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Tag: CS6

  • Adobe Ditches Creative Suite In Favor Of Creative Cloud

    Adobe Ditches Creative Suite In Favor Of Creative Cloud

    For years, Adobe has sold its professional design software under the Creative Suite banner. There were hints that was going to change when Adobe stopped selling CS6 at retail, but the company has moved to kill Creative Suite faster than anybody expected.

    Adobe announced at its annual MAX conference that it will no longer be releasing new versions of its software under the Creative Suite banner. Instead, all future updates and features will be delivered via Creative Cloud. In other words, those who buy Creative Suite 6 will only get just that while all new features to Photoshop and the like will only be available via Creative Cloud.

    The move to Creative Cloud, which is a subscription service, has upset some members of the Adobe user community. The complaints were excellently captured in a new video released by our favorite Taiwanese animators at NMA:

    Adobe says that it’s moving to a subscription-only model because it will allow them to deliver updates to users at a faster rate:

    “We launched Creative Cloud a year ago and it has been a runaway success,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “By focusing our energy — and our talented engineers — on Creative Cloud, we’re able to put innovation in our members’ hands at a much faster pace.”

    To convince current CS6 users to move to Creative Cloud, Adobe is offering discounts on the subscription service for a limited time. You can check out all the different Creative Cloud plans here.

  • Photoshop CS6’s Creation Was Powered By 601 Cases Of Beer

    Have you ever wondered what went into building a piece of proprietary software like Photoshop? I promise you it’s not black magic, but a lot of beer went into building everybody’s favorite photo editing software.

    To celebrate Photoshop reaching 5 million Facebook fans, Adobe has put together a short video that compiles all the work that went into making Photoshop CS6. Some of the stats – like Photoshop’s 4.5 million lines of code – are rather impressive. Other stats – like the number of beer cases consumed during production – show that Adobe must be a fun to place to work at.

    Looking beyond the numbers, the video gives a small glimpse at how software like Photoshop is made. It’s not open source so its users can’t directly influence its development, but the team does take ideas and suggestions from users to make Photoshop the best it can be.

    If the above video has coerced you into wanting to enshrine a physical copy of Photoshop CS6 in your closet; you have until April 30 to do so. After that, the software will leave for the Cloud and digital orders only. You could set up a computer running Photoshop CS6 in your makeshift closet shrine, but it just wouldn’t have the same effect.

  • Adobe Phasing Out Boxed Retail Copies Of CS6

    Adobe Phasing Out Boxed Retail Copies Of CS6

    Do you still purchases boxed retail versions of software? If so, you might want to grab a boxed copy of Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 as the company is beginning to phase out its retail offerings.

    Adobe told multiple outlets today that it will be discontinuing its retail offerings of Creative Suite 6 and Acrobat. An Adobe spokesperson provided the the following comment to TechHive:

    “As Adobe continues to focus on delivering world-class innovation through Creative Cloud and digital fulfillment, we will be phasing out shrink-wrapped, boxed versions of Creative Suite and Acrobat products. Electronic downloads for Creative Suite and Acrobat products will continue to be available—as they are today—from both Adobe.com, as well as reseller and retail partners. We are in the process of notifying our channel partners and customers, as plans solidify in each region.”

    Since last year, Adobe has put considerable marketing muscle behind its Creative Cloud subscription service. For $49.99 a month, subscribers get access to all the software included in CS6 alongside development tools for games and Web pages.

    Phasing out its retail presence makes perfect sense as Adobe pushes for more subscribers. After all, a few hundred thousand subscribers paying $50 a month for years to come will make them far more money than single time purchases of CS6.

    So, what if you really want to own a boxed retail copy of CS6? TechHive says that stores will carry boxed copies of CS6 until April 30. After that, you’ll either have to buy digital copies or sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription.

  • Adobe Shows Off New Photoshop CS6 Features

    Adobe Shows Off New Photoshop CS6 Features

    So, it’s official: Adobe CS6 is out there and in the hands of all you creative types. One of the most popular programs is no doubt going to be Photoshop, but the regulars probably already know all about the new features and what they can do with it. Those people are forgetting a very important new demographic however.

    With the launch of Adobe CS6, the company also announced that Creative Cloud would be launching this Friday. It allows anybody to have access to all of the tools contained in CS6 for a small fee of $49.99 a month. These new people who jump in at this point might have no formal training or experience with the new tools in Photoshop CS6. The video below is for them, but you creative types might want to watch it as well. You might just a learn a few tricks.

