The transition from CS4 to CS5 seems to be going pretty well – there are a few changes, but nothing that’s really thrown me for a loop. A couple things are extremely (potentially) cool, in the sense that it takes very little time to issue certain fixes.  Take the image below, for example:

A View from the Kihei Boat Harbor

This is a crop from the original, but it has the important part (I’ll post the non-cropped version in a day or two).  Take a close look at the palm trees: looks like a great silhouette of a lone palm, right?  Well, the reality wasn’t so: there were two bunches of palms, one just to the left of the ones you see here.  I didn’t like these extra palms – I felt it distracted from the overall feeling of individual oneness: one set of palms, one Molokini, One Kaho’olawe, one ocean… so the extra palms needed to go.

In CS4, this would have been a ten to twenty minute job: mostly delicate work with the clone stamp tool, some patching and smoothing, and eventually a fairly well constructed section.  The background is fairly simple, so it wouldn’t have been difficult.

In CS5?  I merely selected the extra palms – and fairly loosely, might I add.  Then did the “Edit” -> “Fill” option, selected content-aware, and poof: full replacement of the palms.

Don’t think that it was perfect, mind you.  If you look extremely closely, you can see that it’s ever-so-slightly fuzzy at a part there.  Could be atmospheric diffusion, I suppose – but in reality, it was a bit blurrier than that.  A couple of extra strokes with the healing brush (set to content-aware), and it tightened up to what you see here.  A little more contrast work, and it could be even better – for printing, I’d certainly do that.

So, total time: under 60 seconds with CS5.  CS4: over 10 minutes.

That’s something to be happy about!