[UPDATE (November 2018) – These links still work to download the old Acrobat DC 2016/2015 trials. We also now have the all-new Acrobat DC 2019 Direct Download Links!]

Adobe Acrobat DC 2016 is now shipping!  “DC” stands for Document Cloud, which is Adobe’s new set of integrated online services that helps people and businesses better manage critical documents. At the heart of Document Cloud is Acrobat DC – the industry standard for creating, sharing and editing PDFs – which was completely reengineered last year for the initial DC 2015 milestone release.

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After decades of 30-day free trials for its flagship creative applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and all the others, today Adobe announced that going forward, the length of the trial period for Creative Cloud (i.e., the CC 2015 desktop apps) will be standardized worldwide at 7 days.

The company has been running some tests over the past couple months, and says the changes better align with how individuals are actually using the trial software – meaning the degree and duration of time they use them the most after initial installation. By moving to seven days, Adobe feels they can follow up better with the customer when the experience is freshest than if it happened a month later. It also gives users greater incentive to bump up the priority of the new software evaluations. Given the accelerating pace of change in technology (and pretty much everything else moving faster these days), these findings aren’t entirely surprising.

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One of the most frequent upgrade questions we get is what’s new, what’s different, or what’s changed between the new release of Acrobat and previous versions? Adobe Acrobat DC 2016 just launched today, and if you’re counting numerically (… 9, X, XI, DC 2015, DC 2016), then this is the 13th major release of one of Adobe’s biggest products with over 30 million customers. So put simply, what are the major new features and advance­ments in the 2016 Release of Acrobat DC (Pro or Standard), versus DC 2015, or 2012’s Acrobat XI or even 2010’s Acrobat X?

When the Document Cloud first arrived a year ago – and Acrobat DC 2015 along with it – there were some significant changes to how the software was purchased… While the desktop Acrobat Pro/Standard tool is still sold standalone with a perpetual (or “Classic”) license, many of the newer capabilities and services are only available via the Acrobat DC subscription (or “Continuous”) bundle. It’s called “Continuous” because subscribers receive all ongoing product upgrades as soon as they are available, ensuring you are always running the latest-and-greatest software with the complete featureset.

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[UPDATE (December 2018) – A year ago, analysts pegged the number of Creative Cloud customers at 12 million: “We expect Adobe to end 2017 with 12 million subscribers for its CC services.” Most recently, Adobe stated in their Dec. 2018 conference call, “Within Digital Media, we achieved another strong quarter with our Creative business. Creative revenue grew 26% year-over-year in Q4.” Thus we estimate the current total to be approx. 15 million subscribers.]

Adobe’s Creative Cloud has been available for several years now and continues to gain strong adoption in the marketplace, the latest published figures show.

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The Creative Cloud is cool because it offers access all major tools that Adobe makes at an affordable price… But here are four recurring challenges we still see out there since Adobe discontinued boxes and switched over to Cloud-only application downloads:

1. Folks with slow or limited Internet connections who need to complete large (multi-gigabyte) downloads to get started with their Creative Cloud memberships.
2. Customers who’d like to download the CC software using one computer with a high speed network, but install it on another, different machine (or more) without redownloading.
3. Users who just want to maintain secure backup copies of the offline CC 2019 installers should they ever be without connectivity and need to quickly reinstall their products.
4. People who have difficulties with the new Creative Cloud Desktop application manager (maybe not showing apps or updates) and want to download their tools without using it.

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Here’s an incredible new resource that you should not miss – and even bookmark/share… It’s a compre­hensive professional training course on how to best use Adobe Photoshop from O’Reilly’s InfiniteSkills – normally costing US$130, but now completely FREE with no catch. It includes 13 hours of high-quality instruction broken out into 23 chapters with 166 video tutorials (in HD or SD), covering all major aspects of Photoshop – the world’s most popular graphics and photo editing software – at no cost!

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[UPDATE (May 2016) – Adobe just reduced the length of all CC free trials from 30 to 7 days… So the approach below will still work, but would triple the period from 7 to 21 days.]

How long are the free trials for Adobe software? Most people would say 30 days – but practically speak­ing, it’s actually almost 50% longer, at 44 days.  Here’s why, and how you can do it…

After downloading and installing Adobe’s free trial software – whether it’s the latest major release CC 2015 (have you tried it yet?), CS6, Acrobat, Captivate, or Lightroom – your official free trial will begin for 30 calendar days from the date you first run the application (like Photoshop) on your computer.

Once you reach the end of that month – if you haven’t already purchased the product – then that free trial period will end and all the files you created will still be yours, but the software itself will no longer start on your system. And redownloading or reinstalling it won’t give you a new free trial.

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[UPDATE (Oct. 2018) – Watch 132 hours of new training & tutorials from MAX 2018!]

Did you make it to MAX this year? Adobe’s Creativity Conference broke all records with 7,000 attendees coming together in Los Angeles earlier this month, up from 5,000 just a couple years ago… And that was despite an increase in the cost of a full conference pass to US$1,595.

For the price of that ticket, participants enjoyed major new product launches, inspirational key­notes from creative luminaries, hundreds of enriching training sessions, plentiful opportunities for networking with colleagues, access to the latest cool technology on the pavilion floor, meeting the Adobe product teams in person, the highly-anticipated “Sneak Peek” demos of jaw-dropping new features under development, and of course the famous MAX Bash party. And this year, all attendees also received a free year of Adobe Stock as well as a new FUJIFILM X-T10 camera.

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SAN JOSE, Calif.—October 13, 2015—At the record-breaking MAX conference last week, Adobe revealed 11 sneak peeks of technol­ogies they are working on but haven’t released yet. Some of these new features are absolutely mind-blowing and defy belief, yet the company did not web­cast the sneak peeks. But good news, you will find complete videos of each of them captured below!

Naturally, the Adobe says there aren’t any guarantees for what will appear in a production release, or when: “See the coolest demos of what we’re cooking up in the Adobe development labs, and be the first to get a peek at technologies that may (or may not) make it into future products and services.” But never­the­less, major new product features very often appear in these previews before they make it into the real tools (cases in point: Content-Aware Fill, Perspective Warp, Image Deblurring, and Defog/Dehaze).

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With the continuing popularity of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan where anybody can get both Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC for just 10 bucks a month, we’ve had some readers asking us the best ways to learn these two top imaging tools…

We always mention about the free video tutorials on Adobe TV, as well as the super­lative, compre­hensive courses offered on Lynda.com – but we can also recom­mend two new terrifi­cally helpful ebooks that you can work through step-by-step at your own pace. And fortu­nately, both books are completely free.

The first is the Adobe CC/CS6 Design Basics book that we’ve featured before on this site, which is 200+ pages taking you through the core essentials of Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, and InDesign CC.

The second book is Victoria Bampton’s excellent Lightroom Quick Start Guide, just out in a new 79-page edition which tells you every­thing you need to know to get going with Lightroom from the ground up.

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