8 Mind-Blowing New Features in the NEW Photoshop 27.6 Update!

Hey, what's up everybody? Terry White here, and it's my pleasure to give you a quick look at what's new in the latest Photoshop 27.6 release, which just came out towards the end of April. I normally get these things out on day one, but I've been working so hard on Lightroom, I'm just now getting to it, but I saved the best for last. The cool stuff in Photoshop you may have missed. So if you haven't already, go ahead and check your Creative Cloud app, click check for updates. If it's not there, it should be there by now, but if it's not there, sign out, sign back in, check for updates again, and it should be there, and you should be able to install it. Now, these are things that, some of these things were released in the beta that are now released in the regular version. So they're not new new, meaning they're released and ready for you to use, but you may have seen them before in the past. I may have shown you a couple of these when they were in beta, but everything else is new and as of this release, and you can take advantage of it right now. So without further ado, let's dive in. All right, normally I would say these are in no particular order, but they are in a particular order. They're in the order I think are the most fun or the most useful or the ones I like the best. So you can let me know in the comments which features resonate with you, which ones you thought were cool, which ones you thought could be better, which ones you wish we still had. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this one. And this is a old composite I used to do back in the day, just to give people a taste of what compositing was like. My model Shay was in studio, she posed like Laura Croft, and behind her is just a stock kind of even cartoonish cave image. And I would just like to see what that would look like if she were in it. So I would tell people, well, first of all, one of the dead giveaways of compositing is getting the scale and size just right. So you gotta think about perspective, how far back in the cave she is. And also I'm putting her further back where the light is, and that'll make more sense to you in a minute. And then once I get her in place, then of course the next thing would be to remove the background. And that would be a whole process back in the day, but now it's just a simple click, remove background. All right, so now that I got her background, it looks completely fake because she's a different color than the environment. There's no shadows. There's just, you can still see the white reflected in her glasses. All of those things that make this look not good. But even if I got all that right, one of the things that would be difficult to do, if not impossible to do back in the day, is if I needed to turn her to a different angle. And not necessarily left to right, but usually getting the angle right up and down was usually the issue when you're doing compositing of two things that were not shot at the same time, at the same plane, the same perspective. So now we have this brand new rotate object feature. And what it's doing is preparing the object to be rotated. Again, the image with no background. And once it prepares her to be rotated, we'll get some controls to rotate her in what will feel like a 3D space, even though this is not a 3D object. Now you might be saying, well, Terry, the quality went down a little bit once you did this. And that's true. It's doing it in a kind of a temporary low res quality until you're ready to lock it in. So remember what I was talking about, getting the perspective pointing at the right plane down a little bit. Well, now that starts to look a little bit better when I bring her hands down into the scene compared to where it was, where she may not have looked like she was on the floor shot at that angle pointing down. So now I can get the object turned around. I can even turn her a little bit more to the left. And there we are. You turn it all the way around. You have the whole 360 space to work in, even though this is not 3D, but it's giving you the 3D type feel. All right, so now that I got it in place, I'll click done. And what that will do is that will bring back the quality. That'll reintroduce the quality of the original image. So you're working kind of in that proxy view while you do your rotation, while you get the position just right. And then once you locked it in, it will go ahead and bring back the quality of the original image. So there we are. We've got the quality back, but we still have all the original problems. And now, again, this is where I would have taken time in those previous classes. Okay, you gotta put some shadows in. You gotta get the toning of the skin tones right to look like it was in that cave. So maybe warm her up a little bit. You would do all of those things manually. And maybe there are some lighting and reflections you need to do. So now we just have a one click harmonize button. When I click harmonize, that will give me three variations to choose from over here on the right hand side. So I usually don't like all three. There's usually only one that I'll end up using. And just so you know, harmonize tends to make things a little darker