Adobe releases Creative Suite 6
Adobe today released Creative Suite 6, a powerful and professional bundle of some of the best creative applications around: Photoshop,Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and more. While some of the new features lists are a little on the short side (step forward, Fireworks), there are still plenty of interesting additions and enhancements in the new package.
It’s now considerably easier to create designs that will display properly across many different devices, for instance: Dreamweaver’s “Fluid Grid Layouts” and InDesign’s “liquid page rules” can both automatically reorganise your content to suit a new layout size or orientation.
Photoshop CS6 is a useful upgrade, with a new Content Aware Move feature helping you move an object from one part of an image to the other, powerful new blur tools, smarter image autocorrections, and a far more powerful video engine.
Although of course if you need to carry out serious editing then you’ll turn to Premiere Pro CS6. Which in this version includes more powerful multicam editing (there’s no longer any 4-camera limit), better video stabilisation, three-way colour correction, even adjustment layers to help you apply effects to multiple clips.
More generally, most of the applications have seen their interface optimised to improve usability (Illustrator CS6 has had more than 40 tweaks all on its own). And just about every application here sees a significant performance boost through the Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine and Performance Systems, native 64-bit support and a host of code optimisations.
As usual, each application can be purchased individually. You can save up to 60% on the list price by buying one of the suites, though, which range from Design Standard (Photoshop/ Illustrator/ InDesign/ Acrobat X Pro/ Bridge/ Media Encoder, $1,299) through Design & Web Premium and Production Premium to CS6 Master Collection ($2,599 for everything).
And Adobe has also introduced Creative Cloud, which essentially gives you CS6 Master Collection plus a little more (such as Adobe Muse) for a monthly subscription of $49.99 (assuming you make an annual commitment). Creative Cloud is live from May 11.
But if you’re not quite ready for that level of commitment, no problem: there are 30-day trial versions of all the major CS6 available now, so you can try before you buy.