Adobe Releases CS6! Download the Free Trials

Free New Adobe CS6 Tutorials: 18 Hours of Online Video Training

May 15th, 2012 Leave a comment

We’ve mentioned Adobe TV in the past, but it just keeps getting bigger and better…  They’ve just published a large series of free new video tutorials for all Creative Suite 6 tools.

Learn Adobe Creative Suite 6 with Free Tutorials!

You’ll learn the basics with Getting Started overviews plus What’s New reviews by product experts, with nearly 18 hours of content covering all major CS6 applications.

And if you want to get going today, you can go ahead and download a free 30-day trial for any CS6 product for Windows or Mac – then install, run, and start your training…

If you also like learning in print, check out this nice set of free new CS6 e-books (1,022 pages).  But here’s how the video courses break out:

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Watch a Replay of the CS6 Global Online Launch Event [VIDEO]

April 25th, 2012 Leave a comment

What Are the Major Themes for Creative Suite 6?

Missed the big event? No problem! You can watch a full replay… It’s about an hour and twenty minutes in length, and available on-demand below. Creative Suite 6 offers hundreds of new capabilities and focuses on four main areas: Application Performance, Enhanced User Interface, Efficient Development for Multiple Devices, and Killer Features. The launch event illustrates these themes through the true story of a fashion designer and how her company benefits from the new features added in CS6.

Adobe says it’s taken more than 10,000,000 person-hours to produce this version… If you assume salary, benefits, office and other expenses come out to around US$50/hour, then that’s $500 million invested into Creative Suite 6 – and onto your desktop!

If you want to just watch the 22-minute segment with demos of CS6, without the intro pieces or coverage of the Creative Cloud, it’s the second video below. For more details on the release such as product adds/drops, suite configurations, system specs, upgrade paths, plus pricing and availability, see our CS6 Launch Guide. Or check out a detailed product-by-product breakout of what’s new in every CS6 application.

Meanwhile, the free CS6 trials will be available soon, but if you’d like to get started with Photoshop right away, just download the Photoshop CS6 beta release. You can also enter to win Photoshop CS6 for free

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Sneak Peeks at Illustrator CS6: New Gradient & Pattern Features

April 18th, 2012 12 comments

[UPDATE (April 23rd)Creative Suite 6 is out!]

With a barrage of Photoshop sneak peeks plus many for other CS6 products, you knew that finally Adobe Illustrator was bound to get more love of its own… Adobe has now slipped out two cool looks at the new Illustrator CS6.

Two Great New Features in Adobe Illustrator CS6!

Similar to Photoshop, it’s been two years now since a major new version was released – and similar to Photoshop CS6, the new edition of Illustrator will also have a redesigned user interface that is both darker and more modern. The idea here is by making the background darker and the controls more streamlined, the content itself will more readily shine through and stand out.

Here below AI Product Manager Brenda Sutherland shares two quick peeks into a bit of what’s new for Illustrator CS6 as part of the upcoming Creative Suite 6 – a terrific new Gradients on Strokes feature that lets you create artwork that looks complex but is easy to edit, plus an exciting new way to create seamless, repeating vector patterns… check them out:

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Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition CS6 FAQ and Highlights

April 14th, 2012 4 comments

[UPDATE (April 23rd)Creative Suite 6 is out!]

On Thursday Adobe surprised everyone with an “early reveal” of the new CS6 video products just in time for the NAB 2012 show in Las Vegas kicking off today…

Premiere Pro CS6, After Effects CS6 & Audition CS6 Revealed!

If you missed it, we have coverage of the new features in Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition, with a CS6 vs. CS5.5 version comparison – as well as the same for the CS6 Production Premium suite, taking a look at what’s new and improved.

These video tools are loaded with new features and performance improvements, and are already getting solid reviews. Lynda.com writes, “Workflow, speed, and efficiency make for a strong CS6 update to veteran production applications Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.”

And PC Pro Magazine gives its verdict on Premiere Pro CS6: “A significant interface overhaul, both in appearance and day-to-day operation, makes this sophisticated, powerful editor more tempting than ever… Adobe’s video-editing flagship completes its transformation from a clunky and unresponsive behemoth to a smooth, efficient professional tool.”

Here now are some Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) on the products, and a bit further down are some helpful video demos for each of the three.

[UPDATE CS6 Grace Period Savings: Buy CS5.5 Now + Get CS6 Free!]

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First Look: Adobe CS6 Production Premium Suite — What’s New?

April 12th, 2012 4 comments

[UPDATE (April 23rd)Creative Suite 6 is out!]

Wondering what’s coming soon in Adobe’s world-class video suite CS6 Production Premium, before it comes out next month? Read below for the latest details on what’s new and improved in CS6, and what’s different compared to CS5.5…

What's in the New Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium Suite?

This information is being revealed in advance of the 2012 NAB Show in Las Vegas next week, where the company is planning to make a really big splash with these new tools.

Adobe CS6 Production Premium introduces a sleek, fresh editing environment in Premiere Pro – the hub of your post-production workflow. Freely iterate creative ideas with the new Content-Aware family of technologies in Photoshop Extended and with new 3D advancements in After Effects, where the Global Performance Cache lets you work as fast as you can think. New components – Adobe Prelude, a logging and ingest tool, and Adobe SpeedGrade, for color grading and finishing (originally published by Iridas) – offer superior solutions to common production challenges. Adobe Audition adds dozens of enhanced editing features and support for control surfaces so you can produce audio more efficiently. From planning to playback, CS6 Production Premium gives you tools that help your workflow.