than I think they should be sometimes. So like, for example, there's an example I think is too dark, but I'll go ahead and click this next one, still too dark. And I'll click this one. The lighting's much better on that one, but still darker than I would want. So you could go in and add a simple adjustment layer. So we'll go ahead and add a, we can do a levels or exposure adjustment layer. We'll do a levels adjustment layer. And then we can go ahead and simply, we don't want to do the whole thing. So we go ahead and link that to the layer below. And that way now it's just adjusting her. And keep in mind, it's also adjusting her shadow too. So if you really wanted to mask it out, you would get it just the way you want it and bring in that reflection. But you can see what it did. It added the shadows. It added the coloring. Her skin's not as lit in the studio as it was before. It took care of the glasses. It did all of those things for me just by clicking the harmonize button. So there's the before, just so you can realize how much work it just saved you. And there's the after using the harmonize feature. And again, if you want to dial it in perfectly to your taste, that's what the adjustment layer's for to get it dialed into exactly what you want. So that is rotate object. I love, love, love this feature. I can't imagine ever trying to do compositing now without it because now you can get the object that wasn't shot at the same time at the right angle and then use harmonize to get it colorized and locked in with the shadows and everything else. All right, next up. Let's go ahead and take a look at this next one, which is kind of interesting. This is a composite that Victoria did for me. And this composite, you know, we all have our layer hygiene that we don't necessarily all follow. So what that means is you get a lot of layers like layer two, layer three, layer one, layer four, layer five, miscellaneous layer, copy layer, copy number six, so forth and so on. So now there's a little brush, a little broom at the bottom of the layers panel. And when you click that little broom icon, that will give you a couple of choices. So they're usually both off by default. So you can say rename all the layers. And you can even select layers that you wanna rename. So if you already took the time to rename some, you say, no, no, no, I wanna select these layers and have you rename those based on the content that's on those layers. You can do that or the entire document. And this is an optional one. If you have empty layers that aren't being used, you can say delete those as well. And again, that is optional. So now, instead of those empty layers and those layers that are just named random names, it actually named them based on what it saw on the layer. And again, it's using AI to do that naming. So if you don't think the name is right, you can go in and double click and still change the name to what you think it should be after the fact. But it did a lot of that cleanup for me. It got rid of the empty layers, the layer four, five, six, and seven that may have been empty. And it renamed the other ones to be usable names instead of layer one, layer two, layer three. So it's using, again, looking at the content on the layer and then naming it appropriately. Love that feature. Next one, and this has nothing to do with AI. This is just fun for people that work with typography. So we introduced the feature a couple of versions back. I'll go ahead and click here and we will go ahead and say don't go chasing waterfalls. All right, so don't go chasing waterfalls is my text. I'm gonna go ahead and just scale that up a little bit. And the feature we introduced a while back was dynamic text. And dynamic text, for those of you who are like, what's dynamic text? What's dynamic about it? Well, if I just click it, nothing happens because we're on, I click it with the first option now, because before there was only one option. Now you have four. I click with the first option, nothing really happens because it's just one line of text. Dynamic text really only kicks in when you have two or more lines. So one line of text, you're not gonna really see any difference. But if I go ahead and start breaking some of this up, like hitting return, you notice that it keeps everything left and right to be the same. If it has to resize the text, it will to do that. So if I say put go on its own line by itself, then here we'll make this bigger. You'll see that it makes the go big enough to fill the space and don't big enough to fill the space and chasing waterfalls big enough to fill the space. And that is what's dynamic about it. It will keep adjusting the text based on the size of the text frame and the amount of words on each line. It will do this cool artistic design kind of look that people are into these days. Now that wasn't new that we had that before. So let me undo this. All right, so now we got the dynamic text all back on one line and we'll put a space there. There we go. And next thing I wanna do is introduce the new features. So again, that wasn't new. You had that before. And next we're going, we now have three shapes. So if you ever wanted to put text in a circle, quick, boom, easy in a circle and the text is