After downloading the beta, which took me a hell of a long time, because I assume the servers were pretty darn busy, I installed it and started taking a look at some of these interesting new features, Adobe has been talking about (sadly, no blur-removal tool yet. You’re breaking my balls, Adobe!).

Admittedly, I’ve always been a fan of the darker UI’s, from my experience in Premiere Pro and After Effects, so the darker interface in PS CS6 was great, for me. It didn’t really detract from the task at hand, at any point, so I reckon even most people would really like it. Click the image above for a better view of the general UI. If you don’t, well then just change it back to light-grey, like it used to be. Other changes in the UI included something I’m very happy about…the removal of all those lame window-resizing buttons in the top-centre of the window, which I often found myself clicking by mistake, causing Photoshop to turn into a pathetic half-sized shadow of it’s former self on one side of the screen…There are many other little changes to the UI. Too many to get into for now, however.

Adobe has also done quite a bit behind the scenes, in changing the entire engine of Photoshop, to the Mercury Engine, used by Adobe Premiere Pro, which allows for better optimization for GPU use, and a faster, smoother working experience. As a consequence of this, the Mac version is only available for use on 64-bit operating systems.

The Mercury Engine also allows for a very rudimentary video/motion element, that allows you to make fancy slideshow-like videos of all your images, which might at least come in handy for photographers, looking to show off their work. I had a crack at it, to explore the professional potential of the Photoshop CS6 Video option, and came up with this:

Of course, it has no option whatsoever, for exporting your timeline to an animated .gif format, (I rendered out this slideshow to a .png sequence then pulled into Flash) which is more fitting for a photo-editing application, instead, giving you 4 rendering options, one being an image sequence, and the other being 3 different video formats. The number of video formats is something I’m sure they’ll expand at least a little bit in the final release.

The layer system, we found fantastic in CS6. You now have much more control over your layers, with the ability to search and sort through them, duplicate them, or add blending modes simultaneously to a few layers, or apply them to an entire folder, simultaneously. Hidden layers get some love too, now, with the ability to see their opacity, blending modes and such, while they are hidden.

Some of the more talked-about items out in PS CS6, is the Content Aware tool, which allows you move selections around in an image, while Photoshop fills in the blank space left behind. Trying it out, we found it quite interesting, and effective, when used in the right sort of image, with a fairly uniform background, it worked very well, saving what would have been quite a lot of time working with the Clone Stamp.

The 3D options in Photoshop CS5 have been supercharged in CS6, with a myriad of new options for creating all kinds of apparent 3d effects on images and text. We tried it with both and got quite interesting results. It now allows you to adjust the desired 3d object on-canvas, meaning you can actually see exactly how it’s going to look and where, in relation to the rest of the project. Various other effects, like drop shadows and ground planes are also available, too, as well as a whole red bucket full of other little thingies, that we never got to try out, just yet.

The mythical blur-removal unicorn that I’m always banging on about, is not here, yet. But there are some new options for adding blurs. And among them is a very nifty Tilt-Shifting tool. As you may remember, being part of the postively minuscule readership of this blog, we did a post on how to add post-capture tilt-shift effects to your photos. Well, don’t forget how to do it. But you might never have to do that anymore, because you can now do most of the work using one tool. It has an intuitive interface for adjusting the blurs to create the tilt-shift effect, getting the same result as the old, now long way around.

There are many more features, in Photoshop CS6, and these are really just a few of the more notable ones. If you haven’t downloaded it, yet, grab it here. There are also a number of cool tutorials already out, on some of these new features, so go and check them out, it’s really, really interesting stuff.

Overall impression…well, this is just a beta, and I think it’s fantastic already. The changes are great and we can tell that they were all very well thought-out. We can’t wait until the full version is launched.