DOWNLOADING BETA VERSIONS
PHOTOSHOP CC & A CREATIVE CLOUD
SUBSCRIPTION
For the most cutting-edge version of Photoshop, you need to get hold of the beta. Luckily, this is easily available through Creative Cloud, with a Beta versions section on the left-hand side of the central hub app.
A suitable image to edit. Multicore 64bit processor, 2GHz or faster Windows 10 64-bit (version 1909) or later 8GB RAM (16GB recommended) DirectX 12-compatible GPU less than seven years old (4GB RAM recommended)
Once you’ve found it, installation follows the same process as any other Creative Cloud app—you won’t be able to install beta versions of applications you aren’t already subscribed to. They’re essentially pre-release versions of the app suite, used to preview new features and for Adobe to gather feedback on its ideas before setting them loose on the public.
ONE OF THE BENEFITS of a Creative Cloud subscription is that you get almost constant updates to Adobe’s creative apps. You can also access beta versions of parts of the software, which is exactly what we’re doing here with Photoshop.
Neural filters were once part of the beta program, but have now moved over to the stable release version of the app, even though some of the filters themselves are still in beta.
The famous photo-editing app has had neural filters, which use machine learning networks to achieve their aims, for a while now, but they’re an incomplete set and some are still in beta. They’re all interesting to some extent, but one in particular jumps out—the ability to restore and colorize old black-and-white photos with a few clicks. Long-time readers may remember that this is something we tackled in Maximum PCback in 2017 but, thankfully, it’s now much easier.
The beta version opens with a different splash screen from the normal release, but getting it to open can be tricky if you already have Photoshop running. We selected it from the Start menu and Photoshop 2023 itself popped up in its place. It wasn’t until we’d quit that app that we were able to get Photoshop Beta to run. You can confirm which version you’re running by dropping down the Help menu and choosing About Photoshop, as the beta app looks similar to the mainstream one once the splash screen is out of the way. The beta app will be called Adobe Photoshop (Beta) and will have a release number slightly higher than the ‘normal’ version.
It’s not the only neural filter though. You can do dreadful things with portraits using Smart Portraits, from simply changing the direction of lighting to forcing a face to smile, or become angry, when it’s not. The Makeup Transfer tool can take the makeup applied to one face and slap it on another, which is surely going to lead to an outbreak of online clowns and drag queens, while Super Zoom attempts to increase the resolution of a cropped image. There’s a lot to go through here, so let’s get stuck in.