dynamic, fully editable. It for whatever reason makes it so big and off the canvas. I wish it respected the canvas size Photoshop team if you're listening, it would be nice if you click that and it just size it down to be the size of a canvas, no bigger than that. Anyway, that's just a pet peeve. All right, so that is in a circle. You might say, well, Terry, couldn't you have done that circle before? Yes, you could have, but the problem with it before is it would change, it would stretch the characters. So dynamic text does not stretch the characters. It just changes their size. And of course we got other shapes as well. So if I go in and I click okay on that and I go back to my type tool and go back to dynamic text, there we go. We have the arc and we have the under arch, the curves. So if you need to do this curve text, this just got a whole lot easier for you by just being able to go in. Of course, again, you still have complete editability of the text to change it to be, don't go, don't do, yeah, whatever. Whatever makes sense for you. Don't go chasing waterfalls. You can now chase them and have the text conform to your chasing. Next up, this is a long one coming. I've been testing this one for a while and this is expounding upon our distraction removals. So distraction removal has become a big thing in photography and in Photoshop and in Lightroom. And it started with people and then Photoshop added wires and cables. And as I've always been telling people, I expect that list to continue. So under fine distractions, we had people, then we had wires and cables. Now we have a new one, general distractions. What are general distractions? Obviously we know what people are. We get what wires and cables are. What's general? Well, if I hit find, I'm telling it for this particular photo, go find all the general distractions, meaning anything that anyone could consider to be a distraction. It doesn't mean remove them all. It just means show them to me. Show me everything that people have always said, oh, that piece of paper on the ground is a distraction. Oh, that pole is a distraction. Oh, that bus is a distraction. Show me everything that's a distraction, not wires and cables and people, but show me everything else. So, and what it's done a nice job of is colorizing the categories. So for example, poles is in yellow. So those are all the poles that's selected automatically. There's another one here, barriers. That's that little fence over there on the right hand side is selected in the pink or peach color. And there's one more that I kinda wanted to use today. Oh, there's potholes and puddles. I like that one. That's probably more of a puddle than a pothole. Barrier, yeah, barriers. Barriers, I think I said already. And spots and dust. So the spots and dust is in blue. And urban elements. That was the one I was looking for, urban elements. So I wanna do urban elements, poles, and barriers. Now, if I click the check mark, it's gonna get rid of everything that's highlighted. So I don't want everything gone. I don't want the scene completely empty. I just want the things that I want. So I usually turn off the select all, then I go check off the things I want. I want barriers, poles, and urban elements. Now that I've only selected those three, oh, and by the way, you have the option to create a new layer from it. I highly recommend always creating a new layer because that will just make it more non-destructive. You'll always be able to throw that layer away if you decide you don't want it and be right back to the original image as opposed to damaging or editing those original pixels. So we'll give it a few seconds for that to cook. And there it is. Voila. So here's my new layer with all that stuff on it. Before, after. And it does a pretty decent job. Now the guy's leaning next to a stump instead of a pole. But it does a pretty good job of that. Got rid of the barrier, changed the car because it didn't keep the same car. So you gotta watch out for things like that. AI is AI. But it is doing a good job overall. Like it got rid of the urban cones and things like that. So what I highly recommend is if you do this, just like I did with the car, if that car matters, like that car doesn't matter to me. I could even tell it to get rid of the car. But if that car mattered, it had to be that car, then you want to go undo that one part and maybe do it a different way. But otherwise, it looks pretty good. I'm happy with that. So, and again, that's why we do it on a layer. So we can always go in and make further changes or undos if we have to. Because with it being on a layer, I can go back and mask in that one little piece if I needed it back. All right, so that is remove general distractions. I'm gonna be using that a lot, I can tell. Next up, this is kind of a long time coming as well. I've been testing this one for at least a year or so. This is just modernization of the actions panel. I love actions. Actions allow me to batch process multiple images with the same kinds of things I want done to them. So I record, or not even batch processing images, but just running a bunch of steps in one image. So like, for example, people do frequency separation, which is, I don't know, three, four or five steps. You