adobe

Last Wednesday Adobe announced the availability of the public beta for the Photoshop component of its upcoming Creative Suite 6 image manipulation and design software, which users can try before the suite is officially released later this year.

While past versions of Adobe's products have offered a decent spectrum of support for existing operating system and computing environments, new features and development directions in the program suite have had Adobe making some adjustments to the platforms that will support the new software.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 puts a major effort toward performance enhancements, primarily with the implementation of the new … Read more

There's so much big news surrounding Photoshop CS6 that I'm not sure where to start. This is Adobe's first-ever public beta of its most important product (expected to ship sometime in the first half of this year). It's the first Adobe product to incorporate the company's new DRM architecture. It's the first version of Photoshop to take video seriously and to make it into the Standard Edition of the product rather than the extra-pricey Extended version. It's the first version to integrate the company's GPU-accelerating Mercury Graphics Engine (MGE). And for the first time in more than 20 years, Photoshop goes dark.

The beta, which is actually the Extended version of the product, is downloadable from Adobe Labs or Download.com, though at a hefty 1.8GB, it's not for the bandwith-constrained. While you can't run it simultaneously with previous versions, like every Adobe update it installs completely separately so that you can keep predecessors.

Dear Adobe: while that's very convenient, I still want the option to actually update from the previous version. I am tired of the cruft Creative Suite leaves behind every time a new version comes out; on my previous system, I had random directories left over from at least three generations of CS. Given that your new subscription model is designed to drive users to more-frequent updates, you'd better deal with better ways to clean up behind yourself.… Read more

As Adobe Systems prepares to release Creative Suite 6, it's in the midst of two major shifts: the addition of its Creative Cloud subscription and the addition of design tools using Web standards.

And we want to know what you think of the change.

In conjunction with Jefferies, a financial research and investment banking firm, CNET is conducting a quick survey about Adobe's Creative Cloud and embrace of Web standards. It's only nine multiple-choice questions long, so it's very fast and easy to fill out.

We'll be publishing results of the survey later so you can see if other people see things your way. If you are open to us asking you follow-up questions, you can leave your e-mail address at the end of the survey, but it's completely optional. Of course, you also can leave comments on this post. … Read more

Adobe released the fourth version of its Lightroom software today, adding video abilities and editing finesse while cutting its price in half.

Lightroom 4 costs $149 new and $79 as an upgrade, a big step down from the earlier prices of $299 new and $99 upgrade. That's going the same direction Apple has with its competing Aperture, though not as dramatically: an introductory $499 price, then a drop to $199, and in the App Store version now, $80. You can download Lightroom 4 for Windows and Mac.

Lightroom is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, especially those who want … Read more

Just a few months after its first suite of Creative apps debuted on Android, Adobe makes good on shipping its flagship Photoshop Touch for iPad. The app, which is as close to identical to the Android version as is possible given the platform differences, is available on iTunes for the same $9.99; it requires an iPad 2 running iOS 5. Adobe says the iPadification of the rest of the Touch apps is under way.… Read more

Last year, Adobe Systems narrowed Flash Player's scope. It canceled the browser plug-in for mobile devices. It shifted development resources toward competing Web standards.

But it's not giving up on Flash.

In an attempt to patch up communications with Flash programmers, Adobe yesterday published a Flash Player road map that promises many improvements this year, with versions code-named Cyril and Dolores. Then the document adds, "We are also modernizing the Flash Player code base in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes meet the needs of developers over the next 5 to 10 years."

"Runtime&… Read more

Adobe tosses a bone to Android users who subscribe to Revel (nee Carousel), its Apple-only photo-collaboration service. Its new Revel importer Android app does exactly what it says and no more: allows you to upload images from your Android device into your Carousels. You can set it to autoupload, as well as upload straight from the camera. When you select photos to upload, the app will indicate whether or not you've already transferred them.

That's pretty much it.

If you use Revel on multiple platforms, this is disappointing. Forget the editing capabilities: you still can't sync Carousels … Read more

Photography enthusiasts have seen the light when it comes to shooting raw images, but plenty of them have yet to convert to Adobe Systems' DNG format for storing those images.

But Adobe could bring some new sheep into the Digital Negative fold with abilities arriving in Adobe's Lightroom 4 software and its Photoshop CS6 cousin. Adobe isn't evangelizing heavily, but it is offering new features that could convince people that DNG is a better alternative to the profusion of proprietary raw formats that higher-end cameras produce.

Three significant improvements are coming to DNG, two for speed and one … Read more

Adobe Systems has released a second advance look at Photoshop CS6 that shows new work to give a hardware boost to the image-editing software.

The graphics processing unit (GPU) speeds the Liquify tool, which lets people smear images in a finger-painting way, according to a Zorana Gee, a Photoshop product manager. She demonstrated the change in a YouTube video, the second in what looks to be a series of previews of the software. An earlier Photoshop CS6 preview showed new raw image editing tools adopted from the Lightroom 4 beta, a darker user interface, and improvements to brush size selection. … Read more