[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…

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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[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!

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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[UPDATE (May 7th, 2012) – 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…

And with over one million downloads in record time, clearly we’re not the only ones thinking that. The reviews are in: Gizmodo calls it, “The best update in recent memory, I’m in love” … 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 beautiful and streamlined 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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[UPDATE (April 23rd) – Creative Suite 6 is out!]

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:

• We now know when Creative Suite 6 is likely to ship,
• …as well Adobe’s official grace period for free CS6 upgrades.
• The free Photoshop CS6 beta release is out with its lengthy list of what’s new.
• Not to mention, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition CS6 being revealed early!
• And we’ve even got chances for you to win Photoshop CS6 for free.

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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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…

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).

Photoshop’s new “Blur Gallery” including the 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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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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[UPDATE (June 2013) – Lightroom 5 is now out! Check out over 3 hours of free LR5 training that takes you in-depth with the new features, workflows, and improvements.]

Adobe Lightroom 4 is only days old, yet it’s quickly getting rave reviews across the net…

PC Magazine gives it 4½ stars and their Editors’ Choice Award for photo workflow software, writing: “For anyone who’s serious about digital photography, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is now a more essential tool than ever – this is the app you need.”

Digital Photography Review also has great things to say: “Lightroom 4 is a substantial upgrade … offers an impressive list of features … on image quality, the Lightroom team has kept its eye on the prize … consistently getting pleasing results in fewer steps … works impres­sively well on a range of images … you can get superior results compared to previous versions … video users will also be pleased … welcome surprise price drop … compel­ling reasons to upgrade.”

And there is already a wealth of free learning resources available… Here are some good ones:

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We’ve seen a few sneak peeks already of what Adobe’s working on now in Photoshop – but this new one is the best to date, it’s pretty incredible… They don’t say which release these capabilities could make it in (or when), but presumably it’s Photoshop CS6.

This new demonstration takes the much-praised concept of Content-Aware Fill that was introduced in Creative Suite 5 and carries it much further with new Content-Aware Move, Extend, and Patch tool features. It’s hard to explain but you can see how it works with the 2½ minute video below.

Last month we actually put together a guide to getting the best results with Photoshop CS5’s Content-Aware Fill, but these new tools clearly make the work much faster, simpler, and more flexible… and dare we say magical (see the “before and after” screengrabs below the video).

See more advanced features of Photoshop Content-Aware technology. Straight from Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes, this video shares how to seamlessly move, extend, remove, or patch an object from an image.

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Last month Adobe quietly revealed a first look at Photoshop CS6, which was received with hundreds of thousands of views…  And now we have second and third looks, new sneak peeks which focus on performance gains and vector improvements (with dashed and dotted lines).

As images grow larger and larger in resolution and file size, even simple actions such as saving your files can slow down productivity – which has been a point of interest in Photoshop CS5. In this preview, a smooth and oft-requested Background Save capability is introduced allowing you to fully continue working while all file saving takes place in the background, regardless of size or compression.

Large images also slow down functions like Liquify… In the video, a 100MB photograph lags when loading and editing in Photoshop CS5. Now this new Photoshop (CS6 we presume) uses the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to greater effect to bring real-time loading and editing responsiveness. See how much faster and crisper the Liquify filter works, enabling effectively unlimited brush sizes:

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Content Aware Fill is one of the major features added since Adobe Photoshop CS5, and is said to be one of its greatest new timesavers. CAF allows you to move or delete parts of your image and Photoshop will automatically and intelligently fill in the space left behind. We’ve written about it before with the quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguish­able from magic.” [Arthur C. Clarke]

And in our shop here we save hours every month from using Content Aware Fill as well as other CS5 advancements like Puppet Warp and the improved edge/masking tools.

Yet we still see some people claiming that Content Aware Fill “doesn’t work,” “doesn’t give results like in the demo video,” “doesn’t use the right back­ground,” or is just hype, smoke-and-mirrors, or a “gimmick.”

It’s true that it doesn’t always work and of course has its limitations. You can’t synthesize brand new material or hidden content that doesn’t exist in some related form elsewhere in the image. And often it will require some retouching afterwards to get the final result you want.

But usually it will get you most of the way there very quickly – if you know the most effective ways to use the feature. The best is when it “just works” without doing anything special, and this happens often enough too…

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