can record those steps and then just click a button, frequency separation. It'll do those steps in order for you. That's what actions are. So what's modernization about? Well, if I go to the actions panel now, it looks completely different. That's because it's been modernized. First of all, it's got essentials, which these are all the new ones. And by the way, as you can tell, when you do a new one, it does a preview showing you what it's going to do before you click it. That's modern. And then of course you still have yours. You have, if you created ones, which I don't have on this account, but if you created your own actions, they would be listed here. And again, as you can see, I'm not going to run any of these, but they're pretty self-explanatory. Select subject, selects the subject, rule background, moves background, blur the background, generate a custom background, harmonize current layer, so forth and so on, sharpen, add vignette. I thought the add vignette was kind of cool. Just put a subtle vignette around the image. And for it to be different for different images. You can always search for actions that you want to apply. So you have guides as well. So adding guides to your images, that's kind of cool for designers for it to automatically be able to do that. And if we scroll down, we got more. Resize for Instagram, resize for Instagram portrait. Resize for Instagram is probably square, yep. And resize for Facebook posts. And we scroll down, we got more. So save as PSD, save as a ping, save as a JPEG, save as a TIFF. So just quick ways of getting to the things you do all over and over and over again. And now with a modern way to do it. And yes, you can still record your own. If none of those suit your fancy. All right, so next up, number six is going to be a Firefly boards feature. So I switch over to my other version of Photoshop for this one. Because there's two things I want to show. This is all in the release version. I'm just switching to the beta because of a issue I'm having with my release version. But you should have all of this. So first of all, let's go back to the browser. And this is Firefly boards. This is the Firefly website. So firefly.adobe.com, firefly.adobe.com slash boards. And boards, think of them as mood boards or people that like love Pinterest. You put stuff on Pinterest boards to show people your ideas or to collect ideas. Firefly boards work the same way. But the difference is you have the power of Firefly if you choose to use it. You also have a connection back to Photoshop. So for example, I originally uploaded this image to my board directly from Photoshop, which I'm going to show you that in a minute. And then I, once I got it here, I said, oh, let me see what that would look like with a red dress and a black background. So just prompting those with the generated image and using this as a reference image to get the new image. So now that I've done that, I've got another copy of it. And this copy, I'm going to go over and select it. And I'm going to use the little three dot menu here. I'm going to say, open in Photoshop. So that's going to open it up in Photoshop. And that's going to just be a regular Photoshop file for me to do anything else with. And the way you would send this to a board if you were starting out is you have to save it as a cloud document. So save as, get save as. And then you would tell it instead of on your computer, which is where you normally save things, you would tell it to save it to Adobe's cloud. So that's the first requirement is that sending to Firefly from Photoshop, it has to already be in the cloud. And then you'll get there from here. So you'll say, send to Firefly boards, and that will let you pick the board you want to put it on or create a new one. Now, once it's there, like we're here now and we got this image, I'm just going to add some text. Now I could add text in, I could generate text and all that, but this is editable text that I can do in Photoshop. I don't want to generate it. I want to actually create my own text. Cause maybe the client's going to say, change it to a different word, change it to a different font. That's a whole lot easier when it's not generated, when it's the real thing. So for example, we'll go ahead and rotate this. Great, great, great. Make that bigger. Great, great, great. And we'll move that over and we'll get that in place. And then the next thing I want, we'll get rid of that extra text we don't need. And we're going to go to the background again. We're going to say select subject. That should select her. And we'll give it a second to do that. Boom. And we'll add, just duplicate her onto her own layer. So I can put her above the word fashion. So a little trick there to put the word fashion behind her, even though it was a 2D image, a flat image, I should say. All right, so now we'll go ahead and save that. And because I saved it, and it came from a Firefly board already, when I close it and go back to Firefly boards in the browser, it will come back with an update button. Hey, you updated this. Do you want your client to see the update? Yes. Click update and it brings it right in. So this way I have a better version of anything I've ever had before because it's linked