First look at Photoshop’s latest update

So, Adobe recently did an update on Photoshop (Version 24.5.0). Well, one has to download and check it out, right? What is offered in the latest update? Adobe updated Photoshop today with new capabilities that enhance and accelerate creative workflows. New Adjustment Presets, Contextual Task Bar, Remove Tool and Enhanced Gradients empower users to make complex edits and create unique designs while saving time. Let’s take a look.

Contextual Task Bar

The Contextual Task Bar is an on-screen menu that recommends the most relevant next steps in several key workflows, reducing the number of clicks required to complete a project, and making the most common actions more easily accessible. To be honest I am finding it a bit of a nuisance. It did have its uses.

Used in conjunction with the Contextual Task Bar, it can make life a little quicker, with fewer steps. Either Select Subject or Remove Background automatically selects and adds a layer mask (I suggest working on a duplicate layer). But I found it didn’t always do the best job of selection. What changed? It may take some getting used to, but I actually found the good old Lasso and Content-Aware Fill were quicker. There may be a way to quickly add to a selection, but again I found falling back on old tools quicker and did a better job. I needed to add my own shadows back in (the above image).

Enhanced Gradients

The Gradients feature has been significantly improved, and the workflow has been made quicker and much easier to use. It’s got some great features now. It enables you to create gradients in just a few steps and now includes new on-canvas controls which help you have precise controls over many aspects of the gradient in real time. A live preview that’s created automatically shows you instantly how the changes you make affect your image.

You can now also make nondestructive edits to your gradients, which means you can go back and make changes to your gradient without permanently altering your original image. Now THAT is a terrific improvement.

Adjustment Presets

Adjustment Presets are filters that speed up complex tasks by enabling you to preview and change the appearance of images in just a few steps to achieve a distinctive look and feel, instantly. Kind of like an editable LUT file. You select the Preset and hover over it to get a preview. It will then add a group of adjustments, like Brightness/Contrast or B&W.

There are 32 new presets in the Adjustments panel that you can hover over to see what your image would look like with each preset applied before selecting it. Once a preset is selected, it can be further refined by editing the automatically created adjustment layers in the layers panel. These can be found by clicking on the Window tab at the time and clicking Adjustments.

Sadly, I can’t say that these got me highly excited either. Still, it’s a new update, and that is often a good thing. The New Magic Remove Tool looks fabulous, but I can’t seem to find it in my copy, perhaps it is Photoshop beta version only at this stage, but it does look promising.

Final thoughts

While I did really like the new updated Gradient Tool, the rest didn’t exactly WOW me. Sorry, Adobe. I’m super keen to see some of the beta testing appear in the general Photoshop later in 2023 though. You can read more about the Adobe update here.