Photoshop CS6 / Features

See near-instant results when editing with key tools such as Liquify and Puppet Warp. The new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine delivers unprecedented responsiveness for a fluid feel as you work.*

More about Mercury Graphics Engine ›

Keep working even while saving the largest of Photoshop files in the background — a performance improvement that can help your productivity soar.

Let the auto-recovery option work behind the scenes to save your edits without interrupting your progress. A copy of your work is saved every 10 minutes and recovered in the event of an unexpected shutdown.

Save time with a context-sensitive Properties panel that lets you make quick updates to the properties of your masks, adjustments, and video layers.

Organize and manage your media visually using Adobe Bridge CS6 software. This integrated application delivers fast performance with cross-platform 64-bit support.

Easily access your images and documents in the intuitive Adobe Mini Bridge panel.

Speed up day-to-day imaging tasks and process very large images up to 10 times faster by taking advantage of cross-platform 64-bit support.

Print with exceptional precision using an updated print interface. Maximize the viewing area with a resizable print window, and manually control the printed area and selection in the preview. Also, let Photoshop hide inappropriate color profiles for a selected printer.

Get outstanding prints fast with automation and scripting.

Easily control tile size, and use presets for simultaneously setting cache and tile size based on whether your output is for print or web.

Use the Workspace Switcher to quickly navigate and choose among favorite UI configurations.

Let Photoshop automatically record changes you make to a task-specific user interface so that if you switch to a different configuration and then switch back, your panels will be exactly where you left them.

Just click to smoothly turn your canvas for nondestructive viewing at any desired angle.

Navigate to any area of an image with ultra-smooth zooming and panning powered by the Mercury Graphics Engine. Maintain clarity as you zoom to individual pixels, and easily edit at the highest magnification using the Pixel Grid.

Maximize screen space while keeping essential tools accessible. Arrange panels in convenient, self-adjusting docks that can be widened to full size or narrowed to icons or even a thin strip at the edge of your monitor.

Easily work with multiple open files by using tabbed document display or n-up views.

Set up and save custom menus, keyboard shortcuts, and workspaces for quick access to exactly what you need.

Pinch, swipe, and rotate images using the Multi-Touch trackpad on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops (requires Mac OS X v10.5 or later). Easily turn off Multi-Touch support if you wish.

Design with sensitivity for color-blind individuals by creating soft proofs of your images using built-in Color Universal Design Organization profiles.

Easily straighten objects that appear curved in panoramas or photos shot with fisheye or wide-angle lenses. New on-canvas tools use the physical characteristics of individual lenses to automatically correct curvatures, and the Mercury Graphics Engine gives you near-instant results.

Soften select areas with Tilt-Shift, which lets you simulate shallow depth of field or miniature scenes.

Uniformly blur your entire image and then sharpen a single focal point using Iris Blur.

Select multiple focal points and then let Field Blur vary the blurriness between them.

Save time with automatic correction of lens distortions, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. Photoshop CS6 uses an image file's EXIF data to make precise adjustments based on the type of camera and lens you used.

Work intuitively with the Lens Correction filter. Grid display is off by default; chromatic aberration correction sliders allow decimal point adjustments; a third slider can correct common green/magenta aberrations; and more.

Quickly straighten any crooked image. Simply drag a straight line from the Ruler tool onto your image, and the image will snap to the line.

Use the Neutral Density presets to emulate a neutral density filter, clicking once to have the Gradient tool darken an overexposed patch of a photo while leaving the rest unaltered.

Bring out the best in your JPEG, TIFF, and raw files files with improved processing and an enhanced control set.

Use controls in the Adobe Camera Raw to reveal every detail in the highlights while still retaining rich detail in the shadows, and vice versa.

Use local controls for temperature and noise reduction to apply corrections only where needed.

Use the Adobe Camera Raw with images from just about any camera. The plug-in supports more than 350 camera models.

Remove noise common to high-ISO images and consumer-camera shots while preserving color and detail. Maintain a photo's natural look, avoiding an oversharpened feel as you maximize quality.

Take advantage of powerful demosaicing technology for unmatched conversion quality.

Make a digital photo look more organic or film-like by using a simple slider to add grain. Save grain settings as presets, and then apply them to other photos for a consistent look.

Perform post-crop vignetting with precise control, and save favorite vignette effects as presets.

Create photo-realistic or surreal HDR images with exceptional speed and control. Get great results with automatic ghost removal, and precisely control tone mapping and adjustments.

Explore an endless variety of black-and-white looks. Use the integrated Lab B&W Action to interactively color images, create gorgeous HDR black-and-whites with greater ease and speed, and experiment with a variety of presets.

Give any single-exposure image the photo-realistic or wildly surreal look of an HDR image. The HDR Toning feature offers an easy way to bring the rich aesthetic of high dynamic range to your 8-bit images.

Use Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools that intelligently preserve color and tone details, Curves controls that let you make automatic adjustments with included or custom presets, a histogram, color channel lines, and more.

Bring Photoshop editing power to your video footage. Easily enhance any clip using the full range of familiar Photoshop tools, and then create movies using an intuitive set of video tools.

Get a more accurate representation of how your images will appear in film with 10-bit monitor support. See just the pixels you've captured, reduce or eliminate the need for dithering, and reduce contouring or banding.†

Retouch images for film more easily with 3D look-up tables (LUTs) — including Adobe SpeedGrade™ .Look color LUTs — that you can turn on when you need to tweak raw color data.

Work with a variety of video files, including 3G, FLC, MOV, AVI, DV Stream, Image Sequence, MPEG-4, and FLV formats.

Save time and help ensure a consistent look with type styles, which let you apply formatting to selected characters, lines, or paragraphs of text with a single click.

Use vector layers to apply strokes and even add gradients to vector objects.