to Photoshop if I want it to be, to be able to make changes that the client's asking for. And they still have the shared board. They just refresh their browser and they see my changes. Without me having to send them a JPEG, a PDF, and all this other stuff, I just use boards and you can share boards with anybody. So cool feature, the ability to do just boards in general, without, you don't have to ever generate a thing, or if you do generate things, you can ideate and get different ideas. Speaking of generations, that leads me to my next feature, which is a long time coming and it's a long thing you've been asking for, a thing I've been asking for. And that is this little button all the way in the upper right-hand corner, check your generative credits usage. When I click check my generative credits usage, it tells me how many credits I have left. It tells me when they're gonna renew. In other words, when I'm gonna get my 4,200 back based on the plans I have. And more importantly, if I go to features, it tells me how much each feature uses if it uses any. So for example, using the Firefly fill and expand doesn't use any credits, it's unlimited. Using the Firefly one model is unlimited. But if I use Gemini Nano Banana, it's 10 credits. If I use the Nano Banana Pro, it's 40 credits. So I get an idea of what things cost before I click that generate button. All right, so that is, and again, that button should be there. It'll also be when you make a selection, let's grab my selection tool. You make a selection and you hit generative fill. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. That button will also be on the contextual taskbar for you to check real quick before you do stuff to make sure you got enough credits or you don't wanna waste them if you don't need to do something very important. So that is, that is ideating with Firefly board. So I'm gonna switch back to my regular version of Photoshop and I'm gonna go to reflection removal. Now reflection removal, not new, that was in camera raw first then it made its way into Lightroom. And of course you could do it in Photoshop using the camera raw filter, but now you can do it in Photoshop proper without having to bring up the camera raw filter. And it does it in a pretty, I will say a pretty clever way. I like the way they implemented this. So I'm going to go up to edit and I'm gonna go to reflection removal. So when I go to reflection removal, first of all, it gives me kind of the same features that I get in camera raw. You definitely wanna create this on a separate layer. And I get the three modes, preview, standard, best. Of course, best is gonna be the best quality matching your quality that you had in the original image. I'm just gonna do preview to keep it quick. But when I do preview, so like previews four seconds, best might take a couple of minutes. But anyway, I like the way it did this. See what it did on the layers panel? It gave me the reflection removal layer. It gave me the reflection layer, which is kind of cool. I've always shown that in the slider and camera raw going the other way. And it gave me the original background. So if I turn off the actual remove reflection, that's the other side of the reflection. That's what was showing in the window. And of course, if I wanted to see some of that back, this is a layer, so I'm just lower the opacity a little bit and get back to that, get a little bit back. Cause sometimes we use reflections in a creative way. Maybe we want a little bit of that building in the reflection. We just don't want it to be as strong as it was in the original image like that. So this lets me dial in exactly how much reflection I want. And again, keeping it as a, keeping it on layers to be able to always come back and control it and do more with it. All right, next. All right, let's go to number eight first. Number eight. So this is, and I already have the prompt here for one version I did earlier, but let's go to the background here. And what this is allowing me to show off is that you can now, I'm not gonna render it cause I already have it done in a layer. I'll just show you the layer, but just to show you how it works. Partner models. You can, if you use a partner model like now, Banana, Gemini, Flux, any of the partner models, you now have the ability, finally, thankfully, to add your own reference image to use. So in other words, instead of generating something from scratch and it has no idea and you have to be very specific in the prompt, you can give it an image and say, hey, just use this and do what I'm asking you to do. So for example, one of the examples I just did is I made a selection like of the street area like that. Again, size, you'll get used to how you do it with the size. So maybe you made it too small, maybe you made it too big, but you'll get the idea once you do enough of these. Generative fill, and I use Gemini. And again, you can use whichever partner model you like best. So I'm using the 3.1 NanoBanana 2 as opposed to Pro. You can use either one, whichever one you want. And this is the new reference image button. So I can add up to eight reference images. So these are all the images I want to use in this particular one. So I'm using this one of me, looking very