Adobe Photoshop CS3 Goes Public (Beta)

Adobe has always played its cards close to the vest, refus­ing to com­ment about upcom­ing prod­ucts or prod­uct updates, and nev­er com­mit­ting to firm release dates. Any such infor­ma­tion released to the pub­lic could affect Adobe Systems, Incorporated stock prices, and is there­fore close­ly guard­ed by Adobe and Federal Trade Commission reg­u­la­tions. Over the nine months, how­ev­er, Adobe has been break­ing tra­di­tion to dole out secrets.

It began in a March 2006 inter­view with Forbes Magazine where­in CEO Bruce Chizen com­mit­ted to a 2nd Quarter 2007 release of Creative Suite 3. Next, in May 2006, fol­low­ing the release of com­peti­tor QuarkXPress 7 to crit­i­cal praise, Adobe allowed select mem­bers of the press, includ­ing Quark VS InDesign​.com, to reveal fea­tures of InDesign CS3 (see: “Sneak Peek: InDesign CS3″). Now, they’ve kicked open the vault door wider still.

As of 2:00 PM Pacific Time today, Adobe has opened the fun to not just press but the pub­lic as well. 

Photoshop CS3 Public Beta

Following the suc­cess of the pub­lic beta pro­gram for Adobe Lightroom, the pro­fes­sion­al suc­ces­sor to the run­away hit Photoshop Album and the Creative Suite-bundled Adobe Bridge, Photoshop CS3 is enter­ing a pub­lic beta phase as well. Beginning Friday, 15 December, 2006, the Adobe Labs Website will enable any licensed user of Photoshop CS2 or Creative Suite 2 to down­load and try out the Photoshop CS3 beta, which runs native­ly on OS X PowerPC and Intel-based Macs and Windows XP and Vista. The Photoshop CS3 dis­tri­b­u­tion does not include a beta ver­sion of ImageReady CS3, but does come with CS3 ver­sions of Adobe Bridge, Adobe Stock Photos, and the new appli­ca­tion, Adobe Device Central, an inte­grat­ed tool to design, pre­view, and test mobile con­tent for cell phones and oth­er portable media devices.

Available only in English, the beta will work in con­junc­tion with any lan­guage ver­sion of Photoshop CS2 world­wide. In order to use the CS3 beta, users must have a valid license for at least one of the fol­low­ing: Photoshop CS2 (full, upgrade, and edu­ca­tion), Adobe Creative Suite 2.x Standard or Premium (full, upgrade, and edu­ca­tion), Adobe Production Studio Standard and Premium (full, upgrade, and edu­ca­tion), Adobe Video Bundle (full, upgrade, and edu­ca­tion), or Adobe Web Bundle (full, upgrade, and edu­ca­tion). After ini­tial instal­la­tion, the Photoshop CS3 beta will run for 2‑days before expir­ing. To acti­vate and con­tin­ue using the beta, users will need to pro­vide a valid Photoshop CS2, Creative Suite, Production Studio, or Bundle ser­i­al num­ber via the Adobe Labs Website in order to obtain a Photoshop CS3 beta ser­i­al number.

Adobe is firm that “this is not the Photoshop CS3 prod­uct launch… Photoshop CS2 is the ship­ping prod­uct, and PSCS3 is no sub­sti­tute. It’s unfin­ished, and you need to own CS2 to use it.” And: “We’re releas­ing CS3 as an exten­sion of CS2, as a ser­vice to Photoshop cus­tomers who’ve been eager­ly await­ing native performance.”

The com­pa­ny is releas­ing the beta to the pub­lic at this time pri­mar­i­ly to enable Intel-based Mac users to enjoy a Universal Binary ver­sion of Photoshop. From the Photoshop CS3 Beta Q&A released today: “Adobe has a long-standing com­mit­ment to the Mac com­mu­ni­ty and this release is Adobe’s way of deliv­er­ing native per­for­mance to our Mac cus­tomers many months ear­li­er than we oth­er­wise could have done. Over the years, Photoshop has con­sis­tent­ly done right by Mac cus­tomers, offer­ing a free PowerPC update for Photoshop 2.5 and a free G5 update for PS 7, even though new ver­sions were right around the cor­ner. Making the Photoshop CS3 Beta avail­able to all of our Mac-based Photoshop CS2 users is a fur­ther proof of our com­mit­ment to the plat­form. Since a large por­tion of our cus­tomer base is on Windows, Adobe is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly releas­ing a Windows ver­sion of the Photoshop CS3 beta to Windows XP and Vista users.”

Recommended System Configurations

Mac OSX 10.4.8 or 10.5, 1 GHz PowerPC® G4 or G5 proces­sor, Intel based Macintosh, or Windows: Intel® Xeon® , Xeon Dual, Centrino® or Pentium® 4 proces­sor, Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or high­er, Microsoft Windows Vista. Both plat­forms require 512 MB RAM and a 1024x769 res­o­lu­tion screen.

Photoshop CS3 beta will expire soon after the launch of Photoshop CS3 in Spring 2007. Details on final pric­ing, sys­tem require­ments and avail­abil­i­ty have yet to be announced.

Adobe has not announced plans to open oth­er Creative Suite 3 appli­ca­tion beta pro­grams to the public.

