The NewsDemon Blog

Adobe announced that its anticipated Creative Suite 5 product family is now available for shipping or immediate download, with more than 250 new features and, for the first time ever, native 64-bit support for Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Adobe CS 5 comes 18 months after CS4 was released and brings 250 new features among all the products included. Enhancements and improvements should be noticeable across the board and go beyond the few features that have been touted so far, like the impressive Content Aware fill in Photoshop CS5.

Adobe sells these programs alone or packages them up into suites tailored for various market segments. At the very top end is the $2,599 Master Collection, which includes everything. The designer-oriented Design Standard costs $1,299.

For Mac users, the CS5 will require an Intel-based Mac running the latest versions of Mac OS 10.5 or Mac OS X 10.6. Some applications, such as Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects are 64-bit native.

Newsgroups related to Adobe products, such as adobe.acrobat.newsgroups and adobe.photoshop.newsgroups will expectedly provide reviews and tricks from the subscriber community.