The brushes functionality will allow a user to apply different brush techniques and even mix and smudge “wet” paint.  These types of natural painting features have so far only been available in dedicated digital painting applications like Corel Painter.

The other amazing feature is the new warping tool, which basically allows you to stick “pins” in places that you don’t want to move while you fiddle with the surrounding areas via a mesh grid overlay.  It’s the same idea as the current Mesh Warp tool, but it looks to provide much, much more control.

These features were first unveiled at the recent Photoshop World event as sort of a sneak peek into the Adobe Labs.  There has been no promise from Adobe that any of these features will be in the upcoming release of Photoshop CS5, but one can only hope.  I’m not as concerned with the painting stuff (since I’m not a painter) but that warping tool looks amazing.  Want.  Now.

Check out Adobe’s Facebook video to see these tools in action.

This feature is based on a “randomized correspondence algorithm” and something about “structural image editing” that can “quickly find approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches.”  To me, it looks and sounds like the Healing Patch tool and Photoshop CS4’s Content Aware Scaling on steroids.  And crack.  It will be interesting to see what the final flavor of this feature ends up looking like in Photoshop CS5, which is expected to come out April-ish 2010.

For those that want to geek out on the underlying algorithm of seam carving/content-aware scaling, here you go: