Adobe released a public beta of Photoshop CS6 on Thursday, giving users a taste of what’s in store for the next version of the professional image editing application. Version 6 includes a new user
interface along with under the hood improvements to boost performance.
The public beta includes a new graphics engine called Mercury that adds hardware-based acceleration for tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, Crop, and Lighting Effects. It also sports an updated Content Aware Patch feature that lets users select and duplicate part of an image to intelligently fill a different part of an image.
Version 6.0 also includes searchable layers, new type styles, video editing support, and more.
Photoshop CS6’s redesigned user interface more closely matches recent changes to Adobe Lightroom’s darker panel colors and to bring more consistency to its app interfaces. Along with a new look, Photoshop CS6 also supports auto-save for documents.
The public beta of Photoshop CS6 is available as a free download at the Adobe Labs website The official Photoshop launch is expected some time in the first half of 2012.