Yesterday, Adobe announced the much anticipated release of the new Creative Suite CS6 suite of products as well as the introduction to their new online subscription service the Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe has made significant performance enhancements, greater product integration and an increased emphasis on ePublishing as well as new features in each of the products. Many of these new features make significant inroads to speeding up your workflow and a faster workflow should mean increased profitability. I had an opportunity to try out the new version of Photoshop CS6 thanks to Adobe’s public beta of that product over the last few months. I was impressed with the changes I saw and the performance improvements. About 30 days to the actual release of the real thing.
As with past releases of the Creative Suite, customers can choose between different groups of product suites depending on their market focus (design & print, web, or video production) or just buy individual products. New licenses are available or upgrades for past registered owners. A few months ago Adobe narrowly averted customer ire when this past fall they had announced that CS6 upgrades would only be available to registered owners of CS5 or 5.5. There are many owners who are still using CS 4 (myself included) that calculated that the double hit to upgrade to CS6 via CS5 would be just short of buying a new full license to CS6. Needless to say Adobe received a lot of feedback on that one.
Scott Kelby of the Kelby Media Group, Kelby Training and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals wrote an open letter to Adobe on his blog last November clearly stating the issue from the clients perspective. Adobe reconsidered their new upgrade policy and announced a change to that in mid-January. The follow-up announcement on Kelby’s blog is here. Pricing announcements for suite upgrades and a special introductory Adobe Creative Cloud membership for registered users of CS3-CS5.5 were part of yesterday’s announcements so the huge CS client base should be happy with this.
Terry White in his blog has posted 3 videos each listing his top 6 new features for Illustrator CS6, InDesign CS6 and Photoshop CS6. Click this link to see that post and view the videos.