Photoshop’s update is going to make a lot of photographers and retouchers happy with the boost in performance plus three improved tools–Selecting and Masking, Content-Aware Crop and Face-Aware Liquify.

Performance

Adobe has been focusing on increasing the speed of Photoshop. Faster startup time, removing unnecessary dialog boxes, warnings and clicks, as well as how fast a tool returns results. They have promised this in past versions, but in this version it has lead to a noticeable boost in performance.

Selection and Masking Space gets its’ own workspace

Adobe organized the Selection and Masking tools to have their own dedicated workspace. This keeps the selection tools together into one efficient work space. Creating selections and masks is a lot easier and more exact than before.

Visualization controls: A Transparency slider and “Onion Skin” view mode more accurately predict results with new visualization and controls that make it easier to see the edges and other qualities of the selections you are creating in real time while you are making them.

Refine Edge Brush: The new Refine Edge Brush helps to more accurately separate foreground and background for complex selections.

A simple brush to more precisely control exactly which areas of an image are selected or masked. This tool can be used for manual control.

Content-Aware Crop

You can now crop and preserve the look of your image when you crop using the magic of Content-Aware Fill. Photoshop will intelligently fill in the gaps when you rotate or expand a canvas beyond the original image size using the Crop tool.

Face-Aware Liquify

Retouchers are really going to love the new enhancement to the Liquify tool. Now within the Liquify tool, you can use the new Face-Aware technology to automatically identify and adjust facial features like jaw, nose, lips and eyes to retouch them or add artistic effects. Making a subject smile is now a simple click and drag.

Photoshop CC 2015.5 is a full version upgrade. The best part, it’s free if you have the Creative Cloud subscription plan!