    The video tutorial comes from Adobe Senior Digital Evangelist Julieanne Kost. She shows off all the new features that come with Photoshop CS6 Extended including the new Mercury Graphics Engine and Adobe Camera Raw 7. She will also discuss the photographic blur effects, Adaptive Wide Angle, new Shape layers, and the new and improved Crop tool.

    Unfortunately, the above video was meant to cover Photoshop’s new video editing features as well, but Kost ran out of time. She instead pointed us to a video she had previously created that goes over the video editing tools in Photoshop CS6. It’s not as in-depth as the above video, but it should give you some ideas as to how the new feature works.

  • Adobe CS6 Now Available, Creative Cloud Coming Friday

    Adobe CS6 Now Available, Creative Cloud Coming Friday

    After hosting an open beta that was downloaded at least over 500,000 times, Adobe has announced that its highly anticipated Creative Suite 6 is now available for purchase. The new version of CS brings many new features to the programs that creative types know and love while innovating in key areas.

    As we reported last month, Adobe CS6 launches with new versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Flash Professional and other software including Encore and Fireworks. As always, the software is available in four suite versions – Design Standard, Design Web and Premium, Production Premium and Master Collection.

    As was announced alongside CS6, Adobe will also be launching the Creative Cloud on Friday. The new option allows users to download and install all the programs that are in the Master Collection. Users can then store and share their content across desktops, mobile devices and the cloud. It’s the version of CS6 that’s targeted towards those who want to publish content to the Web. It’s available at a subscription pricing of $49.99 a month.

    “We announced Creative Cloud and CS6 two weeks ago and these releases have caught the imagination of creatives everywhere,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “Today we’re shipping CS6 and look forward to the beginning of an exciting new era as we introduce Creative Cloud later this week.”

    According to Adobe, those who buy CS6 can look forward to these new features:

    New levels of performance with tools that take advantage of Adobe Mercury Graphics functionality, allowing users to go from ideas to finished work faster than ever before.

    Enhanced user interfaces that vastly simplify workflows, so users can focus on their content and achieve results quicker.

    New capabilities that streamline the creation of responsive content, ensuring website and apps look great across virtually all screen sizes and form factors.

    Remarkable new science, integrated into imaging and video apps, makes previously impossible tasks suddenly possible.

    The four versions of Adobe CS6 are now available at Adobe Authorized Resellers, the Adobe Store in North America and Adobe Direct Sales. The prices are as follows: $2,599 for CS6 Master Collection, $1,899 for CS6 Production Premium, $1,899 for CS6 Design and Web Premium, and $1,299 for CS6 Design Standard. For more information on the individual versions and the software contained therein, check out the official product page.

    If you have been a CS user since at least CS3, Adobe is also offering a special discounted price on a full Creative Cloud membership. Normally $49.99 a month, a one year contract for existing customers will only be $29.99 a month for the first year.

    Adobe seems to be offering a little something for everyone with the newest release. I’m tempted to sign up for the Creative Cloud if only to have access to After Effects and Premiere Pro at a price that’s way cheaper than what the Master Collection costs.

    Are you planning on picking up CS6? Or are you going for the Creative Cloud? Let us know in the comments.

  • Exclusive: Adobe on CS6, Creative Cloud, and New Focus

    Exclusive: Adobe on CS6, Creative Cloud, and New Focus

    On Monday, Adobe made some big announcements including the next version of its professional design software suite and a new cloud service for syncing, sharing, and storing files. Although there is always excitement surrounding news from the leading company in digital experiences, this week’s announcements were especially intriguing since they included 14 new products and 4 new Creative Suite additions.

    What do you think of Adobe CS6 and Creative Cloud? Let us know.

    Heidi Voltmer, Director of Product Marketing at Adobe Heidi Voltmer, Adobe’s Director of Product Marketing, spoke with WebProNews and told us that Adobe focused its efforts on 4 main areas with these products. As she explained, the company emphasized speed and performance, improving features in its tools, making sure that the content produced in CS6 is ready for devices, and enhancing the user interface.

    In CS6, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are all powered by Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, which will dramatically improve the performance of the tools. Voltmer told us that Adobe wanted to make it “really easy for our customers to use our products and to focus on what they’re doing creatively in the tool… and not so much about where they have to find a particular item in a panel.”

