Yesterday was Photoshop’s 30th birthday and to mark the occasion Adobe has issued a major update to the desktop and iPad software.

The Content-Aware Fill tool (shown above) has been expanded to allow users to make multiple selections and apply multiple fills without leaving the workspace. Being able to sample all layers in the CAF workspace and break the fill region into sub-parts gives users more control while reducing the number of clicks required. Complex multiple edits can be previewed in real time.

The Lens Blur tool (shown above) has been improved with a new GPU-driven algorithm that is tuned to simulate a 3D environment to create realistic results, while also consuming minimal computing power. This significantly improves overall realism, delineating areas of sharpness and edges when using Lens Blur to synthetically adjust the depth of field to blur the foreground, background or middle of an image.

Support for Dark UI, one of the more popular features of the Catalina Mac OS, has been added to the Mac OS version of Photoshop. Both Windows and Mac OS users will experience other performance improvements, especially in panning and zooming and when using the hand tool to zip around the canvas. Stylus users on Windows will no longer need to use WinTab.

Improvements to Photoshop on the iPad, which is included in all Creative Cloud plans that include Photoshop, will find improvements to the Object Selection tool. They replicate the functions released in Photoshop on the desktop at MAX 2019, three months ago and provide the same options and settings. Select Subject finds and selects the main subject in an image with one click and is used when there is one primary object you want to quickly isolate. The Object Selection tool is designed to handle more complex images.

Updates to Type settings in Photoshop on the iPad brings many of the typographic controls used in Photoshop on the desktop to the iPad, including type layer, character and options properties. Tracking, leading, scaling and formatting objects like all/small caps, super/subscript are now available Kerning will ship in a future release.

Photoshop CC susbscribers should find their software updates automatically. If it doesn’t, try restarting the computer and checking the CC app or app store for the updates.