Adobe Photoshop 27.11 — Mac version

Photoshop is a Mac app for building pictures from scratch, blending photos, retouching portraits, and painting digitally. Version 27.10 bundles a few new tools that feel like a friendly starting point if you have just opened the app for the first time.

Type 'remove the coffee cup' and watch the image change

• Prompt to Edit. Type a plain-English instruction — "make the sky a deeper blue" or "remove the coffee cup" — and watch the image change. It is part of the new AI Assisted editor, and it gives you a feel for Photoshop’s direction without needing to learn the toolbar first.
• One-click masking. Click once on a person, a face, or the sky. Photoshop selects it automatically. Masks let you keep edits inside a shape or an area, so you can lighten a face without touching the background.
• Light adjustment layer. Found in the Adjustments panel, this new layer adjusts brightness and contrast without baking changes into your photograph. Slide it, turn it off, tweak it later — completely non-destructive.

What a newcomer gets from version 27.10

The big shift in this release is that you can speak to the image rather than hunt for commands. Prompt to Edit and the Markup tools sit inside the beta AI editor, so you can combine natural-language edits with manual selections. For a first session, that means less time reading menus and more time seeing what the software can do with your photos, composites, or scans.

Fix Save As so it offers a normal local file browser

Out of the box, Photoshop makes a few assumptions that don't suit everyone. Here are three I tweak on any Mac, old or new, before doing real work.

• Save As behaviour. By default, Save As only offers cloud documents and a handful of formats. Go to Preferences > File Handling > File Saving Options and tick Enable legacy "Save As". Suddenly you get JPEG, PNG, TIFF and friends back in the dropdown. For a repair-café machine that moves files between older Macs, this one setting saves constant frustration.
• Scratch disk location. Photoshop loves free space. Head to Preferences > Scratch Disks and make sure an internal drive with plenty of room sits at the top of the list. If you are working on a machine with a small boot SSD, point it at a secondary drive. The difference in responsiveness when handling large layered files is immediate.
• Units and rulers. Right-click the ruler (Cmd+R if you don't see it) and pick pixels, millimetres or inches depending on what you actually make. If you design for screen, pixels save mental arithmetic. If you lay out for print, millimetres keep you honest. The default often doesn't match what your hands are doing.

Drag an underexposed photo onto the Photoshop icon

Here is how a Saturday morning might go with version 27.10, the way I see people use it in the library.

1. Open a photo that needs fixing. Drag a slightly underexposed shot onto the Photoshop icon. The image lands on a locked background layer.
2. Add a Light adjustment layer. Click the half-moon icon in the Layers panel, choose Light from the new menu. Push the exposure slider up a touch, pull highlights back a hair, and lift the shadows until detail emerges from the dark coat the person was wearing. Nothing is baked in yet — you can double-click the adjustment layer later and change your mind.
3. Remove a distraction. There is a crisp packet on the grass. Grab the Lasso tool, draw a loose loop around it, then open the AI Assisted editor and type "remove litter" into the Prompt to Edit field. Photoshop does a tidy job of replacing it with plausible grass texture. If the first pass looks odd, you undo and try "remove object, blend with surrounding grass" — being more specific usually helps.
4. Mask the sky for separate treatment. Click the sky with the one-click selection. Photoshop builds a mask in seconds. Now you can add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer (it automatically inherits the mask) and deepen the blue without touching the foreground.
5. Paint in a small detail. The fence post at the edge is scuffed. Pick a soft round brush, sample a nearby colour by holding Option and clicking, then paint over the scuff at low opacity. A few strokes and it blends in.
6. Save a copy for sharing. With legacy Save As enabled, choose JPEG at quality 10, rename the file, and you have a clean version ready for email while the layered master stays untouched as a PSD.

The whole sequence takes maybe ten minutes once the shortcuts are in your fingers. No menus deeper than one click, no dialogue boxes you don't need.

Stop stacking Brightness/Contrast and Levels for one adjustment

Version 27.10 is not a seismic overhaul, but it shifts a few daily rhythms. The Light adjustment layer arrived in this release, which means you no longer need to stack a Brightness/Contrast layer and a Levels layer just to do what your phone's photo editor does with one slider. For quick edits on event photos or product shots, it cuts the layer count and the mental overhead.

The AI Assisted editor, still in beta, changes how you approach small fixes. Before, removing an object meant reaching for the Clone Stamp, the Spot Healing Brush, or Content-Aware Fill — each with its own learning curve. Now you can lasso the problem and type what you want. It is not magic; complex removals sometimes need a second prompt or a manual touch-up. But for the straightforward stuff — litter, stray cables, a date stamp in the corner — it saves digging through menus.

Markup, the other beta addition, gives you a way to sketch roughly where you want an AI edit to happen. Draw a circle around an area, scribble an arrow, and the AI reads your intent alongside the text prompt. It bridges the gap between selection tools and natural language, which matters when the thing you want to change is hard to describe with words alone.

One practical shift worth noting: the Save a Copy dialogue can now be customised. In Preferences > File Handling, you can tick which formats appear in that menu and which stay hidden. If you never export as PNG but always need TIFF, you can clean up the list so the format you want is one click away instead of buried in a long dropdown.

Click a path and start typing to follow the curve

• Dynamic Text on a path. Draw a shape or a path with the Pen tool, then switch to the Type tool and hover over the path. The cursor changes — click and start typing. Your text follows the curve. Handy for logos and labels, and tucked away enough that people discover it by accident.
• Sample colour from outside Photoshop. Hold Option, click inside the canvas to sample, then drag the eyedropper outside the Photoshop window onto your desktop wallpaper or a reference image open in Preview. The colour picks up. It works on macOS and saves a trip to the colour picker.
• Scrubby sliders everywhere. Hover over any numeric field label in a panel — Opacity, Fill, brush size — and you get a little hand icon. Click and drag left or right to change the value without typing. Once you get used to it, you stop typing numbers entirely.
• Reset a dialogue box. Hold Option and the Cancel button in any adjustment dialogue turns into Reset. One click and your sliders go back to defaults without closing and reopening.
• Quick export as PNG. Cmd+Shift+Option+W spits out a PNG of your current document using the last export settings. It skips the Save As dialogue entirely, perfect when you are iterating on a web graphic and saving versions every few minutes.

The 27.11 update for Photoshop 2026 ships Adobe’s current set of maintenance fixes and core-tool performance work.

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit Mac