Articles about Adobe

Graphic design software company Adobe on Wednesday launched the final release versions of its Lightroom 4.1 photography software and Camera Raw 7.1 Photoshop plug-in.

These updates add some new features, correct some bugs, and broaden device support.

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It's the question I've asked myself since Adobe unveiled the subscription service in late April; it launches May 11. For me, $49.99 a month is steep. But $29.99 strongly tempts. I'm eligible for that lower pricing, and you might be, too. But to get either price, Adobe requires 12-month commitment -- and gets 50 percent still, if you cancel early. Month-to-month option is $79.99 per 30 days, or $959.88 yearly versus $599.88 for standard annual subscription pricing.

You get a lot regardless of pricing plan -- more than 20 products now and others planned (I'm waiting for Photoshop Lightroom 4.x, Adobe), offering huge savings that surely will appeal to someone. For starters: student, sole-proprietorship or small business. Among the included products and list price, if purchased (rather than subscribed): Acrobat Pro ($499), After Effects ($799), Flash Pro ($599), Illustrator ($599), Photoshop Extended ($699) and Premiere Pro ($799).

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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.

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Adobe took the wraps off Creative Suite 6 on Monday, introducing the largest release to date of the content-creation platform. CS6 now includes up to 12 programs and two companion applications, Bridge and Encore, and is available in four editions: Design Standard, Design and Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection.

The CS6 beta is one of the most successful in the company's history, with one million downloads over the past month of availability alone, a record for Adobe. The move was slightly unusual considering the company typically does not offer large-scale betas of its products.

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Adobe Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, major updates to its browser plug-in and runtime environments, are now available. Flash Player, which is built into Chrome and available as a separate download for Internet Explorer, was until the advent of HTML5 the de facto standard for accessing rich, multimedia content on the web.

Both updates are aimed very much at repositioning Flash as a rival gaming platform to consoles, focusing on providing developers with tools to produce immersive, graphically rich games across all supported platforms.

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Adobe has released a free public beta of Adobe Photoshop CS6.

And while these are relatively early days -- we don’t have information on pricing, yet, or a firm date for the final release -- it’s already clear that this is going to be a significant upgrade.

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If you need to investigate the inner workings of an SWF applet then there are plenty of great free tools around that can help (Flashbug being particularly useful). It seems these are now going to have some major and official competition, though, as Adobe Labs have just released a major inspection tool of their own in the new SWF Investigator.

Open the SWF file of your choice -- either locally, or online -- and the program will tell you much more about it. The SWF Info tab displays its tags, exported classes and header information; the Disassembler works with ActionScript 2.0 or 3.0 content to give you an idea of the original code; the Hex Viewer allows you to view and edit the raw SWF bytes, and the Strings pane displays any embedded strings within ActionScript 3.0 content.

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In advance of the SXSW Interactive festival which begins on March 9, Adobe has introduced a new product in its software lab called Adobe Shadow, a Web development tool that is meant to simplify the creation of mobile-customized sites.

Adobe Shadow Labs Release 1 is a wireless client/server tool that lets developers pair multiple smartphones and tablets with their workstation so they can view previews of their content in real-time. As the developer works on sites locally or even browses live sites, the content is simultaneously retrieved and rendered on the paired mobile devices. It also allows for remote inspection and debugging so HTML/CSS/Javascript bugs can be fixed instantly on these paired devices.

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Adobe has released version 4 of its photo cataloguing and editing tool Photoshop Lightroom. This high-end tool, aimed at photography professionals and enthusiasts, debuts with new basic video-editing capabilities and more photo-editing controls, among other improvements.

Photoshop Lightroom 4 also costs 50-percent less for new users: $149 for new users, and $99 for upgraders, compared to $299 and $99, respectively, for version 3. A 30-day trial is available for download for Windows and Mac users.

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It has been some time since Adobe announced plans to release an iPad-specific version of the image editing tool Photoshop, and that day is finally here. Adobe Photoshop Touch arrived today, joining a surprising number of software announcements coming out of Mobile World Congress.

Photoshop Touch is a latecomer to iPad. Adobe released an Android tablet version in November.

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Flash is dead. Well, maybe that wording is a bit strong, but Adobe's roadmap for the platform released on Wednesday officially codifies the company's plans to scale back development efforts as new web standards take Flash's place, like HTML5.

As announced last year, development on mobile is officially over, as is direct development for Linux flavors of the Flash player. Adobe will focus its efforts on two key areas where Flash has a significant presence: video and gaming. The effort is aimed at making the technology viable "for the next decade", the company says.

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Adobe "Muse" is a piece of desktop software from the InDesign team that lets graphic designers create websites in a purely graphical format without the need to manually enter any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. On Wednesday evening, Adobe rolled out the beta 6 build of Muse that includes more than 80 updates and performance enhancements.

This is a mandatory update because Adobe has changed the install and update mechanism of the software. Once this beta is downloaded and installed, future beta builds will be sent automatically. The initial release of Muse is expected to be some time in early 2012, under a different name, as a subscription-only product.

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Say, photo buffs, if all these new, stinking cameras announced at the Consumer Electronics Show excite you, don't cool your jets yet. I just got spam mail from Adobe. Photoshop Lightroom 4.0 Beta 1 is now available. I downloaded the Windows 64-bit version right away and installed it on my Lenovo ThinkPad T420s.

It's a hefty download, more than 410MB. Given this is CES Day 1, I don't have time for any kind of review. But I must say this: Norton Internet Security 2012 auto-protect sent up the red flag during install, regarding two DLLs -- "mc_enc_mpa.dll" and "qtp.parser.dll", which were quarantined. That's gotcha #1. The second surprised even more. LR 4 Beta 1 warned on opening that it couldn't open "Lightroom 3 Catalog" because "the Lighroom 4 Beta release does not support catalog upgrades". I created a new one, and, of course, it's empty. Hey, I'm really loving this software now.

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Adobe is a name associated with design tools, and it has long been associated with desktop software that can be used to create everything from websites and product designs to page layouts and perfect photos. But in recent years there has been a huge interest in mobile devices, and while handheld devices are a little limited when it comes to being used as design tools, the same cannot be said of tablets. The larger screens found on tablets have been put to great use in Adobe’s latest Android apps -- Adobe Photoshop Touch, Adobe Proto and Adobe Debut.

Adobe Photoshop Touch is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a touchscreen compatible version of the company’s flagship image editing tool. The selection tool has been redesigned to make it easier to control with just a fingertip, and the usual raft of filters and effects can be found here to help enhance images on the move. For most people, this app will be the one that appeals most from Adobe’s new range of Touch Apps.

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Adobe Flash, as a mobile browser plug-in, is finished.

Today, Adobe Vice President and General Manager of interactive development Danny Winokur announced that Adobe is ceasing work on Flash Player for mobile devices after the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

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