“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” [Arthur C. Clarke] — that’s what comes to mind when watching this latest preview demo from the Adobe Photoshop team… There have been several videos out on this amazing new Photoshop CS5* Content-Aware Fill (aka PatchMatch) technology, but this new one is the best. Move/remove/repair entire objects with the back­ground automatically filling like the object was never there – jaw-dropping, really. Incredible how easy this makes it and what the possibilities could be – and thinking already of the hours it’s going to save.

The best part is about halfway the video when he makes trees and roads disappear and then creates desert and mountains and clouds and sky from seemingly out of nowhere, all with single clicks of the mouse. And just like when watching magic on TV, we found ourselves wondering if there was something going on “behind the scenes” to make it work… But let’s hope not – what do you think?

By the way, the breakthrough new technology shown here is a joint development effort between the Adobe Photoshop team and the Graphics Group at Princeton University.

* Creative Suite 5 inclusion is subject to the same disclaimers confirmed! as for our earlier previews on Photoshop CS5 and Dreamweaver CS5.

The wait is over, the date is set! Moments ago, Adobe confirmed they will be officially launching Creative Suite 5 on Monday, April 12, 2010… This lines up well with our earlier forecasts of a CS5 release date in “mid-April” and “just around the corner.” The event will be webcast worldwide at 11am ET / 8am PT and 3pm GMT on the thriving Adobe TV, and is open to all who sign up here.

Naturally there are a lot of details left to unfold but here are some of the earliest:

And the pithy invitation:

Read more…

Yesterday in a remote corner of Adobe’s website emerged a surprise article written by the lead designer for their Desktop Brand team, which confirms our earlier story that Adobe CS5 is coming soon (shipping estimates) and even revealed some of its visual design and icons:

Reinventing the System: The New Adobe Desktop Brand

A New Season

Winter is fading, Spring is just around the corner, and we are rapidly approaching that magical time that comes but once every eighteen months: Adobe is releasing a new suite of products, which means Adobe’s Desktop Brand team has been hard at work for the last year creating a new branding system.

The author, Shawn Cheris, then goes into more of what his team does and its long branding history with products like Illustrator, with the style eventually culminating in the two-letter mnemonic system that came with the merger of Adobe and Macromedia… Then, a closer look at what’s coming next:

When we began thinking about what we wanted to do for CS5, the one thing we all agreed on was that we wanted to bring back a sense of joy to the brand work. Our goal was to move beyond the monolithic expression of of the CS3 and CS4 systems and create a more dynamic language. We wanted to bring back inspirational and aspirational artistic qualities to the identity system while leveraging the successful patterns we’ve established with CS3 and CS4. Everyone missed the more whimsical imagery that was such a big part of Adobe’s heritage and wanted to surprise and inspire our users and give them something new.

Read more…

[UPDATE (May 21st) – More details on the new support in Dreamweaver CS5 for HTML5 here.]

Over the past three days Adobe has quietly released several “preview” videos of future technology in Dreamweaver… Now just as with the sneak-peek Photoshop videos posted last week, there are no assurances on exactly which version of Dreamweaver or when – but considering that CS5 could be coming out fairly soon, we could be seeing some of these new technologies in CS5. But even if not, they are rather impressive…

The first video below covers a very cool new “Smart Paste” command that makes it a snap to bring vector designs (such as artwork from Illustrator) directly into HTML – as simple as copy and paste.

The second one delves into support for multiscreen authoring with HTML5 and CSS3, and so might be considered more in the “emerging” department… This one is a big challenge for designers especially as varied mobile devices become increasingly more prevalent on the web.

The last video comes from the new “CSbuzz” hub site that launched last week, and is a little tease on significant improvements when working in Dreamweaver with dynamic material such as PHP, which historically hasn’t been as handy.

For best viewing, click the expand icon after pressing play on each thumbnail for full-screen HD:

In recent days and weeks Adobe has been slipping out little preview videos of some of the features that could be coming in Photoshop CS5 (well OK not necessarily “CS5” but rather “a future version of Photoshop,” is the official word… ;)

They cover new technologies for painting, coloring, selection, alignment, edge detection and masking, among others, to help save time and effort.

Here we’ve put together the entire collection thus far, in case you’ve missed any or haven’t seen them yet… Each one is bite-sized at about two minutes apiece, and for best viewing, click the expand icon after pressing play on each thumbnail for full-screen HD:

[UPDATE – Adobe has stepped up their hiring lately, with hundreds of openings in the USA and internationally – see their current job listings…]

It looks like Adobe is hiring:

Work for Adobe building Great Experiences out of California!

