Hello. This is Tsukamoto from Merci.

The new year will soon be here and it will be 2018.

A year really does fly by…

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the new features of Adobe Photoshop, whose 2018 version was released a little ahead of schedule.

1. Smoother brushes!

A stroke smoothing feature has been added to the brush tools.

To use it, just select a brush and adjust the Smoothing value in the options bar at the top.

You can configure the smoothing options from the gear icon next to it.

So what exactly is the difference?

Simply put, it makes hand-drawing feel so much better! Drawing smooth lines with a mouse when using a brush is really hard. Shaky, jagged lines are all too common.

The newly added stroke smoothing feature is what smooths out that jaggedness.

I actually tried it out, and the line follows along behind as if you were pulling it,

and you can draw far cleaner lines than before. The image below was drawn with smoothing at 0% and at 100%. I was amazed at how easy it is to draw…

I'd like to try this feature with a pen tablet, not just a mouse.

What a welcome feature!

2. Freely adjust font weight, width and slant! Variable fonts

This is another very handy new feature.

You may have noticed that some OpenType fonts have a slightly different icon.

It's the icon circled in red in the image below.

Only for fonts with this icon, but you can freely change the weight, width and slant of the text while keeping the font information intact, without rasterizing.

You'll have far fewer struggles picking fonts, thinking things like "I want it a bit bolder, but there's no weight that's just right…" or "I'd like it just a little more slanted…"

So convenient…

3. Easy publishing! New sharing feature

File → Share

Select that, and you can publish directly to Skype or social media from there.

Even if the file is in PSD format, it automatically converts it to JPEG for you before sharing.

4. The new Curvature Pen Tool

With this tool, even people new to paths can draw beautiful curves!

It's located among the pen tools, so be sure to give it a try.

You can now change the color of path lines too!

5. It's finally here! You can now copy and paste layers!

Until now, I imagine everyone was copying layers by duplicating them.

But with this update, copying and pasting layers has become possible!

Being able to use the Command key is really great.

Also, in addition to a normal paste, you can paste in the same position.

This was one of the points where I felt Photoshop was less convenient than Illustrator, so it's a hugely welcome new feature that you'd think would have existed all along.

There are other improvements to existing features besides the new ones, but here I've introduced the new features that personally got a "nice!" out of me.

Photoshop welcomed 2018 a bit early back in October, so be sure to try out its new features for yourself.

That's it for this introduction to the new features in Photoshop 2018! Happy New Year, everyone!