Industry & Community News, Software for Retouching

The New and Old Features of The Latest Update: Photoshop CC2015.5

While I am very happy about the return of the Legacy Healing Algorithm for the Healing Brush tool and excited to play with the new features, I can’t wrap my head around the name of the update – why is it 2015.5, Adobe?

Regardless of how insanely hectic and disappointing each and every Photoshop update has been for our team in the past few years, we’re still very much pro-progress and have faith in the brighter future for the digital artists race, including photographers and retouchers. We choose to hope that Adobe wants what’s best for us and will correct its path when some unpopular decisions are made. And the return of the old Healing Brush is a good sign that we’re not that far off.

If you retouch faces and skin on a regular basis, most likely you know that the desire for instant gratification and immediate visible results led Adobe to come up with a new healing algorithm for the Healing Brush in the CC2015 version. It was cool to see the changes in real time, but unfortunately the results the updated Healing Brush offered were far from what we, the artists who retouch for a living, wanted and expected.

Adobe did offer a temporary fix for it last year, and now it is permanently back (or at least we hope so), and to revert your Healing Brush behavior you need to simply check the Use Legacy Healing Algorithm for the Healing Brush in Preferences > Tools:

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Among other changes there’s a large number of fixed previously reported issues and a long list of new features that you can review here: Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.5 new features.

I am a little worried about the potential disastrous results from the use of the new Face-Aware Liquify tool that we will inevitably witness in the interwebs and in the beginner retouching communities very soon. So, I am just going to come out and say it – if you are serious about retouching, don’t use it.

But the new Select and Mask Workspace seems pretty neat, check it out:

So is the Content Aware Crop, even for those of us who only shoot in studio. I am actually very excited about this one:

And lastly, we hassled a little and got the RA Panels updated in just a couple of days after the official CC2015.5 release, so if you just like me refuse to work without the Beauty Retouch and Pixel Juggler, go ahead download the updated panels from your Member Area on our RA Lab website AS WELL AS the updated ZXPinstaller and you’re good to go!

Check out these installation steps if you had the previous RA Panels versions installed on your computer.

We have tested and tweaked the 2015.5 panels, but please let us know if you happen to have any issues with the installation.

Enjoy!

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