

You can open 70 different video formats in Photoshop CS6 and add layers–er, tracks–trim, add basic video and audio transitions, apply effects and the like, and then export the result as a video in one of three formats using a built-in version of Media Encoder. Photoshop has had basic video editing features for a few versions, but its capabilities have been enhanced with CS6. So, if you need Photoshop’s tools for your Web-bound graphics, you still should create in Photoshop, save your Photoshop file and open it in Fireworks, and then export your final image. Photoshop has had a ‘Save for Web’ feature for a long time, but it still doesn’t compress images as well or as much as its suitemate Adobe Fireworks does–Fireworks produces significantly smaller file sizes than Photoshop does. You can even paste in lorum ipsum placeholder text automatically, and you can copy the style of one block of text and apply that same style on text elsewhere. A new type-rendering engine, which supports OpenType, makes text appear cleaner and sharper. CS6 regards text as so important that it now has a Text menu, and it has several new controls over text, including the ability to format ordinals and fractions properly. That may happen less often now that Photoshop CS6 has ramped-up text tools. For some projects, especially ones that that incorporate text, I’ve found that I have to choose between Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign.