like I'm from England. And I'm going to go in and just simply add me standing in the street. Now, because that was just a waist up kind of shot, even not a chest up kind of shot, add me standing in the street wearing black pants because it doesn't know what to put under me. And I've had to put like, take that whole thing and make it more of a robe than the actual image. So I'm not going to hit generate because I've already done it and I don't want to take the time to do it again. But let me just show you what that looks like. Let's deselect. And here's what it did. It added me because again, I made the selection kind of small there the first time, but there it is adding me with the black pants on. And here's a version, there's a version of me somewhere over here. There we are. It's me with the robe. I made a bigger selection. I thought it was cool that it even added the shadow. Now, notice the shadows cut off here. And the same thing on my other one, the shadows cut off there. Well, what do you think that's, why it's cut off at that spot? Because that's how small the selection was. It didn't have enough room to go all the way out. So you might want to give it more selection area than you think you need. So it can add in the details to make this look real. So that's my fault. I just didn't make the selection big enough initially for it to add in the rest of or extended shadow. So here, obviously I made the selection bigger. I didn't tell it to use black pants, so it guesstimated what it should do. Here I told it to use the black pants, but it didn't make the selection wide enough. So the shadow got cut off. But again, in both cases, it's using the reference image. Here it's giving me a little bit more light because there's more light over there. Here it's putting me a little bit more in the shadows because there's more shadows over here. So it's doing kind of the cool right things. All right, next up, let's go to number nine. And this is kind of interesting from an editing perspective using generative fill and also what's new inside of Photoshop is finally, finally, finally, the Firefly 5 model is here. So we started out with Firefly image model one back when we first did it back in 2023. Three years ago already. And then we came up with Firefly image model three, and that's been out for a couple of years or a year or so now. And now image five, because image five, we're interested in being competitive with all those partner models as well. So we wanted a model that could maintain details and give you more of an instructive kind of thing. So I'm just gonna select, there we go, go back to the background there, select all. And on the background, so in other words, normally I would select the thing I wanna change. In this case, I wanna change the water in the waterfall, but I'm gonna, no, I'm gonna let it go for it. I'm gonna hit generative fill, and I'm gonna say change the waterfall to look as if it were shot with a four minute long exposure. Because if I were back in Iceland doing this the right way with a neutral density filter and shooting this the right way, I would do a long exposure so the water looks nice and silky. So I'm using it in this case. We also showed you the difference, partner models on one side, Adobe models on the other side, Firefly five, using that model, and we're gonna hit generate and let it do its thing. So before I would have be very specific, select the area I wanna make the change to and be very specific with the prompt and all that. Firefly five is more of a do your thing, tell it what you want it to do, and it'll figure out better, try and do a better job of figuring out what you really want. And so that's been amazing to have that come to Photoshop in the Firefly five image model. All right, I've talked enough to where hopefully it will finish. Try to talk out the progress bar, and we'll give it a second. If not, I'll let it finish. There we go. I was gonna say, if not, I already got it on a layer that I did previously, but look at that. It did exactly what I wanted it to do. It gave me my image. So again, here's my before with the bad water. Now it also raised the image up a little bit. I'm not sure why it's doing that, but it's giving me more of the ground, which is great. It's actually giving me a better composure. And of course I'm going to tweak any of that stuff I want as well. But did a great job of not only straightening up that waterfall, because it was a little crooked from my perspective, and it also gave me that nice silky long exposure look, and it did not get rid of my rainbow. It kept the rainbow. And in a previous version, I thought it was interesting that it did, it kind of tried to do the clouds too, because in a four minute exposure, if those clouds are moving, they will be streaky as well. But I actually liked the outcome of this version better. So that is what's new in the Photoshop 27.6 release, which was released at the end of April, 2026. For those of you who are keeping track, go update your Photoshop and you can take advantage of any of these features or all of these features or none of these features. With that said, cheers everyone. Let me know what you like best in the comments. We'll catch you in the next one. Bye everybody.