The Print menu looks a lot different in the new CS6 beta than what we’re used to seeing when preparing an image for print. There are collapsible tabs and some extra options for printing crop marks, labels and more.

The first thing you’ll likely notice are the diagonal lines around your image. These show areas of white on your paper. To get rid of these you’ll need to go into Print Settings for your selected printer and choose Borderless.

There are no explanations for each of the options under Rendering Intent, but you can find more information on these at Adobe’s CS5 Help Centre.

The new Functions tab lets you define the size of a border, the background colour and any bleed to the edges of an image.

All in all, this change may not affect photographers as much as it will graphics artists printing layouts and designs. Pre-order a copy of Photoshop CS6 and CS6 Extended today.

The Adjustments and Properties palettes are used together to apply changes to an image. Whereas before this was all done in Adjustments, the addition of an extra palette lets you flick between the adjustment’s Masks as well.

The Masks section of Properties contains the mask’s Density, so you fade the effect. Also, Feather is now part of this palette, to help blend the transition of the adjustment; a helpful feature that we’re pleased to see in CS6.

The adjustment itself is also altered in Properties, leaving the Adjustments palette open all the time. Notice too, that the Properties palette can be resized both horizontally and vertically.

With the Adjustments palette now static, you can add multiple adjustments and edit them separately in Properties.

Tip: If you’ve applied mulitple adjustments, use Alt/Opt [+] to quickly jump up and down the Layers palette, so your mouse can stay hovering over the Properties palette.

The interface of the new Photoshop CS6 Beta has four styles: black, dark grey, medium grey and light grey. You can read our full article looking at the four options in more depth.

These, like a lot of other things in Photoshop, have shortcut commands to instantly cycle through Photoshop’s various looks.

To save you going to the Preferences menu to alter colour, use Shift+F2 (Windows)/ Shift+Fn+F2 (Mac) to lighten the interface, and F1 in place of F2 to darken it.

1. Adobe Nav

The Adobe Nav app basically connects your new iPad to your desktop Photoshop. Artwork can be transferred from your image library on the iPad to edit in Photoshop. Bear in mind that this is only compatible with Photoshop CS5.

Your iPad will need to be on the same Wi-Fi connection as your desktop, so it can take a little setting up. But this is worth it for being able to edit off a shiny, touch-screen surface such as the new iPad.

Price: £1.49/$1.99US

Download from the iTunes App Store.

2. Adobe Revel

Adobe Revel 1.1 is a subscription-based app for applying photo filters, cropping and altering brightness and colour in photos. It’s quick to use and images can be shared over the Cloud service.

Revel 1.1 was previously called Carousel, however it’s now compatible with the new iPad… well, almost anyway! Adobe are working on a version of the app where you can utilise the powerful retina display, which will be the icing on the cake.

Price: £3.99/$5.99US per month or £39.99/$59.99US per year

Download from iTunes App Store.

3. Adobe Ideas

Ideas lets you sketch and design using the new iPad, and also eyedrop colour from images. The app has vector-based drawing tools, so you can transfer artwork not just into Photoshop but Illustrator, too.

You have ten layers to play with off the bat, but after those are all gone, there’s an additional layers feature that costs £0.69/$0.99US.

Price: £6.99/$9.99US

Download from iTunes App Store.

4. Adobe Color Lava

Get your ‘paint’ on using Color Lava, with mixer-like tools for combining colourful smudges. The app allows you to design colour themes from a photo and create your own, to then take into Photoshop CS5 (but not earlier versions).

Connecting the app to your PC requires a wireless link and colour selections are automatically updated as your Foreground colour.

Price: £1.99/$2.99US

Download from iTunes App Store.

5. Adobe Photoshop Express

The latest update of Photoshop Express sees added features such as a border set of 22 frames to apply to images (additional £1.49/$1.99US in-app). Also, Flickr compatibility has been improved, so you can upload full-sized photos to your account.

Controls for improving photos include transform commands, exposure and colour adjustments, image effects (Rainbow, White Glow and Pop, for example) and now borders.

Price: Free (Camera Pack: £2.99/$4.99US in-app)

Download from iTunes App Store.

…6. And don’t forget, Photoshop Creative is available on your iPad!

You can read all our tutorials and advice in Photoshop Creative magazine on the beautiful retina display of the new iPad. Version 2.5 of our app has some essential fixes, available from the iTunes App Store now.

It’s free to download and magazine issues can be bought in-app from only £2.99/$3.99US.

There’s now a dedicated filter for creating oil paint effects, a big step up from previous paint effect filters whereby adjustments seemed limiting.

Here’s a look at the filter itself…

Click for larger

For starters, it has its own place in the Filter. Now, bear in mind that this is the Beta, so things may still change when CS6 is eventually released.

There are two sections to the filter: a set of Brush adjustments and also two adjustments for controlling Lighting.

Brush will control the smoothness and bristle detail. You can achieve a granier, or clumpier, oil painting style by lowering the Stylization slider.

Scale will increase the brush strokes, giving a look that it was painted with a heavy hand.

Lighting will determine the angle of the shading and vividness of the oil painting, to top off what looks like an excellent addition to Photoshop.

The Layers palette in Photoshop CS6 Beta has a couple of new extras that help us stay organised. The first is a new filtering system, which gives you options to only view certain layer types.

Categories include Effect, Name, Kind, Mode, Attribute and Color, which are further specified with sub-categories relating to these initial themes. To clear all filters, simply click on the small grey box at the end of the pictures along the top.

