First impressions of CS6

Well it’s here. Adobe launched the latest creative suite about 24 hours ago and I haven’t been able to get out of it. I spent the last 3 hours in After Effects. I missed dinner. I’m an addict.

Now here’s the real deal. I use PS, AI, and AE CS5.5 at work (that’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects for you newbies) for 2D animation. It’s fast, but not fast enough for comfort. Now my computer at work is about a month old and my personal laptop is about 2 years old. I’m using CS6 on my personal computer. It’s faster than my work computer.

Now before you get too excited keep in mind both computers run a core i7 process and have 8gb of ram. My work computer has 3.2 Ghz (I think) and my home computer has 2.66Ghz so that computer “Should be faster” but it’s a PC running windows 7 so we’ll just assume it’s automatically slower. Nothing personal.

Some of the lesser known new features that have really impressed me are:

-Speed improvements all over the place, especially in AE
-Pencil brush in PS (This brush preset dulls as you use it until you reselect it to “sharpen” your pencil. Genius)
-More will come as they are discovered.

The new Dark user interface is definitely awesome. I feel more focused and certainly don’t have eyes hurting afterwards. I’ve only been using CS6 for about 18 hours though (download & install took me about 6 hours) so we’ll wait to really judge how I feel about the new UI color.

Lastly before the screencast showing speed improvements in AE I wanted to say that when I first opened Illustrator I was rather freaked out… They changed it a little more than I expected and couldn’t find the settings to change the color of the vector/outline (I’m new to illustrator more or less so don’t be a hater because I got lost. Thanks) but I eventually found it.

No complaints just yet. I am very satisfied with the new version of creative suite master collection and am excited for Creative Cloud’s release on friday (running the trial till that is out) which I will be downloading and using most every service available as much as I can.

Now for the screencast:

Now I’m not sure if it’s just me but that playback speed is quite faster. My computer didn’t do that before. Trust me, I’ve tried many times.

I’ll start doing more about CS6 in the coming weeks. Probably more focus on PS, AI, and AE, but I may touch into other apps as well.

Hope all is well for you guys reading this, make sure to go grab your copy of CS6 as soon as you can, even if it’s only a trial. This stuff is definitely awesome and I can’t wait to really start creating with it.

Sam