After 22 years, Photoshop has enough feature additions that it's invaluable to many professionals needing powerful tools to edit photographs. But Adobe isn't alone in the photo editing market anymore. While previous attempts to steal away photo professionals largely failed (anyone remember Live Picture?), low-priced hobbyist apps and prosumer editors have now become incredibly attractive. If you read my Pixelmator 1.6 review, you know this $30 program adequately answers many people's photo editing needs. So Adobe had a dilemma with CS6: how do you lower the barrier to entry and keep users upgrading? You make it cheaper to buy in, and you throw in some cloud storage.

Because of the transition to 64-bit on the Mac side, Photoshop CS5, although not skimpy on the features, wasn't loaded with a ton of new tech. But CS6 is another ambitious release that includes GPU-accelerated tools, saving in the background, timeline video editing, a significant reorganization of the 3D tools, and an optional new licensing scheme coupled with Adobe's new Creative Cloud service.

Let's start with the main confusion about Creative Cloud: it's not just Adobe Dropbox. It's more accurate to call it “Adobe Subscription," but that probably sounded too much like Autodesk Subscription (a similar yearly subscription plan offered by the 3D software behemoth). Under the new scheme, you can still buy a retail box for $700 and upgrade to CS6 for $200, but the subscription model instead lets you pay a monthly fee of $20 for Photoshop Extended with no upfront cost and you get 10GB of space on the Creative Cloud. For a $50 monthly fee, you get access to all software in the Adobe Master Collection and a Creative Cloud Membership with access to a 20GB.

Otherwise, CS6 is the same disk-based app, but you have to check in your activation on a monthly basis. The Photoshop application doesn't live in the cloud and you don't have to store your documents in the cloud, either. If your subscription runs out, you'll lose access to your application and the cloud storage. Like Dropbox, nothing will be deleted from your Creative Cloud folder on suspension of an account; it just won't sync. Documents remain backwards-compatible (some newer things may get flattened), though, so you can still open files if you have another recent-ish version of Photoshop.

For users who already own Photoshop, traditional upgrades make more sense. Since you're effectively renting a license to Creative Cloud software, you can't resell a Creative Cloud copy of Photoshop. You can still install two copies of Photoshop for every serial number you own (laptop and desktop, for example). The subscription version of Photoshop lets you mix Windows and Mac licenses for those two copies, unlike if you bought a boxed copy for a single platform.

The Creative Cloud subscriptions are well priced and the Master Collection CS6 is a huge deal at $50 a month. Renting software usually costs you more than the yearly price, not less. For instance, I'm on an Autodesk Maya and Mudbox subscription and I had to pay the full price of the software before I could access the lower yearly subscription cost. If you want to rent the $5,000 professional video compositor Nuke for three months, it would run you $1,600 (for a total of $6,400 yearly). Adobe's Creative Cloud pricing is a relative bargain.

My only concern is that the stability of releases doesn't suffer as Adobe plans more frequent releases for all of its software. In my experience with the Autodesk subscription, combining a creative software monopoly, complex software, and a short release window can be brutal: Mudbox 2013 has two critical service pack releases and it's been out for merely a month and a half. Maya has accumulated so many critical bugs that every new feature is a curse as much as it is a blessing. There isn't time for overworked devs to fix issues and meet target feature deadlines. Adobe's got a good history of squashing Photoshop bugs by release, so let's hope they invest in the additional resources needed to keep that reputation.

No matter how you've chosen to pay for your software, the real fun begins when you fire it up.

Test Hardware

HP Z820 Dual 8-core Xeon E5-2665 2.4GHz 16GB RAM Quadro 4000 2GB Windows 7 Professional x64



2011 Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro 17" Quad 2.5GHz i7 16GB RAM Radeon 6770M 1GB OS X 10.7.4



The Photoshop CS6 interface

The first time you launch Photoshop CS6, you'll be greeted by a very different interface than CS5's:

CS6 now sports a dark UI by default, similar to many other Adobe apps like After Effects. There are four different modes to select from, with the lightest being the old default. There's not a lot to say about these other than I think a lot of people will like the option to change it to match their tastes. Even if you still prefer a lighter look, there's nothing wrong with the darker interface in my opinion, unlike...

The Application Frame: thanks, but no thanks

The Application Frame was off on the Mac by default in CS5 but Adobe flipped the switch for consistency's sake in CS6. I'm a firm hater of the Application Frame—it might make sense on Windows, where it helped overcome a limitation of GDI, but it wastes so much space on OS X. You get to see the words Photoshop twice, with more gray pixels than used ones. On Windows:

OS X:

Considering that Adobe just got rid of the Application Bar in CS5 for the same reason (wasted space), it doesn't make sense to add that blank space back in.

Add to that the confusing duplication of the close widgets. Click the red gumdrop and all your documents close, taking the tools and palettes with them and leaving the app running. Yeah, thanks. The Application Frame also removes document proxies, which are the best things about OS X windows:

It's a real mess when you try and use it with multiple screens. I'm sure some Windows Photoshop users who switched to Mac requested this, while Mac people requested that things not change. (No one says, “Please don't reverse a 22-year-old behavior" that looked unlikely to change.) Anyway, the Application Frame is dumb but can at least be turned off, which is what I hope Adobe does permanently after realizing its mistake.