December 14th, 2006

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta To Be Released Tomorrow

Most creative pros using Macs have begrudgingly resigned themselves to waiting until Spring 2007 for an Intel-native Adobe Creative Suite - which includes Photoshop, the dominant image editor since… well, since I was in school using version 2 (= forever!). Apple released Intel hardware waaay back in January 2006, and apparently Adobe has had a lot of trouble porting their (now huge and bloated but still useful) apps to Intel Universal Binary nirvana.

Dave Nagel over at Creative Mac says:

Adobe tomorrow will do something unique in the history of Photoshop: release a public beta of a full-version upgrade months before the final product hits the shelves… This is not a “final gold” beta. It’s a real beta. Not everything will work correctly, and not all of the new features will be complete. But its availability will give you a chance to play around with the new version to get a feel or the workflow and interface tweaks and get a little experience using some of the new features.

Why the hubbub? Those of us running on Intel Macs (like my MacBook Pro 17") will finally get some decent speed; the new live Adjustment Layers and streamlined, After Effects 7-like interface are welcome changes. That, and I love playing with beta software! “Warning: This software should not be used in a production environment.” Like I can resist that.

Read more at Creative Mac (with screenshots); more good stuff at Ars Technica.

Posted in Photography, Work

Responses

More really juicy stuff here.

Allan On December 14th, 2006 at 06:39 pm, Allan said:

And more juicyness with videos at the Russell Brown Show. The video about the Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers is amazing. I’ve relied on PanoTools for years, which produces phenomenal panoramas - but at the cost of a lot of time, very challenging user interface and process. If CS3 could replace that, I’d be stoked. I would doubt if this approach would have as much power as PanoTools though (you can make grid image panos; select points to mesh individually; and have it auto-color correct for you). The new CS3 looks like it does a good job, though.

Allan On December 15th, 2006 at 11:20 am, Allan said:

Got it, playing with it, looks great so far. I’m fortunate enough to have a CS2 serial for my work computer.

On the Core Duo 17” laptop the launch time is about 4 seconds now. Teh Snappy!

Allan On December 15th, 2006 at 05:02 pm, Allan said:

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