Adobe Systems Incorporated announce Adobe® Creative Suite® 5

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Creative Suite® 5, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Focusing on interactivity, performance and maximising the impact of digital content and marketing campaigns across media and devices, the Creative Suite 5 product line brings exciting full-version upgrades of flagship creative tools while delivering significant workflow enhancements to designers and developers. Featuring integration with online content and digital marketing measurement and optimisation capabilities for the first time, Creative Suite 5 products include access to signature Omniture technologies, to capture, store and analyse information generated by Web sites and other sources. Additionally, a brand new component, Adobe Flash® Catalyst™, joins the Creative Suite, ushering in the ability to design interactive content without writing code and improve the collaborative process between designer and developer.


The Adobe CS5 product family also enables the creation of content and applications for the much anticipated releases of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR® 2, which are optimised for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer, more immersive user experience.
The new lineup is headlined by Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection, which includes, in a single package, all of Adobe’s renowned Creative Suite tools, such as Photoshop® CS5 (see separate release), Illustrator® CS5, InDesign® CS5 (see separate release), Flash Catalyst CS5 (see separate release), Flash Professional CS5, Dreamweaver® CS5, Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5 (see separate release) and After Effects® CS5. These tools are also available separately or in one of the five Creative Suite editions. The complete Creative Suite 5 lineup includes Creative Suite 5 Master Collection, Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Creative Suite 5 Web Premium, Creative Suite 5 Production Premium and Creative Suite 5 Design Standard, as well as 15 point products, associated technologies and integration with new Adobe CS Live Services (CS Live Services are complimentary for a limited time).*
“While Creative Suite 5 continues Adobe’s storied history of delivering astonishing new creative features, this release first and foremost addresses the challenges facing publishers and creatives worldwide—how to build profitable businesses around digital content,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “By coupling sophisticated online business analytics with dazzling creative tools, we’re ensuring that publishers, designers and marketers can create, deliver and optimize beautiful, high-impact digital experiences across media and devices.”

Design Without Boundaries
More than 250 new features have been integrated into the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection. InDesign CS5 is powering the transition to digital publishing with new interactive documents and enhanced electronic reader device support. Image creation and editing get a boost in Photoshop CS5 with Refine Edge, which offers better edge detecting technology and masking results in less time. Photoshop CS5 also includes the ability to remove an image element and immediately replace the missing pixels with Content-Aware Fill. New stroke options allow Adobe Illustrator CS5 users to create strokes of variable widths and precisely adjust the width at any point along the stroke.

Work Faster with Greater Precision
Engineering breakthroughs throughout Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection work together to dramatically improve performance. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are now native 64-bit applications on both Mac and Windows®, allowing users to work more fluidly when working on high-resolution projects. The highly anticipated NVIDIA® GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine allows Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 users to open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD sequences in real time and play back complex projects without rendering. The revolutionary time-saving Roto Brush tool in After Effects helps users isolate moving foreground elements in a fraction of the normal time. In addition, Dreamweaver CS5 now supports popular content management systems Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress, allowing designers to get accurate views of dynamic Web content from within the product.

Accelerate and Optimise Creative Workflows
Adobe Creative Suite 5 products integrate with new Adobe CS Live*, a set of five online services that accelerate key aspects of the creative workflow and enable designers to focus on creating their best work. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time and currently include Adobe BrowserLab, Adobe CS Review, Acrobat.com, Adobe Story and SiteCatalyst® NetAverages™ from Omniture. Adobe CS Review enables online design reviews directly from Creative Suite 5 applications, while Adobe BrowserLab is an indispensable tool for testing Web site content across different browsers and operating systems. NetAverages provides Web usage data that helps reduce the guesswork early in the creative process when designing for Web and mobile. Adobe Story is a collaborative scriptwriting tool that improves production and post-production workflows in CS5 Production Premium. Access to Acrobat.com services, such as Adobe ConnectNow Web conferencing, is also included to enhance discussion and information exchange with colleagues and clients around the globe.

Create and Deliver to More Mobile Platforms
Using Flash Professional CS5, designers and developers can create, test and deliver Web content across a wide range of mobile platforms and devices such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, smartbooks and other consumer electronics. Users can look forward to deploying content in the browser with Flash Player 10.1 and as a standalone application with AIR 2 when those planned products become available. In addition, they can now build AIR applications, using the new Packager for iPhone tool preview, a component of Flash Professional CS5 that can be deployed on the iPhone and iPad (subject to Apple’s requirements and approval) with future device support planned for Android, BlackBerry and Palm webOS.

