It’s that geeky time of year for the creative soul, where Adobe releases its latest developments for its packages. Software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects have published updates to fend off the rivalling design packages such as Sketch, Pixlr, ProCreate and CorelDraw. Not to mention us users waiting to see what bugs have been fixed and what techniques have been made easier for usability. So let’s take a look at a few of these new features in Photoshop 2020.

Photoshop’s announced a new quick selection tool that has a rivalled object selection which reduces the hassle of cutting out human figures, hair and the finer details of images. But in case this tool wasn’t great enough, they’ve complemented it with a ‘remove background’ feature that does exactly what it says on the tin, without the effort of using the previous background eraser brush. The formula used for these improvements has been applied to the content-aware tool, also allowing fluent selection all around. Designers everywhere are currently cheering, trust me.

Along with this, designers remember when warping images and objects feeling rather limited. Now in transformer mode, you may add more grid dividers allowing more customisation in the editing points. The addition of bounding boxes and custom placed splitting of an image means you can create the ideal perspective view that is usually so hard to achieve. Mockups just got a little easier to create.

On a more usability front, the blending options have been given their own tab for pure on the fly customisation and to rid us of the double click and alteration process. We can simply have a pattern/drop shadow/bevel tab that can be applied to layers with a drag and drop system similar to how layer styles used to work. The functionality of Adobe seems to be the main focus this year allowing the user to achieve high-performance edits at minimal click rates. Some designers look at this like a saturation of the process others will see these as time-effective added features.

Once we have had a look at all the improvements across all packages Adobe offers we will see how these features integrate, and if any other of their rivals have capitalised in any areas. Our experts are keeping close attention and will keep you updated in the coming weeks.