Adobe Releases Creative Suite 5.5, Adds Support for iPad Apps to Photoshop CS5

Tuesday May 3, 2011 7:27 am PDT by Eric Slivka

Following on last month's announcement, Adobe today officially released Creative Suite 5.5, bringing a number of enhancements to the company's flagship multimedia applications.

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 delivers important advances in HTML5 and Flash authoring, enabling designers and developers to create compelling content and applications. Creative Suite 5.5 products also feature significant innovation in the areas of video production and editing. Finally, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 delivers exciting new capabilities in the exploding area of digital publishing. With Creative Suite 5.5 content authors worldwide can deliver high-impact work to multiple platforms, operating systems, Web browsers, smartphones and tablets - including Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS, and Apple iOS devices.

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 is available in a variety of versions packaging various component applications together to meet users' needs, and upgrades from earlier version of Creative Suite (including CS5) are available at discounted prices.

As noted by Adobe's John Nack, Adobe has also pushed out a free Photoshop 12.0.4 update for existing Creative Suite 5 users, bringing support for Adobe's new iPad apps designed to extend the functionality of Photoshop.

The 12.0.4 update enables specially designed apps on tablets, smartphones, and PCs to communicate with and control interaction with Photoshop CS5 (Located in the File menu: Remote Connections). Now you can be creative on other devices and instantly incorporate what you create into Photoshop. You must install the 12.0.4 update to activate a remote connection between Photoshop CS5 and any apps that Adobe or third-party developers create to interact with Photoshop. For example, Photoshop CS5 must be updated to 12.0.4 to interact with three new iPad apps that Adobe has designed to work with it - Adobe Nav, Adobe Color Lava, and Adobe Eazel. Available on the App Store.

Those three apps, Eazel, Nav, and Color Lava, are not yet available in the App Store, but should presumably appear relatively soon.

Top Rated Comments

Osnabrueck

202 months ago

I've been using Adobe's software professionally since oh gosh, Photoshop 3 I think, and possibly Illustrator 5 even older versions while I was studying. I haven't been excited by upgrades to either of these for a long time.

InDesign, being a somewhat less mature program, has staggered some useful feature releases over the years and kept me forking out money for upgrades until CS4. They're all pretty decent programs, but upgrades are becoming far from essential or exciting IMO.

We're in the same boat. Been working professionally with Adobe software since PS3.

Adobe has been charting a 'bloaty/crufty' path for about a decade, and to date I can still accomplish the majority of my day-to-day design work with Photoshop 5 and Illustrator 8.

That being said - they still make the best design tools in the business and I have yet to run into a colleague who feels as though Adobe software has 'Bad UI.' To the contrary - their UI tends to be top-of-class when it comes to sheer usability.

I don't get excited about these updates - We're still on CS4 at the office and none of us really feel that we're missing out.

It's been good to see InDesign mature into full-featured Quark killer. I'm still looking forward to a day where Flash behaves like an Adobe product and not a massively retrofitted piece of 90s animation software.

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)

bugfaceuk

202 months ago

I am excited about this update. Can't wait for the set of free ipad apps. Typical MacRumors anti-Adobe whiners...you must not actually be a professional designer of any real sort, right.

Adobe Junkie here... but one that is failing to get excited about 5.5.. The main tools I use are Flash, AE, & PS. What's getting you excited so I can muster an excuse to go buy the upgrade?

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)

chrono1081

202 months ago

This coming from a student, right?

Nope. Although I am a student at the moment its simply because I returned to school. I have plenty of professional experience and have been using Photoshop since version 5 and have used every single version since. Photoshop isn't the only Adobe product I use either I use Illustrator and After Effects and occasionally have to use Flash.

Sorry you have such a superiority complex.

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Steve121178

202 months ago

I wonder when Adobe is going to wake up to the fact that people aren't going to pay almost $2K for a software package that has competitors offering products almost as good and sometimes better for less than $100. I hope people are waking up to this reality...

You have to be joking, right?

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

amorya

202 months ago

I wonder when Adobe is going to wake up to the fact that people aren't going to pay almost $2K for a software package that has competitors offering products almost as good and sometimes better for less than $100. I hope people are waking up to this reality...

Thing is, people are. Not home users, but there's enough professional users who wouldn't even consider anything that is not Photoshop that they can charge that kind of money.

If people really weren't going to pay $2k, they'd drop the price.

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

SpinThis!

202 months ago

Even on my Mid-2009 17" MBP, CS5.1 and CS5.5 are both much faster than the previous generation of Adobe software.

yeh CS5 is way faster than previous versions. I don't mind feature "bloat." Just because you don't use a feature doesn't mean it's worthless. If a new features saves a designer a couple minutes of work a day, you've easily made your money back.

People who usually complain about the price aren't professionals. Professionals use their tools, get paid using them, and write them off at the end of the year on their taxes.

Adobe Junkie here... but one that is failing to get excited about 5.5.. The main tools I use are Flash, AE, & PS. What's getting you excited so I can muster an excuse to go buy the upgrade?

After Effects has the excellent warp stabilizer (helps with rolling shutter on DSLRs and can all kinds of new tricks), new camera tools and camera blur effects, etc.

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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Adobe Releases Creative Suite 5.5, Adds Support for iPad Apps to Photoshop CS5

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