11 thoughts on “Adobe Photoshop CS3 Goes Public (Beta)”

  1. woz

    I’m not in a posi­tion to dowload it right now. But you Pariah, you have been a beta tester for quite some time, I believe. Now that ‘the cat’s out of the bag’ what would you say are the top 10 best changes Adobe made to Photoshop? Would you mind shair­ing them with us?

  2. Choppy Ocean

    And why do they keep say­ing “spring” if they tell Reuters end of Q2 and inter­na­tion­al­ly even July 2007? :-(

    Choppy

  3. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Hi, Woz.

    Well…um… I’m not at lib­er­ty to… Let’s just say I’ve seen it, yeah. :-)

    I’m work­ing up some­thing about my favorite new fea­tures, actu­al­ly. I’m a lit­tle behind on my work rel­a­tive to Photoshop CS3 because I’ve been so deep into some upcom­ing InDesign, Illustrator, and QuarkXPress projects.

    Coinciding with the release of the “next ver­sion of InDesign,” ({cough}CS3{cough}) Wiley/Sybex will be pub­lish­ing my new book aimed at print pro­fes­sion­als. It’s InDesign for those who are already skilled in lay­out, pre-press, or print­ing, rather than a begin­ners’ book.

    At the same time, I’ll be launch­ing or co-launching sev­er­al new dig­i­tal media projects around InDesign, QuarkXPress, and so on.

    Back to the Pshop thing… I’m hop­ing to get an arti­cle fin­ished up this week­end. I have to fin­ish the first draft of a chap­ter and the rewrite on anoth­er by Monday.

  4. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Hi, Choppy,

    There’s a lit­tle bit of chrono­log­i­cal con­fu­sion going on there. Bruce Chizen keeps stat­ing 2Q fis­cal 2007. Well, Adobe’s fis­cal year is not the same as the cal­en­dar year. Yesterday was their end of 4Q share­hold­er con­fer­ence call; December begins the 2007 fis­cal year for Adobe. Their fis­cal 2nd quar­ter ends in May, thus it’s still Spring even if goes until the last day of the quarter.

    I don’t doubt they’ll make that dead­line. Clearly, Photoshop is well ahead of the sched­ule. Looking strict­ly at the pub­lic beta, one could esti­mate that Photoshop would be ready for gold mas­ter (ready for release) well ahead of Spring ’07.

  5. morgan

    I’m unsure, but if my mem­o­ry is cor­rect, weren’t there sev­er­al read­ers (ID zealots) on this site mak­ing jabs at Quark for thi­er novel-like beta releas­es lead­ing up to the actu­al 7.0 prod­uct ear­li­er this year?

    Is this a me-too thing from Adobe? Or per­haps, on a larg­er lev­el, should we expect “beta-version releas­es” hav­ing a big­ger role in all major appli­ca­tions pri­or to their full-blown release? I just don’t remem­ber this kind of thing way back when…

    Old Fords rule!

  6. woz

    @Pariah; Well now THAT’s some­thing I per­son­al­ly can’t wait to get my hands on. Do you know if they’ll ship their books to Europe as well? 

    @Morgan; You don’t think the release of the fist beta soft­ware from Adobe ever, has any­thing to do with pres­sure from Apple/Intel, now do you? 

    @Adobe; Most buy­ers of CS3 will NOT have a CS2 licence. Larger com­pa­nies (like mine) decid­ed to skip CS2 because ‑let’s face it- there just was­n’t enough ‘new’ stuff in there. It’s all abou the Benjamins. CS3 how­ev­er, will be bought. But WE can’t legal­ly test this CS3 beta stuff. That’s too bad. Seduce me Adobe, please let me DL this beta with CS1 numbers!

  7. Don't be crazy

    Based on the out­put of the beta it won’t be ready till spring 08, crazy stich­ing on out­put when resized. 

    Adobe is feel­ing the presure of respond­ing to Quark, Beta release cycles.

    This could also be the first step to telling users that there is a delay to mar­ket but it is due to doing these cycles ‘mak­ing the prod­uct right for the users’ real­ly say­ing we screwed up and gave impos­si­ble dates.

  8. woz

    LOL! “Adobe is feel­ing the presure of respond­ing to Quark”
    Yeah, I keep read­ing all these sto­ries about peo­ple switch­ing back to Quark. ;-)

  9. Don't be crazy

    Where are you read­ing, becouse it’s hap­pen­ing, Slowly now but peo­ple who are look­ing at this chang­ing mar­ket with no pre con­cep­tions are see­ing no benifits to switch to Indesign, n dis­re­spect it’s a good prod­uct, just noy quite there with Xpress 7. facts are facts

  10. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Woz:

    @Pariah; Well now THAT’s some­thing I per­son­al­ly can’t wait to get my hands on. Do you know if they’ll ship their books to Europe as well? 

    Thanks, man. I’m not sure about release in European book­stores, but I know it will be avail­able at least to ship to Europe from online stores.

  11. woz

    Well okay then. We’ll order it online. I do hope you’ll let us know when it’s done? There are a lot of books out there, but per­son­al­ly I try to find the books that were writ­ten by peo­ple who actu­al­ly use and under­stand the prod­uct. Not by peo­ple who just re-wrote the ‘help’ files. ;-)

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