Pricing and Availability
Adobe Creative Suite 5 products are scheduled to ship within 30 days, with availability through Adobe Authorised Resellers, the Adobe Store and Adobe Direct Sales. Estimated street price (ex VAT) for the suites is expected to be £2,303 for Master Collection CS5, £1,509 for CS5 Design Premium, £1,429 for CS5 Web Premium, £1,509 for CS5 Production Premium and £1,032 for CS5 Design Standard. Upgrade pricing and volume licensing are available. Adobe CS5 products integrate with Adobe CS Live Services, which are complimentary for a limited time.* For more detailed information about features, OS support, upgrade policies, pricing and international versions please visit: www.adobe.com/uk/products/creativesuite

Countdown End: Photoshop CS5 week is here!

Finally, the wait is over! Adobe has announced the launch of CS5 and this week we are going to be bringing you tasters of what image-editing alchemy can be found inside Photoshop CS5. Later today we will be bringing you a rundown of Adobe’s web seminar and bringing you the news as it happens. Throughout the rest of the week, we will also be bringing you tips and tutorials on the new features and how they work.
There are some truly awesome features in Photoshop CS5 and we hope you will be as excited about them as we are!

Advanced Photoshop competition

Web Designer’s sister design magazine offers exclusive competition with Springleap.com

Advanced Photoshop magazine, in association with Springleap.com, brings you a competition that challenges artists from around the world to set the tone for design in 2010.
Use your design power to chart a course for the direction of forward-thinking design trends for 2010. It’s time to be motivated by the cutting-edge world of commercial design! Release your own creative influence by drawing inspiration from popular culture, advertising, product design… the list is endless. It’s all about the trends that are making the most impact worldwide right now. Your designs must speak to people from all walks of life. Let the world’s most popular styles come alive through your design!

***Closing Date: 20 April 2010

What you can win…
We’ve joined forces with design
lovers Springleap.com and provided entrants with cash prizes, personalised T-shirt prints and generous subscription incentives. But for that something extra, every entrant will receive a 40 per cent discount to a year’s subscription to Advanced Photoshop magazine. The prizes for the winner are:

What you can win…

• 4 T-shirts of the winning design (sizes selected by designer)

• A year’s subscription to Advanced Photoshop magazine

• A cash prize of approximately $500 (subject to current exchange rate)

• Showcase in the magazine

Visit www.springleap.com for how to enter and image requirements

 Full details at http://www.photoshopdaily.co.uk/news/springleap-photoshop-t-shirt-competition-goes-live-today/

Photoshop, a software industry fixture, turns 20

It's not often that a technology product, even a successful one, enters the language as a verb. Some of us google, but nobody iPhones, Excels, or HDMIs.

But by remaining influential over a history that now spans 20 years, Photoshop software has achieved a place in the English language. Over its two decades, it grew from a single black-and-white image-editing package to a multi-product franchise, a starring member of Adobe Systems' Creative Suite line, and, of course, a verb.

At a National Association of Photoshop Professionals event Thursday in San Francisco, Photoshop's movers and shakers will gather to toast the software. For those who can't be there, here's a look at the software's history and future.

Photoshop got its start in 1987 when Thomas Knoll wrote software that could display grayscale images--those with a range of gray tones--on monitors that could show only black or white pixels. He and his brother, John Knoll, licensed the software to Barneyscan in 1988, then to Adobe in 1989. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 arrived in 1990, a Mac-only product initially, and in 1995, Adobe acquired the Photoshop software outright.

Pixel-level manipulation software turned out to be popular. Photoshop's clone tool let people copy one part of an image to another. And even at this early stage, it enabled sophisticated tonal controls through levels and curves adjustments.

Photoshop acquired many more features over the years. By providing a nicer interface to raw mathematical image-processing algorithms, Photoshop let people sharpen edges and change colors. Layers enabled creation of composites that blended multiple photos, text, and other elements. Adjustment layers opened up the idea that changes could be revisited rather than baked into the pixel data. Camera lens problems could be corrected.

The software gained popularity in a variety of areas--publishing, art, photography, advertising--and specific features followed. Narrower markets arrived, too--police forensics, medical diagnostics, scientific analysis.