Blend modes can now be applied to multiple layers at a time as well as multiple layers in a Group folder. This was a feature taken from the feedback received in the Beta’s early testing stages. By Shift-clicking, more than one layer can be selected and the blend modes are all available.

And also, in the same vein as Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CS6 Beta contains space for palettes at the very base of the interface. This may shrink the overall working space, but means you can keep palettes such as Mini Bridge and Timeline open at all times.

There have been exciting additions to the range of Blur filter options in Photoshop CS6 Beta. The three new filters – Field Blur, Iris Blur and Tilt-Shift – give you even more control over focal points and depth of field in your image.

Once you’ve opened up one of the filters, you actually have all three at your disposal to mix into your image. Well, sticking to one is what you’ll likely need to do, keeping the blurring as realistic and controlled as possible.

Field Blur – Place focal points

These three filters work with focal points, which are pinned into your image. You can add more and change each point to customise the blurring simply by clicking on your image. The Field Blur looks like this…

Alter amount of blur

Each focus pin can be enlarged and repositioned to effect certain areas. The Iris Blur filter, shown below, can be adapted in all directions. The area blurred can be customised to create authentic lens blur around a chosen subject.

Using the Tilt-Shift Filter

The new Tilt-Shift Filter creates the miniature effect quickly, using a corridor with the focused area inside. The level of blurring and distortion can be defined using the sliders to the right side of the interface.

Bokeh effects

You’ll also find the option to add Bokeh into your image, using the dedicated section under the three filters. Adding Bokeh will boost the intensity of bright patches in blurred areas, and some colour can even be added too.

Among a host of new features and tools in the exciting Photoshop CS6 Beta release, another change that’s been made is to its interface’s themes, of which may or may not be a welcomed one.

The design difference means working with a darker interface recesses tools and palettes into the background, emphasising the artwork being edited. However, the lighter grey theme may feel more comfortable, if this is what you’ve been used to.

The interface can be set to four shaded themes. From working with slate-black palettes and filters to experiencing a more familiar light grey interface that we all know and have come to love; they are all accessed through the Preferences>Interface.

The near-black interface is designed to keep your eyes focused more on the image. The lighter it goes the more everything else comes forward into your peripheral.

You can still customise the canvas area colour independently from Photoshop’s theme.

Click to enlarge

Here’s how Variations is laid out and what it all means.

Original and Current Pick

These are self-explanatory, however what’s sometimes confusing is that whenever you close Variations and then go back into the adjustment, your last settings are always saved on the Current Pick preview. To reset Variations, click on the Original image box.

Variations variables

This is where the adjustment really shines.

Shadows, Midtones, Highlights – Colours in each of these areas can be tweaked, depending on your image’s overall balance and which areas standout the most.

Saturation – Selecting Saturation presents you with two options, Less Saturation and More Saturation. This will boost the entire colour range.

Fine to Coarse – It’s easy to be put off by Variations because its default has a very strong effect (too strong!). Lower this slider to Fine to keep changes to a minimum and you’ll end up with more accurate results.

Show Clipping – Reveals for the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights sections which have lost their details.

Altering colours

So you’re presented with this; a hypnotic layout of the same image repeated seven times!

This is great for changing the mood of an image, or correcting colours for more accuracy and a true-to-life tone.

Treat this as if you’re trying to balance scales, tipping its direction one way and then the other. Every click adds one more weight on to the scale.

The colours are presented as opposites, so if you add more red you can reverse the effect by adding more cyan, and so on.

Finally, Brightness!

Adjust the brightness of your image using these two boxes down the right side of the Variations menu.

Remember, to offset one side simply click the same number of times on the opposite.

Use this to alter exposure to complete the Variations adjustment.

We peak into the creative portfolio of BillyBonkers, a dynamic duo working in Norway. Christine Aas and Dag Standal paired up in the late ’90s to combine their knowledge of photography and retouching. After a succesful year of self-promotion and taking on assignments in London, they packed up their bags and crossed the continent. Dag takes pleasure in telling us more of the BillyBonkers’s Photoshop style.

How do you create a strong HDR imaging effect that gives your artwork so much detail?
By breaking down the image into several pieces we get tremendous control over the tonal range. It all starts with photographing the background, fine tuning the different pieces and pasting them together in Photoshop. Always using a wide range of exposures. Then we photograph the models (or objects) in the studio with the best available lighting equipment, mainly Broncolor. Shooting on a Hasselblad H4D-50 we control the contrast in order to have the best conditions to take it a step further in Photoshop. After all the images have been shoot the time comes to put it all together into one image, often containing 30-50 layers.

Why is such a large portion of your portfolio focused on sports?
An interest for sport photography came to us when a couple of years ago we helped our local football club. We made individual pictures of all the players. Discovering that the lighting equipment could freeze movements down to 1/7000 of a sec. made us quite intrigued. Having the pictures in our portfolio recruited more assignments for other sports-related customers.

Any tips on working successfully as a freelancer?
In order to make it as a freelancer I think you have to develop a distinct style and keep improving and developing it all the time. Having your work displayed at different societies like Behance Network, Flickr, Facebook, or One Eyeland, is a good idea. Art buyers constantly need to be reminded of your ability.

How long do you spend in Photoshop at any given time, and why?
We do all of the retouching ourselves. It can take from 1 day to several days when retouching an image to perfection. Sometimes we send the images to Clipping Images to have them masked, but it always takes a few hours to fine-tune a mask to seamlessly make it blend into an image.

How do you see your style evolving through 2012?
It is difficult to guess how the style of BillyBonkers will evolve throughout the year. We will keep improving both the skills in photography and Photoshop by exploring the great work produced by other artist, tutorials and workshops.