Addressing every last shred of your right brain, the new Adobe Creative Suite 6 is the definitive collection of creative apps applications. Whether you design, code for the Web, cut video, sketch, or crop-stitch-and-sharpen photos for your blog, the 14 applications that make up CS6 leave nary a creative stone unturned.
The flagship, of course, is Photoshop CS6, with its “content-aware” (Skynet style) enabled patching tools that make the clone-stamp of yore look positively pre-school. It also touts several new components including a Camera RAW module, drawing, text and perspective tools, and the ability to directly edit video. The entire application is also zippier thanks to an all-new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, which relies on your graphics card instead of the CPU. And for those of you that care, Photoshop CS6 als boasts a snazzy new “dark” user-interface theme — a first.
If you’re ready to shell out more cash than you did for your laptop, the Adobe Master Collection, which weighs in at $2,599 ($549 upgrade), includes CS6 versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Professional, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Prelude and SpeedGrade along with the Bridge and Encore companion apps.
But the news here isn’t just the astonishing software — it’s the announcement of Adobe Creative Cloud. For an attainable sum of $50 per month (or $30 if you’re upgrading) Creative Cloud gives you access to all of CS6 Master Collection, plus the yet-to-be-released Adobe Lightroom 4 and 20GB of Dropbox-like online file storage. Also included are the Muse and Edge apps for making snazzy HTML5 web pages and apps, website hosting, and publishing services for tablets. The only thing not included is gobs more hard drive space, but at prices like these we can’t imagine your left brain minding much.