    Photoshop CS6 is, of course, one of the big draws to the application bundle, and it is particularly noteworthy since this version is the first completely new release in 2 years. The increased performance it enables lets users receive near instant results in their editing.

    “Now, when you’re editing images or making changes, you’ll actually see them appear just really quickly on the screen instead of having to wait for it to redraw,” said Voltmer.

    Although the Creative Suite would have single-handedly been big news from Adobe, the company also announced Creative Cloud in which users can access its suite of desktop tools – normally $2,599 for a full license- for $49.99 per month. The cloud offering also adds online services for sharing and publishing content created through CS6. As a result, customers have much more flexibility using the software.

    This subscription-based service is also useful for customers that only need the software for a certain period of time. It also gives them access to all the updates Adobe makes to avoid having to buy the newest version every time it rolls out.

    “It’s not just like today, where you buy a single box and you don’t see anything new from Adobe for 12-24 months,” said Voltmer. “With the Creative Cloud, you actually get those updates on an ongoing basis.”

    Last year, when Adobe announced CS5.5, Scott Fegette, Senior Product Manager on the Creative Suite Web team, talked to us about the company’s first attempt at a new pricing model. The company wanted to give customers both long-term and short-term options.

    After listening to the customer feedback from last year’s pilot attempt at changing the pricing model, Voltmer told us that Adobe decided to take the model further this year.

    “We evolved the model to lower the price, first of all, and second of all, to add in additional value,” she said.

    In terms of video, CS6 includes major improvements to both Premiere and Flash. Incidentally, after a long battle with Apple over Flash’s significance on mobile devices, Adobe announced in November that it was re-positioning Flash for use, primarily, in premium video and hi-end gaming. While CS6 does include updates to Flash, Voltmer told us that Adobe really wanted to help bridge creators from Flash to HTML5.

    “We’re really trying to help our Flash customers to transition into animating and creating interactive activity with HTML,” she pointed out.

    With this greater emphasis on HTML5, Dreamweaver also received several improvements for incorporating HTML5 animations and more.

    With all these developments, Voltmer told us that Adobe ultimately wants to streamline complex workflows for creative professionals. The company recently combined its digital media group with its marketing group in an effort to support this goal.

    “By bringing those two pieces together, we offer a much more broad and integrated solution that not only sells to say, our customers in a creative department or an agency, but also people on the business side,” she said.

    According to Adobe, the new products will be available 30 days from its announcement on April 23, but the company is accepting pre-orders now.

  • Adobe Holding Twitterview On CS6 And Creative Cloud

    Adobe Holding Twitterview On CS6 And Creative Cloud

    Twitterview is one of those unholy mashup of words that just shouldn’t exist. The idea behind it is noble and I like asking questions via Twitter just like anyone else, but why does it have to be called a Twitterview?

    Regardless of my years studying the AP stylebook like it was the Bible, Adobe is sticking to their use of the word “Twitterview” and I just have to suck it up. That’s because the company is holding its first ever UK Education Twitterview this Thursday. The topic will of course be on the recently unveiled Creative Suite 6 and the new Creative Cloud.

    If you need a refresher course, check out our coverage of the announcement yesterday. In short, Adobe will be launching the official CS6 software sometime in the next 30 days. The applications and creative suites bring some major changes to the table including expanded HTML5 support. With all these changes, people are going to obviously have questions.

    Adobe has the answers to all your questions and more if you join the Twitterview this Thursday, April 26, between 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. GMT. For us not in England, it starts 11:30 a.m. EST.

    For those who can make it to the Twitterview, just send your questions to @AdobeUKEdu with the hashtag #CS6. Adobe’s UK Education Manager Mark A ‘Bear will be on tap to answer all of your questions. If you can’t make it to the Twitterview, you can DM your questions in advance to the same Twitter handle and Adobe will get to them.

    Be sure to ask some really good questions. This is the perfect time to get a leg up on the new features coming to CS6. Now excuse me while I go forget the word Twitterview exists by watching a video of a giant spider eating a snake and scaring myself into amnesia.

  • Adobe CS6 Software Previewed, Expect Demo Next Week

    Adobe CS6 Software Previewed, Expect Demo Next Week

    Adobe will be rolling out its new Creative Suite 6 programs at some point this year, with many signs pointing to a June release. While the Photoshop CS6 beta has been the talk of the town, other Adobe programs, like After Effects and Premiere Pro, should not be left out. These tools are expected to be demoed next week at NAB in Las Vegas, but one lucky user got an early look.

