Adobe launches CS6 - which Creative Suite is for you?

Adobe India has unveiled the latest version of its Creative Suite of applications, CS6, aimed at artists and creative professionals. The suite includes latest versions of popular apps like Photoshop, InDesign and others.

CS6 applications are available individually or as part of 4 different suites, each aimed at a different kind of professional. The entry level suite is the Design Standard, which includes four of the most popular Adobe apps, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat X Pro as well as two supplementary apps, Bridge and Media Encoder. While Bridge is a manager for digital assets like photographs, Media Encoder automates the process of creating multiple encoded versions of source files.

Design and Web Premium suite features Photoshop extended instead of Photoshop and adds the three popular web authoring tools Adobe acquired from Macromedia, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. The Production Premium suite is aimed at video-editing professionals and includes Photoshop, Illustrator, in addition to video-focussed tools like Flash Professional, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Encore and Story. The Master Collection suite includes all the aforementioned apps.

Pricing for the suites vary from Rs. 77,786 for the Design Standard suite up to 1,55,571 for the Master Collection suite. Competitive upgrade pricing is offered as well for existing CS existing customers (see table below).



For the first time, customers in India can buy CS online, by logging onto the Adobe India online store. Adobe promises to ship CS6 orders staring May 7th.

Coming to the individual applications, Adobe Photoshop CS 6 sports an improved interface that bundles a host of new features that are sure to save creative professionals a lot of time. The content-aware patch and move tools, in particular, will continue to wow users with its effectiveness every time it's used. Read more about all the new features in Photoshop CS6 in our hands-on.

The standout feature in InDesign CS6 is the all-new layout system. InDesign CS6 lets you quickly layout your content for various devices/ screen sizes/ orientations with minimum of effort. For the first time, InDesign comes with support for 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi and Tamil.