CS3 Will Have Two Editions of Photoshop

Adobe System Inc. announced today they will be making available not one, but two editions of Photoshop CS3 this spring. Adobe has set the date for the big launch: CS3 will be revealed in a special event in New York City, on March 27. The event will be webcast live.

This release is highly-anticipated and particularly important for Mac users, this being the first version of the Creative Suite that works natively on Intel-based Macs. The tool will be available later this spring, probably during the second half of April.

The new edition, Photoshop CS3 Extended, would add a new set of capabilities for integration of 3D graphics and motion graphics, image measurement and analysis. It's meant to help professionals in science, architecture and even medicine.

"We never imagined that Photoshop would someday help make major motion pictures, let alone save lives," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. A public beta has been available since December.

The extended version of Photoshop will be specially useful to professionals in film and multimedia and graphics designers. It's a toolset for editing 3D and dynamic content, can perform 3D visualization and texture editing. Animation professionals will be able to add 3D content to two-dimensional compositions. Materials can be exported to various formats, such as QuickTime, Adobe Flash Video and MPEG-4.

Medical specialists, scientists and architects will benefit too from this extended version. Photoshop extended will render quantitative and qualitative data from images and will be able to perform various measurements and analysis. This edition will also offer additional support for viewing and editing specialized image formats.

Both editions of Photoshop, along with the other design applications in Creative Suite 3.0, will become available later this spring. Adobe has made no specific comment about CS3 application details and features, nor did it mention any price-tag for the suite.