    Scott Strong from The Training Farm got an early look at the features of Premiere Pro and After Effects, and he likes what he sees. He said that his “appetite is whetted” after seeing a leaked headline that said, “3D extrusion! 3D camera tracker! Variable mask feather!”

    Premiere Pro is the main competitor to Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Apple’s video editing service faced some heavy criticism earlier this year with the newest version, but Apple has worked to fix the complaints that users had. Regardless, there might be some people who are looking for a new editing software, and Premiere Pro CS6 might be that software. Strong, from what he saw, says the new version is “moving in the direction of speedier workflow with ease of access to important tools.”

    Of course, nothing is more fun to play with Adobe After Effects and the new version apparently doesn’t disappoint. After having a hard time finding workarounds for extruded text, Strong says the new version makes it easier to “merge live action footage that was shot with a moving camera using After Effects’ 3D camera tracker to place the text in the proper 3D place.”

    The other big change for After Effects is that it will have two rendering engines for 3D compositions. It’s called the Ray traced rendering engine, and Strong says it pushes After Effects “beyond being a 2.5D software and closer to a true 3D platform.” This is achieved by Adobe embracing 64-bit processors for faster renders and more efficient RAM use.

    As previously stated, these new versions of the software are expected to be shown off April 16 through 19 at NAB in Las Vegas. It remains to be seen if Adobe will release a public beta like with their hugely successful Photoshop beta.

    Are you excited about Adobe CS6? Do you think Premiere Pro CS6 can take on Final Cut Pro now? Let us know in the comments.

  • Photoshop CS6 Beta Is Really Popular

    Photoshop CS6 Beta Is Really Popular

    Beta testing periods are a common practice among many software manufacturers these days. It’s rare for these tests to be met with the kind of reaction that the Photoshop CS6 beta has met. Of course, Photoshop rarely gets beta releases, so I guess the excitement is understandable.

    Adobe has revealed the initial figures from their CS6 beta release and the numbers are pretty staggering. They have seen over 500,000 downloads of the beta in less than a week. They say the download number keeps going up and I’m in no position to disagree with them.

    Photoshop CS6’s social media campaign has helped the beta reach those numbers. When the beta was announced last week, it became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. On top of that, the CS6 “sneak peek video playlist” has received nearly 3 million views on YouTube and the CS6 beta videos have received half a million views.

    Going even further, over the past week there has been over 12,000 Facebook likes, over 2,000 comments and over 110,000 tweets. That’s the kind of social media campaign success that other products and companies would kill for.

    As a final bit, Adobe went to Photoshop World and showed off the CS6 beta to a crowd of people who paid money to see nothing but Photoshop. These are the kind of people that would flip out over a small update. Seeing all the changes being made in the newest version of Photoshop must have been like heaven for them Good thing Adobe was on hand to film the people at the convention and what they thought about the new version of Photoshop.

    The Photoshop CS6 beta is stil available for download. Head to the product page to help them hit a million downloads.

  • Adobe Photoshop CS6 Enters Public Beta

    Adobe Photoshop CS6 Enters Public Beta

    Adobe, as a company, is never one to rest on its laurels. They are constantly improving their software and they want their users to give them the feedback they need to make it the best it can be.

    Adobe announced the launch of the Photoshop CS6 open beta today. What does an open beta mean to you? Anybody can download it and try it out to see the new features coming in the next edition of Photoshop.

    What are the new features contained in the latest version of Photoshop? Adobe lays out what they feel are the most important features in the newest version:

    Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.

    Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop. Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.

    New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.

    If you don’t know how to use any of the new features in CS6, Adobe has set up a great Web site with tips, tricks and tutorials that teaches users how to get the most out of the CS6 beta. There are in-depth videos and guides on layers, image correction, image manipulation and everything else you need to know when using photoshop.

    Adobe’s Senior Creative Director, Russel Brown, lays out his six favorite features that are new to the CS6 beta. They may not be your favorites, but it shows off some of the new features that make CS6 even more awesome over previous versions.

    Here’s another video that explains the content-aware technology new to the CS6 beta. It’s admittedly the most impressive part of CS6 and I can’t wait to play around with it.

    You can download the CS6 beta now from the Adobe Web site. Let us know how it is in the comments.