The long-awaited Adobe Lightroom 6/CC began shipping this week, and has got some folks pretty excited about the new features and capabilities… There’s a long list of them given further below, but some of the highlights include much improved performance, facial recognition, photo merge for both HDR and panorama, advanced video slideshows, improved web galleries, new Pet Eye tool, touch-enabled PC support, plus GPU acceleration and native 64-bit architecture on Windows and Mac.

One big change is the naming difference and what you get with the two options (Lightroom 6 vs. Lightroom CC). You can still buy a standalone perpetual version as before (either full or upgrade from an older release) – the product is then called Lightroom 6 and it will still receive bug fixes and new camera/lens additions, but will not get ongoing new feature updates and does not have access to online LR features and apps such as Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom web.

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It’s been quite some time since the last release of Adobe Acrobat – it’s Acrobat XI, which shipped in October 2012 – so we’ve been eagerly awaiting to see what the next major version of this core product line would bring…

And now, we finally have some answers, announced by Adobe not as “Acrobat XII” or “Acrobat 12” – but as Acrobat DC, where “DC” stands for Document Cloud.

The Adobe “Document Cloud”? What does that mean? Is this the same brand of Acrobat toolset that we know and love, and use daily? Are there still Pro and Standard desktop tools, and perpetual licenses? Or is this a new type of web-based application or service that we can only use online, or via subscription?

Not to worry. Everything is as you want, only better. It looks like this long wait for Acrobat DC was actually worth it… This is Acrobat XII or 12, only raised to the next level.

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Hard to believe, but today Adobe Photoshop officially celebrates its 25th anniversary (or birthday, depending on how you look at it)… The first version of Photoshop shipped on February 19th, 1990, at a price of US$895.00. Adjusted for inflation, in today’s dollars that would cost almost $1,700! Now, of course, there are tens of millions of users of Photoshop who can pay less than $10 a month for the latest-and-greatest release of this iconic, industry-leading tool.

Indeed, the software has traveled a long way. When it first came out, Adobe predicted it would sell just 500 copies per month. Yet today, over 90 percent of creative professionals worldwide have Photoshop on their desktops. The original authors say they knew they had a groundbreaking technology on their hands, but never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us. Adobe Fellow and Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll says, “Not in my wildest dreams did we think creatives would embrace the product in the numbers and ways they have. It’s inspiring to see the beautiful images our customers create, the careers Photoshop has launched and the new uses people all over the world find for Photoshop every day.”

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[UPDATE (April 2015) – The next major release of Adobe Acrobat – the new Acrobat DC – is now shipping… Download a free trial!]

It’s been a while now since Acrobat XI was released, and considering Adobe usually runs on two-year release schedules for this product, give or take, what does this imply for when Acrobat XII (Pro/Standard/Reader version 12) will be coming out?

Ordinarily, our best estimate would be simply to go with the release dates for the past few major revisions of Acrobat and then extrapolate.

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It’s that time of year. Early each fall, Adobe launches a new version of Photoshop Elements, and this year is no exception… Last week the company introduced Photoshop Elements 13 (with brand new free trials to download), and one of the common upgrade questions we see is what’s new, what’s different, and what’s improved in version 13 compared to the previous Elements 12?  Or more essentially, what are the key new features in PSE 13, versus PSE 12 or 11?

The bottom line is you probably want to know what’s changed since the last release (or two) – but how about a version-by-version, feature-by-feature table? You’ll find this down below (or take a shortcut here), but first let’s take a quick look at some of the major additions.

First off, on two things folks often ask about:  Is Photoshop Elements 13 available a native 64-bit application on Windows (as Photoshop CC 2014 is), and does it offer improved 16-bit imaging function­ality compared to earlier versions?  The answers are: PSE 13 is now available for the first time in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows systems (and continues as 64-bit-only for Mac), and 16 bits-per-pixel image support is only slightly better than in PSE 12 – meaning you can open 16-bit files, convert to 16-bit color depth in ACR, do basic edits, but there is still no 16-bit support for layers, many artistic filters, and so on.

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The Creative Cloud has been Adobe’s flagship product line since the launch of the CC release in the spring of last year – but ever since the Cloud was first announced in 2011, there has been persistent confusion over what the name actually means…

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[UPDATE (Nov. 2019) – The all-new Adobe CC 2020 release has launched and is now available! See what’s new in features and all the differences compared to older versions and CS6.]

When readers ask us, “What’s new in the Adobe CC 2014 release?” – they usually mean what’s been added in terms of product features and improvements compared to previous versions such as CC 2013 or CS6.

And for the most part, we’ve answered that question in our prior article here:

 » What Are the Differences Between Adobe CC 2014 vs. CS6, CS5, CS4, CS3?

But there’s a larger picture as well – in terms of what’s going on with pricing and what’s included with the different Creative Cloud plans, and whether/how Adobe is keeping its promise to evolve and bring new innovation to CC subscribers. So we’re going to try to tackle that here.

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Did you miss Adobe’s big 2014 Create Now Tour? Would you like to see it now, online and on-demand?

The Create Now session we attended was packed – a large theater with standing-room only – and got terrific audience reviews and feedback… All together, over 100,000 people went to the tour around the globe.

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[UPDATE (Nov. 2019) – The all-new Adobe CC 2020 release has launched and is now available! See what’s new in features and all the differences compared to older versions and CS6.]

BREAKING NEWS (New York) — Adobe has just announced the immediate availability of the all-new CC 2014 release, with hundreds of new features and enhancements across their creative product line (all tools) focusing on workflow, performance, and connectivity.  In this fast-paced and rapidly evolving world of technology and platforms, CC 2014 succeeds the CC 2013 version which launched last June, which in turn replaced CS6 from 2012. So thinking in the old terms, this would roughly be equivalent to CS8 (and more).

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Last week we covered a wonderful story about a terrific new feature in the latest Photoshop CC release: the Camera Shake Reduction Tool, which was previously known as Photoshop Image Deblurring. This new capability has received a lot of press and attention – and, as shown in our previous article, it can really make a difference.

But accomplishing this feat for still images isn’t the only cool deblurring application Adobe has been working on lately… Adobe researcher Jue Wang has published a paper on an innova­tive new technique to deblur videos as well – which could be huge consid­ering how much handheld video footage is out there now, and growing every day. The devel­opment of this technology could be a big addition to flagship video editing tools like Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

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