The biggest and possibly most infamous feature, though, is the ability to make people look more attractive. Curves get curvier, skin gets creamier, teeth get whiter, muscles get chunkier, lips get plumper.

In many circles--advertising, most notably--this is considered fair game. But elsewhere, where many people still expect a photograph to capture truth, image manipulation has caused controversy.

Did 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry really stand next to Jane Fonda in a 1970s anti-war rally? No, but with each passing year such manipulations become easier. That "Photoshopping" has come to be synonymous with image manipulation and sometimes outright fakery shows we're getting more sophisticated about the possibilities, but you can bet we will be fooled again.

Adobe's Photoshop franchise has been expanding gradually. At the lower end, where people rarely are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for software, the company has released a cheaper enthusiast version, Photoshop Elements. Adobe killed the free Photoshop Album Starter Edition version.

Another new direction for the software was the photography-specific Lightroom. This software is tailored for high-quality "raw" images that come directly from camera image sensors and handles cataloging, captions, titles, and other image management matters.

The company continues to work on the core Photoshop product, too. For example, it's got refinements in the works to automate one of the most difficult processes, selecting complicated subjects to isolate them from backgrounds.

Adobe now faces new challenges, though, as computing moves into domains where Adobe doesn't have its incumbent power: increasingly powerful mobile computing devices and the cloud. To cover its bases, Adobe has released the online Photoshop.com and Photoshop for the iPhone.

Even though today's explorations of photography's social dimension are largely taking place beyond Adobe's sphere of influence, though, Photoshop doubtless will remain a fixture of image editing for some time.

Design Trends (Predictions) in 2010

As we are stepping in a new decade, I can foresee that web design in 2010 is going to be fun and filled with experimental works. With the new CSS3 and HTML5, designers and developers are trying to utilize the new features to create impressive designs. Sketchy and large background styles are fading out. Serif fonts and texturized background will be popular. Thanks to CSS3, we are going to see a lot of rounded corners, RGBA transparency, and drop shadows. With the rise of smart phones, mobile web design is going to pick up this year.

Serif Fonts
In the last decade, most web sites were designed in either Verdana or Arial (sans-serif fonts), but that is going to change in this new decade. Serif fonts will get more attention. Read this article to find out why: Next Serif Trend.








Big Headings
Big headings in header (as part of design interface) will gain more popularity in 2010.








Custom Font Embedding
As Typekit is expanding their font list and more free quality fonts are available (e.g. FontSquirrel, OpenType, and The League of MoveableType), I think more people will use custom font embedding in the coming year.







Texturized Background
The big background trend is going to be gradually out-of-date and be replaced with subtle and texturized (particularly the light noise) background.











Minimalist & Grid
Minimalist and grid designs are not today’s new. They have been popular for the past couple years and I think it will continue to grow in 2010. Check out my previous post for more minimalist sites.










CSS3 New Features
Although CSS3 is not fully supported by all browsers yet, but a lot of designers are experimenting with the new features such as: rounded corners, multi background images, multi-column, border images, and animation. The following sites show good implementation of CSS3’s new features with fallbacks. So, we will see more and more CSS experimental works.

CSS3 Animation
Neutron Creations’s blog uses webkit-transform to spin the circle graphics (view it with Mac Chrome or Safari). If your browser doesn’t support webkit-transform, it will just show the static circles.



Rounded Borders and Box Shadows
Border-radius and box-shadow are the most commonly used CSS3 properties.





Text Shadow
A lot of designers are using text shadow to add more depth to text.





RGBA & Opacity
RGBA makes setting background opacity easier. I think more designers are going to take advantage of this feature to create semi-transparent effect.




Mobile Design
Since the release of iPhonein 2007, everybody is talking about mobile design. Now with more smart phones that support full CSS and Javascript, mobile design is definitely going to be the future of web design. A lot of sites(ranging from design agencies to editorial sites to web apps) are offering a mobile version. Below are some great examples (screenshots are captured with iPhone).









Conclusion
2010 is going to be a new adventure for web designers and developers. I and many people (from the Twitter replies) believe that, CSS3 is going to be wowing this year. If you haven’t checked out CSS3 and HTML5 yet, you should really look into it because they will change the way you design and code. You can take advantage of the new features to create cleaner and more efficient layout. For example, instead of writing extra div tags to display multiple background images, we can eliminate it with CSS3. Instead of writing div id="header" tag, we can simply write

in HTML5.