Feature summary | Photoshop desktop (October 2020 release)

Learn about new features and enhancements in Photoshop on desktop (version 22.x) released in 2020-2021

Photoshop desktop | 2021 releases

Photoshop desktop

October 2020 release (version 22.0)

Neural Filters

Neural Filters

Explore a range of creative ideas with new re-imagined filters powered by Adobe Sensei. Colorize your old black and white photos, alter facial expressions, or drastically edit your portraits. 

Automatic preset syncing

Sky Replacement

Quickly select and replace the sky in a photo, automatically adjusting your scenery colors to match the new sky. Get the mood you want in your photos even if the shooting conditions weren’t perfect.

Learn more directly in the app

Learn more directly in the app

With the brand new in-app Discover panel, you can search and discover new Photoshop tools, hands-on tutorials, articles, and quick actions to help you level-up and take on new challenges in Photoshop.

Enhanced cloud documents

Enhanced cloud documents

Access previously saved versions of cloud documents directly within Photoshop. It's now easier than ever to preview, mark, and revert to earlier versions of your creative documents.

Pattern preview

Pattern Preview

Envision how your design will come to life as a pattern. You can now quickly visualize and create seamlessly repeating patterns in real-time with Pattern Preview.

Neural Filters

Powered by Adobe Sensei

Neural Filters is a new workspace inside Photoshop with new reimagined filters powered by Adobe Sensei that lets you explore a range of creative ideas. Using simple sliders you can colorize a scene, zoom in on parts of an image, or change someone's expression, age, gaze, or pose in seconds. Use the power of artificial intelligence with Neural Filters to make amazing edits in Photoshop.

To access the new Neural Filters workspace in Photoshop, choose Filter > Neural Filters.

Explore the magic of AI with Neural Filters

To learn more, check out Neural Filters.

Sky Replacement

The new Sky Replacement feature in Photoshop lets you quickly select and replace the sky in a photo, automatically adjusting your scenery colors to match the new sky. You can now get the mood you want in your photos even if the shooting conditions weren’t perfect. You can save precious time when you're retouching your landscape, real estate, wedding, or portrait photos.

To get more precision, you can also zoom in and select just a section of the sky, or move the sky around to find the right configuration of clouds or color you want. 

Choose Edit > Sky Replacement.

Photoshop Sky Replacement tool

To learn more, check out Replace sky in your photos.

Learn more directly in the app

With the brand new in-app Discover panel, you can search and discover new Photoshop tools, hands-on tutorials, articles, and quick actions to help you level-up and take on new challenges in Photoshop.

The new Discover panel brings an entirely new learn and search experience to Photoshop by combining in-app learn content, step-by-step tutorials, and a new powerful search functionality.

The new experience is context-aware and gives you recommendations based on your skills and your work. These recommendations include tips and tutorials on how to get multi-step workflows done faster. The new panel also packs in the most used workflows in Photoshop into a one-click Quick Actions such as removing and blurring the backgrounds.

To access the new Discover panel at any time in Photoshop:

  • Use Cmd/Ctrl + F keyboard shortcut
  • Click the Search icon () at the upper-right of the interface
  • Choose Help > Photoshop Help from the menu bar
New and improved Help and Learn

To learn more, check out Using the Discover panel.

Enhanced cloud documents

  • Easily manage Photoshop cloud document versions in-app

With the new Version History panel, you can now access your previously saved versions of Photoshop cloud documents. 

Open a cloud document and choose (Windows) File / (macOS) Window > Version History. Here, you can preview, mark, and revert to earlier versions as needed.

  • Use Photoshop cloud documents offline

Are you going off the grid but want to edit on the go? You can now make a recently opened Photoshop cloud document available offline for editing later when you don't have Internet connection. Go to Cloud documents on the Home screen, click the three-dot icon  on the cloud document thumbnail, and select Make available offline.

