Adobe has now come up with its sophisticated Creative Suite 6 together with new versions of Photoshop and its novel cloud-based subscription scheme.
On 23rd April 2012 Adobe launched not only all its 14 updated applications but also the new and much-talked about Creative Cloud payment plan. The monthly subscription is of $75 based on which you will get all the CS6 applications along with Adobe Muse and Edge Preview, the two latest HTML5 products. Another option is also available for this and it is $50 per month for a yearly membership.
The subscription scheme was previously announced last fall along with the original tablet-based Adobe Touch apps. The scheme allows you to download and install desktop applications from Adobe. What’s more, it also includes access to Adobe Touch apps and offers 20GB cloud-based storage through which you can avail your files from any of the web browsers, and also you can view, coordinate and share the files through multiple computing appliances, like desktop PC and tablets.
Existing consumers of CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS5.5 have been offered discounted price of $30 per month. There is even a free membership available with just 2GB of storage space which allows you to coordinate and share files across devices and offers 30-day free trial for all desktop applications involved in the paid membership.
Those who balk at the monthly subscription idea can still purchase the CS6 applications on their own in the traditional manner, i.e. by paying a huge cash straight. Of course, there are again plenty of packages, like CS6 Design and Web Premium for $1,899, Production Premium at $1,899, Master Collection at $2,599 and Design Standard at $1,299. Upgrade cost for Design Standard is $299, two Premium editions is $399 and for Master Collection is $549.
Key Features
Adobe Photoshop CS6 – Photoshop and also Photoshop Extended have been refurbished remarkably, with its darker (customizable) and more sophisticated interface and hardware acceleration which increases performance. New features and more tools have been included which exploit the benefits of content-aware technology. So also the video features which were originally available only with Photoshop Extended are now made available in the standard version too; however 3D tools still remain only in the Extended version.
Adobe Illustrator CS6 – Illustrator too has been upgraded to get newer look (by default it is dark gray, but it is customizable) and GPU acceleration boosting the performance. More interesting features are a new engine for image tracing, facility to apply gradients to strokes and a new tool for pattern creation. A 64-bit support for Windows as well as Mac is also included in the new version.
Adobe InDesign CS6 – The page-layout application of the upgraded version of Adobe includes all new Adaptive Design Tools, which include Alternate Layout which allows you to create multiple layouts easily of the same document for multiple devices or prints, Liquid Layout which allows you to apply page rules which automatically adjust content when you change layout orientation, size, etc, Linked Content which permits you to associate content from layout to layout or document to document within the same document thus alterations are applied across the associated objects or texts and Content Collector Tools which allows you to grab various pieces of content from the present layout and repurpose them in the same or different documents.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 – Just like the Illustrator and Photoshop, the video editing application of Adobe offers a new interface and large performance boosts for hardware acceleration. It includes an all new Project Panel with big and resizable thumbnails of size 16×9 which lets you preview clips through something called Hover Scrub by Adobe (meaning hovering and moving the mouse over the thumbnails to scrub through the video.) The new sophisticated trimming tools let you trim clips straightaway in the timeline with the help of shortcuts from keyboard or dynamically in the Program Monitor. The adjustment layers allows you to apply effects over multiple clips (similar to that in Photoshop) and generate masks to make alterations to a chosen area of a shot.
CS6 and Creative Cloud are both planned to be available within a month.