MARCH 5, 2010

As we build out our capability to deliver innovative, customer-centric experiences with our platform technologies upon our enterprise technologies, we’re creating a Solution Center in our San Jose office. The solution center is a fantastic innovation-space, where a team of designers, developers and quality engineers will work together to create incredible experiences alongside Adobe partners, on behalf of some of our most strategic customers.

If you’re a developer, designer or quality engineer who thinks you could be a pivotal part of this initiative, then please check out Peter Martin’s blog post and drop him a note.

Have you heard of other tech companies hiring right now? Feel free to let other readers know with a comment below.

Or search 50,000 current job openings requiring Adobe skills.

[UPDATE – See all of Adobe’s current deals & discounts!]

Adobe has a new voucher code: Use adobe10 to save 10% on all products in the Commercial Store in Europe, from now until March 17th 10th… (Update – Adobe has just notified us this offer was so overly successful that they had to expire it early – our apologies!) The code should be entered at time of checkout to receive the discount in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere in the EU.

Another new offer, valid worldwide, is save $20 (£13/€17) instantly when you purchase Photoshop Elements with Acrobat. This discount is in addition to the existing $20 Mail-in Rebate for Photoshop Elements products. See our quick take on Elements 8 here.

Lastly, Adobe has extended the deal for purchasing multiple copies of Adobe Acrobat – buy four, get one free – until April 23, 2010. So that translates into savings of up to US$449 when you sign up for the easy new online Volume Licensing Program with Adobe Acrobat software. Note that Adobe has just rechristened their volume licensing store to be called the Adobe Business Store, and this offer also works in both North America and Europe.

Following up to our popular post Tuesday on CS5 release timing, an alert reader discovered a new site launched yesterday morning called the Adobe Creative Suite Buzz Hub… It’s a ‘Twitteresque’ destination where you can follow and see official tweets for the products or evangelists you’re interested in. Facebook connections are there too, as well as an initial set of videos.

Thus far there are presentations on getting started with the design tool Flash Catalyst, which is new for CS5, plus Introducing BrowserLab, which allows you to easily preview and test your web pages on multiple browsers and operating systems on demand, and new script development app Adobe Story, both of which are in limited free preview. There’s also a humorous performance from Photoshop guru Russell Brown.

Adobe expects the buzz site will be a focal point for Creative Suite updates and videos going forward…

[UPDATE (April 29th) – Creative Suite 5 is now shipping!]

[UPDATE (April 16th) – We’ve put together new estimates on likely CS5 shipping timeframes, plus information on Adobe’s “free upgrade” grace period for CS4.]

When will Adobe Creative Suite 5 be released? That seems to be a big question of the season… Now that it’s March, let’s take another look. If you search the Adobe site for CS5, you’ll find some good tidbits, particularly about Flash Pro CS5 and Photoshop CS5, but little that’s concrete on timing.

But if you look to coverage of a financial conference the CEO spoke at last week, the Wall Street Journal writes: “CS5 is slated for release in April, though Narayen wouldn’t comment on a release time frame at the conference. Narayen said Adobe will ship its new version of Flash around the same time as CS5, in the first half of this year. ‘Data points and reviews point to a really solid release’ of CS5, he said.”

So it sounds like at this point there is still no official date from the company, but the financial community (whose jobs depend on researching this type of info) is expecting it to be available in the mid-spring. And if it were to come three years after the CS3 release, and eighteen months after CS4, then it would be in the second half of April – so with any luck, not too much longer to wait…

Read more…

Hard to believe, but on Friday Adobe Photoshop officially celebrated its 20th anniversary (or birthday, depending on how you look at it)… The New York Times writes:

“It’s remarkable when a product stays on top of its game for 20 years, and Adobe Photoshop had done just that. The first version of Photoshop shipped on Feb. 19, 1990, at a price of $895. Today it’s the go-to tool for professional photographers and graphic designers, and it is used by 10 million people around the world, according to Adobe.”

Indeed, the software has traveled a long way. When it first came out, Adobe predicted it would sell just 500 copies per month. Yet now, 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.

The current CS4 version of Photoshop is actually release 11.0 – so there have been ten major versions of the tool over the past two decades. And the flagship product is less expensive now than when it originally came out, even more so (less than half the price) when adjusting to 1990 dollars. Photoshop together with Acrobat and Dreamweaver remain Adobe’s top three selling individual desktop products.

In honor of the celebration, Adobe is offering a couple new specials for the week… The first is free shipping on all Photoshop-family products in the North American commercial store. The second is free shipping on all Adobe products for the Europe and Australia commercial stores, with the promotion code adobeeu. All shipping offers are valid through Sunday, February 28th, and might be stackable with the 10%-off coupon code posted last week.