Get sharp rendering by clicking once to snap the edges of vector objects to pixels.

Easily create custom strokes and dashed lines.

Use layer search capabilities to quickly zero in on the layer you need.

Get better performance and results with the new, 64-bit Lighting Effects Gallery. The plug-in is powered by the Mercury Graphics Engine and offers on-canvas controls and previews that make it easier to visualize your lighting enhancements.*

Quickly give your work the look of a fine painting with the Oil Painting filter powered by the Mercury Graphics Engine. Control the style of your brush as well as the direction and shine of your lighting for a superior look.

Draw more naturally and realistically using drawing tips that erode as you work. Endlessly wear down and sharpen a charcoal pencil or pastel to create different effects, and save favorite blunted tips as presets.

Create realistic airbrush effects using fluid, lifelike controls and granular paint particles.

Simplify painting with new presets that offer a good starting point for creating realistic painting effects.

Paint more naturally by manually changing the rotation of your paint brush with your mouse. Dynamically resize your brushes with shortcuts, and easily adjust opacity or hardness.

Quickly experiment with different warp effects. Powered by the Mercury Graphics Engine, Warp preview offers immediate feedback as you manipulate your image.*

Define multiple colors on a single Mixer Brush tip to paint with realistic color blends. Or use a dry Mixer Brush to blend a photo's colors and transform it into a beautiful painting.

Easily paint with lifelike, naturally textured brush strokes using defined bristle properties like shape, length, and stiffness, and experiment away by adding Bristle Tips to a variety of Photoshop brush tools.

Click to smoothly resize brushes; adjust bristle hardness; or choose your color hue, saturation, or brightness from an onscreen color picker. The Mercury Graphics Engine makes the process fast and fluid.*

Create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable drawing tools.

Easily adjust the hue, saturation, or brightness of your foreground color without having to jump into the Color Picker dialog box.

Generate geometric pattern fills faster with new Scripted Patterns.

Paste an element into a Photoshop CS6 file in the same position it held in the original file, for example, when you create something on the wrong layer and need to move it to the exact same place on a new layer.

Save time with the ability to adjust the opacity and fill of many layers at once.

Save your individual layer-style settings as defaults.

Combine a range of images, each with a different exposure, color, and focal point — with options to preserve tones and colors — into a single, color-corrected image.

Drag and drop a file onto an open PSD document to create a layer; nest up to 10 layers; move a selection while the active layer is hidden; and delete all empty layers with one command.

Let Adobe Photomerge technology automatically stitch horizontal or vertical photos to create amazing panoramas — and even wrap them around 360-degree spheres.

Create accurate composites with the Auto-Align Layers command, which lets you move, rotate, or warp layers to align them accurately. Or use spherical alignment to create breathtaking spherical panoramas.

Auto-blend layers to create an image from a series of shots that have different focal points, smoothly blending color and shading, and even extending your depth of field while automatically correcting vignettes and lens distortion.

Easily migrate your presets, workspaces, preferences, and settings so you can experience Photoshop in the same way on all your computers, share your setup, and bring your customizations from past versions into Photoshop CS6.

Work with a fresh, elegant interface featuring dark background options that make your images pop, and benefit from hundreds of design touches that create a smoother, more consistent editing experience.

Use heads-up displays to get greater precision when selecting and transforming objects and text.

Work smoothly with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® software (sold separately), easily moving files from Lightroom to Photoshop to create HDR images, panoramas, and multilayered Photoshop documents.

Precisely control the size of PDF pages opened in Photoshop; add security controls and metadata to images within PDF presentations; and create a rich image display in PDF presentations and documents.

Automate routine production tasks in a variety of ways. Set up event-based scripts, record a series of steps as an action for efficient batch processing, and design repetitive graphics faster with variables.

Let Photoshop track all editing steps within your files with the Edit History log. Export steps to a text file or save them as part of image metadata for easier documentation, file audits, and more.

Import and export hundreds of image file formats, including PSD, AI, PDF, NEF, CRW, TIFF, BMP, Cineon, JPEG, JPEG2000, FXG, OpenEXR, PNG, and Targa.

Take advantage of Adobe Flash® and Zoomify technology to export high-resolution images to the web for viewing with Adobe Flash Player.

Work with a larger range of TIFF files. Enhanced TIFF support allows for greater bit depths and larger file sizes.

Get great results when resizing an image — the best resample method is automatically selected.

Save time with the ability to insert "Lorem ipsum" filler text when working with type.

Edit and paint with brush sizes all the way up to 5000px.

Let Photoshop CS6 automatically downsample your 16-bit image files so you can save them as 8-bit JPEGs.

Save clicks with the ability to close all open images without saving.

Add a preference that helps ensure you'll save all open images to the last folder to which you saved an image.

Clone any image element, and then click once to reverse the cloned element so it faces in the opposite direction.

Design, edit, and elegantly present your work using Adobe Touch Apps designed for your tablet, including Adobe Photoshop Touch, Adobe Kuler®, and Adobe Ideas.‡

Transfer files through Adobe Creative Cloud™ for further refinement in Photoshop — or to view, access, and share from almost anywhere.‡

Explore exciting ways to interact with Photoshop CS6 from your iPad using apps from Adobe and the developer community. Use your fingertips to mix colors, paint beautiful works of art, activate Photoshop tools, and more.§

Create your own color profiles for Photoshop CS6 using the DNG Profile Editor (available separately).

Develop and/or share filters for Photoshop CS6 using GPU-accelerated Adobe Pixel Bender® technology (available separately).*

Explore Adobe Photoshop Marketplace for a huge range of third-party plug-ins and resources.

Get the power of an online search engine from within Photoshop, but with more targeted results. Searchable content includes Photoshop Help and additional Adobe and third-party content chosen by Adobe and community experts.