Adobe Plans Monday Launch Event for CS6, Creative Cloud

Adobe will launch Creative Suite 6 (CS6), the next version of its market-leading digital media software, next week in San Francisco, along with its new Web-based subscription service, Creative Cloud.

The April 23 event, to be hosted by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, will also be streamed over the Web beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Adobe's launch site. The presentation will be available later for replay at tv.adobe.com.

Not only will all the apps, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Premiere Pro be demonstrated to the public for the first time, but Adobe is staging a San Francisco scavenger hunt, with prizes of $10,000 and a free lifetime subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.

The Creative Cloud service gets users all of the CS6 apps—Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver, Premiere Pro and the rest—along with updates, starting at $49.99 per month for an individual user. The service includes all of Adobe's mobile apps, too, as well as online collaboration and project hosting capabilities.

Adobe is not allowed by law to add features to one-time purchased software, but the Creative Cloud model doesn't have this restriction, so subscribers will get new features periodically without needing a full program update. It will also include syncing of your work in the apps between multiple devices, 20GB of cloud storage, Adobe Business Catalyst site hosting, and thousands of Web-based fonts.

In addition to the product launches, Adobe will "unveil new primary research on the impact of creativity on our culture and economy, and reveal new initiatives that encourage creativity in education," according to the company.

Adobe previously released a beta of the CS6 suite's leading app, Photoshop. For an in-depth look at the new standard in image editing, read PCMag's hands on with Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta and the slideshow below.

Last week, Adobe tipped the video professional's version of the suite, CS6 Production Premium, showing the new versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Encore, and Story Plus applications. Also shown were two new suite members—Prelude CS6, a new app for organizing production workflow through on-set ingest and logging; and SpeedGrade CS6, professional color grading tool.

Stay tuned on PCMag for full rated reviews of the new Creative Suite 6 apps after they become available on Monday.

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