Along with the various Creative Suite options discussed yesterday Adobe has also released the individual point products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc. Although, readers of this site will likely be more  interested in Photoshop CS6.  With this new version Adobe has delivered increased performance and a host of new features. The highlight features will no doubt be discussed widely both on-line and written media, but for those that can’t wait, here’s a brief summary on a few of my favourites.

• Content Aware Patch – this feature is designed for those occasions when you need to remove unwanted content from a photo and replace it with a seamless patch. The patch is automatically applied, but only after you’ve identified exactly which area of the image you want to sample from. More details along with a short video tutorial can be viewed on Adobe’s Content-Aware Patch page.
• Blur Gallery – with the new Blur Gallery you can quickly create photographic blur effects using a simple but powerful interface. There are 3 blur options: iris blur for a shallow depth of field, field blur for graduated blur, and tilt-shift for special effects blur. Using the principle of dropped pins and on-image control points the user can fine tune where blurs start and finish. For those who really want to mix-the-pot, multiple blur effects can be applied to the same image. More details and a couple of examples are demonstrated on this short video tutorial.
• New Crop Tool – many users of both Photoshop and Lightroom often remark that cropping in Lightroom is much more intuitive. Whether you agree or not it seems that the engineers must have heard these remarks because they’ve totally re-engineered the crop tool in Photoshop CS6.
• Camera Raw 7 –  with version 7 Adobe have incorporated the all new processing algorithms that Lightroom 4 users have been enthusing about for months. Stop Press: it gets better, with Camera raw 7.1 (currently available as release candidate) Adobe have included the ability to process 8bit, 16bit and 32bit HDR images. And there’s more, Camera Raw 7.1 has a new set of controls for correcting colour fringes. Eric Chan, one of the Camera Raw developers has put together a short tutorial on how to use the defringe tool.
• Background Save – this feature helps you keep working even while saving the largest of Photoshop files in the background.
• Auto-Recovery – the auto-recovery option works behind the scenes to save your edits without interrupting your progress. A copy of your work is automatically saved every 10 minutes and recovered in the event of an unexpected shutdown.