Adobe began the week early with official launch details of Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud. The collection of professional tools are available for pre-order as of Monday and should ship within 30 days.
As in the past, each creative app will be available individually, with the core Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CS6 Extended costing $699 and $999 respectively, with upgrades starting from $299. Suites start at $1,299 for CS6 Design Standard, with regular Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat X Pro, Bridge, and Media Encoder. CS6 Design & Web Premium at $1,899 adds Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, and Fireworks. CS Production Premium at the same $1,899 price drops the web-specific apps in favor of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, and Encore to generate both the video and post-production effects. Culminating the line, CS6 Master Collection includes every app for $2,599.
Creative Cloud, which provides access both to the cloud sync, every CS6 app, and the cloud-specific Edge and Muse, is available for $50 per month on a one-year subscription and $75 month-to-month. For those who already have earlier versions of Creative Suite from CS3 onwards, Adobe is running a promotion that lets them subscribe for $30 per month.
The software collection focuses on a new interface and, in each case, has its own specialty. As mentioned during the beta, Photoshop CS6 includes content-aware patching, a new hardware-accelerated Mercury rendering engine, and more tools for photographers. Premiere Pro CS6 has a new workspace, new tools for multichannel audio and multicam recording, and support for 5K video.
Creative Cloud provides the previously mentioned syncing, letting mobile apps like Photoshop Touch automatically stay in line with the desktop. It goes beyond this to more easily publish Android and iOS apps as well as publish websites. Edge and Muse help design and develop HTML5 web apps.
