as a Channel Sales Manager)
Life is stranger.
And I’d prefer to be here at Microsoft.
I can vouvh for this feature as being more than masking alone. Ever wanted to make a luminoscity selection of the composite of an image, then contract or expand it, with live preview?
Imagine an image flooded with tone, especially a papparazzi shot, with little to no shape in the skintone. Make the luminoscity selection (CMD click the composite of the channels in the channel palette), then clicking refine edge and do the expand/contracct, feather, smooth, with live pixels in colour…you end up with a selection that allows you to then duplicate the corresponding information as a new layer from the background layer. How to use it: click on the layer containing the resulting data; use screen blend mode with varying levels of opacity; this gives you a tonal correction that is better than any person and their brush are ever going to produce, in under 1 minute!
Wow. That’s going to make life too easy for some. Way to easy.