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What’s New in CS6: Premiere Pro, After Effects & Audition Features!

April 12th, 2012 3 comments

[UPDATE (May 7th)CS6 is here!]

We’ve got the scoop on the new video features and software coming soon in Creative Suite 6 — and the go-ahead from Adobe to reveal them!

What's the Difference Between Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition CS6 vs. CS5.5?

In particular, we can sneak peek and show you everything that’s going to be in the CS6 Production Premium video suite: Premiere Pro CS6, After Effects CS6, Audition CS6, Story CS6, Adobe Media Encoder CS6, Encore CS6 – plus two new applications, Prelude CS6 and SpeedGrade CS6!

The company is planning to make a really big splash with these new tools at the 2012 NAB Show in Las Vegas next week.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 delivers a sleek, professional user interface; a powerful playback engine; and a host of fantastic creative features. Quickly stabilize shaky shots with Warp Stabilizer. Natively edit anything from low-resolution to RED EPIC 5K and ARRIRAW footage, finesse your work with dynamic timeline trimming, handle more multicam angles, and correct rolling shutter artifacts. Get flexible audio tracks, powerful color workflows, Adobe Prelude software integration, and more.

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What Are the Differences in Photoshop CS6 vs. CS5 — What’s New?

April 5th, 2012 13 comments

[UPDATE (May 7th) – CS6 is now shipping!]

At Photoshop World last week, we had the chance to sit down with Adobe Senior Product Managers Bryan O’Neil Hughes and Zorana Gee for hours of in-depth walkthroughs of the new Photoshop CS6 release. And all we can say is – on top of what we already knew and experienced – this is the Photoshop version you’ve probably dreamed about…

Download the Photoshop CS6 Extended Free Trial!

And with over 1 million downloads in a week, clearly we’re not the only ones thinking that. Gizmodo calls it, “The best update in recent memory” … PC Magazine says, “The future of creative image editing is upon us – this new version will thrill nearly all categories of users, from photo­graphers to designers” … USA Today writes, “Having lots of fun with the new tools – the new inter­face is a huge improvement, and the images really do look sharper and more pronounced.”

For expediency we put together a quick “cheat sheet” below of the top differences and new features in Photoshop CS6 as compared to PS CS5. Naturally if you’re still on CS4, CS3, or earlier, then you’d also need to add in the differences between CS5 vs. those older versions.

But really, it’s also a fit and polish thing – with two years since the last major release (and having no architectural challenges to worry about), the Photoshop team had plenty time to hone this into a smooth and polished product. This is reflected in the 62% more new features added in this cycle contrasted to the previous one, and nearly twice as many JDI requests (user-focused “Just Do It” items) addressed.

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Sneak Peeks of CS6: Dreamweaver, InDesign, Flash, Premiere & More

April 3rd, 2012 2 comments

[UPDATE (April 23rd)Creative Suite 6 is out!]

See the new Adobe Technology Sneaks video page

Adobe Technology Sneaks

Similar to how they did before the launch of CS5.5, Adobe has been quietly slipping out a bevy of “sneaks” (now numbering 16 videos including those for Photoshop CS6) for new features that may be in a forthcoming release of the Creative Suite…

“Check out what new technologies, features and innovations the Adobe product teams are working on behind the scenes.  Stay tuned to get an early glimpse of what could be next from Adobe.”

The latest CS6 products previewed include: Dreamweaver, InDesign (2), Premiere Pro, Audition, Flash Profes­sional, Illustrator (previously), and of course Photoshop.

The drumbeat has been getting louder with plenty of news lately about Creative Suite 6:

So things are starting to get a little exciting.

Here now are some of the significant new preview demos… For the complete set, please see the Adobe Technology Sneaks 2012 page.

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8 Photoshop CS6 Sneak Peeks – New 3D, Video, Depth-of-Field Tools

March 19th, 2012 Leave a comment

It’s no secret that Adobe lately has been slipping out little sneak peeks of “a future version of Photoshop” – presumably Photoshop CS6, when it comes out

Future Innovation: Video & Photoshop...

Full Video Editing in Photoshop CS6?

What’s surprising is that over the past two months we’re now up to 8 (eight!) different videos released in total, to date.

The first 5 previews arrived in January and February, and now we’ve got 3 more so far in March…

This latest set shows off new capabilities for working with 3D and Video, as well as easily creating shallow depth of field in any image (a.k.a. the bokeh effect, the technique of aestheti­cally blurring the background).

The new Iris Blur Filter can quickly add selective blur to any image without masks, layers, or depth maps – making it very easy to “pop out” a photograph’s subject with the appearance of shallow focus:

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What Are the Differences in Adobe Lightroom 4 vs. 3 – What’s New?

March 9th, 2012 4 comments

Following onto a successful public beta period, the long-awaited Adobe Lightroom 4 final release began shipping earlier this week, and has some folks pretty excited about the new features and capabilities. There’s a complete list further below, but some of the biggies include much better video support, soft proofing, integrated maps and photo books, enhanced sharing & exporting, and some amazing improvements to the Develop module.

We’ve got a new video set from the popular Julianne Kost giving a thorough review of what’s new and improved… (2 hours of coverage; see Table of Contents)   If you want to try out the software for yourself, the 30-day free trials are also now available for download.

New Features in Lightroom 4 (Video Collection)

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