Enhanced cloud documents

Pattern Preview

You can now envision in real-time how your design will come to life as a pattern. Quickly visualize and create seamlessly repeating patterns with Pattern Preview.

The new Pattern Preview mode virtually tiles and repeats your design so you don't have to wonder how it will look as a pattern. Try the patterns on your fashion designs, bathroom wallpapers, or a wide multitude of projects you can imagine! 

Simply open your design in Photoshop and choose View > Pattern Preview

pattern preview

To learn more, check out Pattern Preview.

Other enhancements

Live shapes

You can now dynamically create and edit shapes directly on your canvas with new controls to alter lines, rectangles, triangles, and more. With the major improvements to the shape tools in Photoshop, you'll experience:

  • A new tool to create triangles. You can find it under the Shape tools group in the toolbar
  • New on-canvas controls have also been added to make resizing and adjusting shapes fast and intuitive. Create a rectangle, triangle, or polygon to see the new on-canvas controls
  • Easy to adjust shape controls in the Properties panel
  • Improvements to the Line tool, Polygon tool and a whole lot more
live shapes

For more information, check out Draw shapes

Reset Smart Objects

Photoshop now allows you to completely reset a Smart Object to its original state. The Reset action now detects any rotations, transforms, or warps and restores it.

Reset Smart Objects

To learn more, check out Reset Smart Object transforms.

Faster, easier-to-use plug-ins

Discover new third-party plug-ins in the Creative Cloud desktop app that you can install and use immediately in Photoshop. 

  • Slack and Trello plug-ins for communication and collaboration

For more information, check out Photoshop plug-ins and extensions.

Preset search

Search is now included in the Brushes, Swatches, Gradients, Styles, Patterns, and Shapes panels so you can spend less time hunting for a specific preset and more time creating.

After searching for Presets you may notice the preset folders get expanded and do not automatically collapse. To collapse or expand all preset folders use CMD (macOS) or Ctrl (Windows) and click on the preset folder's enclosure arrow.

Preset search

Preset search

Content-Aware Tracing Tool

Introduced as a Technology Preview feature in this release of Photoshop, test-drive the new Content-Aware Tracing Tool that lets you easily draw a path around an object by simply hovering over the edges and clicking.

To begin experimenting with this new tool, first go to Preferences > Technology Previews to enable it. Then, restart Photoshop. You can now find Content-Aware Tracing Tool under the Pen tools group in your Photoshop's Toolbar.

Content-Aware Tracing Tool (Technology preview feature)

To learn more, check out these resources:

Select & Mask enhancements

Easily perfect your selections with these Select and Mask enhancements:

  • Easily find and refine difficult hair or fur selections with a single click with Refine Hair 
  • Save and load your settings with custom Select and Mask presets
  • Two new edge refinement methods, Color Aware and Object Aware

To learn more, check out Select and Mask workspace.

Content-Aware Fill improvements

Access the Content-Aware Fill workspace quicker than ever by right-clicking selections directly on your canvas.

To learn more, check out Remove objects from your photos with Content-Aware Fill.

Other features

  • Japanese text is now supported by the World-Ready Text Layout Engine
  • View > Actual Size for viewing your document at Actual Size. With Actual Size, Photoshop uses hardware information from attached displays to calculate an appropriate zoom factor to display your image at its physical size on screen, for instance a 7 inch wide image would appear as 7 inches wide on screen.
  • Line Tool: You can now use the Stroke option to govern Line Tool line thickness instead of previously using Weight. With this change, using the Line tool in Pixel mode has been disabled.

Support for new cameras and lenses

The wait is over! Find newly added cameras and lenses in the full list of supported profiles below:

Fixed customer-reported issues

For detailed information, see Fixed issues in Photoshop.

Deprecated features

The Zoomify command was removed. Visit http://www.zoomify.com to create and preview Zoomify content.

Known Issues

For detailed information, see Known issues in Photoshop.

 Adobe

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