Photoshop CS3 Beta Is Posted!

[Updated December 15] In a surprise move, Adobe announced that a public beta of Adobe Photoshop CS3 is being made available for download. Adobe made the Photoshop CS3 beta available to all Photoshop CS2 customers on Friday, December 15 from the Adobe Labs website. (This is a little off-topic for an InDesign blog, but since Photoshop CS3 and InDesign CS3 are brothers or sisters in the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 3, many people will care about this.)

The beta software is available in English only, but you can enter a serial number from any language version of Photoshop CS2 (including Adobe Creative Suite 2, Adobe Creative Suite Production Studio, or the Design, Web or Video bundles). The actual release of Photoshop CS3 and the new Adobe Creative Suite 3 is expected in Spring 2007, as has been previously acknowledged by Adobe officials. You can download the software without a CS2 serial number, but then the product will expire after two days.

“This is an exciting time for the Mac, and Adobe wanted to ease the move to new Intel-based systems with a preview release of Photoshop CS3,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. “We didn’t want to leave Windows customers out of the party, so the beta is available to everyone in the creative industry’s most passionate user community — no matter what their platform choice. We still have some surprises in store, but this beta gives customers an early chance to see the power of another great Photoshop release, optimized and tuned to run natively on the latest hardware and operating systems.”

In particular, they want to release a version of the product that will run natively on Macintosh Intel processors?all the new MacBook Pros, MacBooks, Mac Pros, and so on. But the Photoshop CS3 beta will also run on PowerPC Macintoshes, Windows XP, and Vista. However, remember that this is beta software, and, while relatively stable, it is not finished. It will include bugs which haven’t been fixed, and the engineers will still be working to enhance the performance of the shipping product.

This is the first time that Adobe has made available a public beta of one of the Creative Suite products. I think this is one of the things Adobe gained from its merger with Macromedia. The Macromedia folks were much more proactive about putting out public betas. I think it’s basically healthy (as we’ve seen from the Lightroom beta), and it can also help Adobe bond with their customers better.

Will there be a public beta of the version of InDesign that will ship with Adobe Creative Suite 3? I don’t know, but I sincerely doubt it. Those who have beta tested InDesign in the past say that, unlike Photoshop, which stores its files in a relatively stable format which is backwardly compatible for the most part, InDesign stores its files in a kind of database. Through the beta process the database (and the new file format) change through the process. This would make it very difficult to release a public beta because public testers would be creating files which wouldn’t work in the shipping version!