The Photoshop CS6 beta is available to download for both PCs and Macs, and you do not need a serial number to install and use it: just select “Try. I want to try Adobe Photoshop CS6 for a limited time” in the welcome screen when you start the installation process.
[RELATED: First Look: Photoshop CS6 Beta Is Dark, Swift, and Content Aware]
Adobe said the final release will have 60 percent more new features than CS5, along with some 65 user-requested features such as a Paste Lorem Ipsum option to fill up text blocks. The first thing you will notice, however, is the new user interface that is much darker (you can revert the light gray), but most of your favorite tools should be in the same place as before.
One of the cool new features in Photoshop CS6, which Adobe demoed last month, is the content aware move and patch tool. This allows you to select and duplicate an area of an image to fill in a different area within the same photo, or select and move an object to a new place in the image, while the background is filled automatically behind the moved object.
A long overdue feature for Photoshop finally arrives in CS6 as well: background saving, so you don’t have to manually save every time you make a change to the file. Meanwhile, features made popular by mobile photo apps, such as tilt shift and iris blur, are now available as built-in effects from the Filters menu.
You can explore the free Photoshop CS6 beta from Adobe’s downloads page.
Follow @ Daniel Ionescu and Today @ PCWorld on Twitter.