Hello all you photoshopers. I have recently had the priveledge of checking out the new photoshop 6 beta through a friend and was able to play with it for a great many hours. First of all, it is "in disguise" as Venus in Furs. So the splash screen is kind of bizarre. The program takes about six hours to load on an Athalon 550 with 256 megs. The cgi is about the same, though there is now a toolbar for tool options under the standard menu bar on top. No more looking around for that damned toolbox! There is now a "Liquify" option which is VERY exciting. You can warp your image in a great variety of ways in real time. It can be as silly as power goo or as subtle as...well, subtle. Magic wand is much more accurate and intuitive and does the job faster. There is also a new feature called slice, which I couldn't understand. It's use looks and feels alien to this layman when compared to other Photoshop tools and features. In the text editor, you can now select a different color for each character which is quaint. There are no new filters, brushes, or anything fun like that. On one usage, the beta crashed the computer on it's way out. Had to reboot. Also noticing that it doesn't shut off adobe online manager, it stays active in the background after leaving photoshop, which I find annoying. Not sure if that is a bug or if it's intentional, but I hate background resident programs with a passion. All in all, I would not say it's a vast improvement over 5.5 but then again, that liquify feature sure is fun... Any questions just ask and I will visit my friend again and put it to the test. -Darth_Logice

Very cool! Thanks for sharing your experience with Photoshop 6 with us. So far from what you have seen, would you recommend buying Photoshop 6 if you already have 5.5? Is it worth it? Thanks again Darth! Adam

I would only recommend it if the upgrade cost is worth it. It doesn't seem to do THAT much new, and certainly nothing you can't do with other programs such as goo, though it's nice to have that built in. I will have to figure out what in the hell slice does...that alone might be worth it if it does anything spectacular. will Keep everyone informed as I find out more. -Darth

I wish they would kick this one out for free, getting tired of paying for an upgrade only to have a new one come out. I may wait on this one.

Slice i assume is the same or expanded function from ImageReady. Slice is used to create web interfaces, You define were you want to brake up the image, define url's ect...

Myself, I am getting very tired of Adobe's method of adding a little whistle or bell or rearranging things a tad and then charging for a full upgrade. Whats wrong with just a update? I may wait on this one. Do we actually need a upgrade every year or so? Only if you have money to burn, I guess.

And 6 hours to load on a 550? Yikes... My computer would probably choke on it then.

Not really six hours, but you get the idea...it takes longer than usual. -Darth Oh! By the way, the text features are HUGE!!!!!!!!!! Finally you can contort and spin and satinize and metalize text easily...no plugins required!!!!!! BIG FUN!

thanks Darth! sounds like once again, they put their efforts into the text features. pam

Now that does sound cool. I might have to check into this one more. Right now I use PSP but have been thinking about switching to photoshop instead.

it sounds like if you have Kai's power tools and Eye Candy, then PS 6 is kinda old hat. As far as an improved magic wand, that I want!! but why buy an entire upgrade for something that should really be a patch?

I too have had the chance recently to play with 6 and don't find it all that improved except the magic wand. For photo restoration work you would be better off putting money into better scanning software or other editing tools. As per the text editor, this was an improvement but not muc use to me, and I found that I could do most of the new tricks with current actions. I probably will get this, only because I get the educational version as an instructor. I did find it took a while to load under win 98 and 2000, but did reasonably better under NT 4.0, however it's best load was on my 5 year old Digital Alpha 500 with a gig of RAM

If you look at my art on Renderosity, you'll find the Venus In Furs, and another wolverine pic from Image Ready 3, that comes from Photoshop 6.