Adobe has finally launched the much anticipated Creative Suite 5!

The product revamps PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver and Flash and it comes with a new feature: Omniture, a tool to track the relative success of different versions of websites, such as a new home page design.

The full product, called Master Collection, is priced at $2599 and if you have the predecessor,  its upgrade is $899.Advantages ?

• Industry-leading performance enhancements – work faster with the native 64-bit support for both PC and Mac.
• Support for evolving web trends – now Dreamweaver CS5 comes with full support for content management frameworks, including Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress.
• Expressive motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects – A revolutionary Roto Brush in After Effects CS5: isolating, moving foreground elements from their backgrounds with automatic transparency is now dramatically faster.
• Truer Edge detection technology – Hair selection has never been easier !
• Crisp graphics for web, interactive and mobile delivery – Create clean artwork that aligns perfectly – no more fuzzy graphics for the web and mobile apps !

• Type enhancements for the web – create sophisticated typography for the web with support for bidirectional and vertical text, flowable text layouts, and support for more than 30 writing systems including Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, and more.

Mac OS

• Multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6
• 1GB of RAM or more recommended
• 10.3GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash-based storage devices)
• 1280×800 display with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
• Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
• DVD-ROM drive compatible with dual-layer DVDs

• Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or 1.6
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
• Adobe Flash Player 10 software required to export SWF files
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services*

For more details, please visit Adobe.com

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.I have used Photoshop for as long as I can remember, atleast 16 years by now. It was love at first sight and it’s by far one of the most amazing tools on the market, EVER! I couldn’t do all the work I do if it wasn’t for Photoshop. ( That goes for my Wacom board too btw :P )

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.

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.

So, first of all let me give a big thanks to Thomas & John Knoll. I also want to thank Adobe and all the other people involved with the development & evolvement of Photoshop. I am looking forward to another 20 years with more exciting features and a lot of new fancy additions. Good luck!

Source: Cnet