Adobe has recently made Photoshop CS 6 available as beta, which will last until CS6 is released. In order to activate, you need to have an Adobe ID ( freely available ) within 7 days of installing. The Mac installer is now 64bit only and weighs in at just under 1GB, while the Windows install is closer to 1.7GB.

The biggest new features in Abobe’s own words are:

Content-Aware Patch — Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result.

— Patch images with greater control using the newest member of the Content-Aware family of technologies. Choose the sample area you want to use to create your patch, and then watch Content-Aware Patch magically blend pixels for a stunning result. Blazingly fast performance and a modern UI — Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop.* Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop.

— Experience unprecedented performance with the Mercury Graphics Engine, which gives you near-instant results when you edit with key tools such as Liquify, Puppet Warp, and Crop.* Plus, a refined, fresh, and elegant Photoshop interface features dark background options that make your images pop. New and re-engineered design tools — Create superior designs fast. Get consistent formatting with type styles, create and apply custom strokes and dashed lines to shapes, quickly search layers, and much more.

The content aware tools are easily the biggest new feature, and look pretty impressive as demonstrated in this video:

Another good video showing off the new features is Russel Brown’s 6 favorite new features:

Lynda.com have also made a number of tutorials freely available for CS6.

So, if you are interested in Photoshop CS6, or just want a free copy for a limited time, head on over to labs.adobe.com and give it a download.

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