Adobe Creative Cloud Review: Is it worth upgrading?

Every time Adobe rolls around the latest version of Creative Suite everybody asks the question "is it worth upgrading?" The answer even if you're just interested in Photoshop CS6 is a firm "yes"; however the addition of a Creative Cloud subscription makes it an even easier, more definitive "yes".

Photoshop CS6

Erodible tipped brushes give you more realistic brush marks

First off, Photoshop CS6 is a fantastic upgrade. It is much faster (just use the Liquify Tool and you'll instantly spot the difference!) and has many new features both big and small that are very welcome. The new dark interface is something that I didn't have a strong feeling about either way; but after changing it back to the old default grey I soon appreciated the new look.

From a creative point of view the new Blur Gallery is very impressive and gives much more control over Blurs then we've ever had previously (you can now edit Blurs in the real time!), and the new Erodible tipped brushes are an excellent new addition to help make realistic pencil, charcoal and dry media style effects. 

Photoshop CS6 lets you edit blurs in real time

Another new feature which almost makes it worth the price of upgrade itself is Auto-recovery! Photoshop makes a background save for you every few minutes so if you have an unexpected crash you won't have lost much work; Photoshop will automatically try to recover the file for you. This has he saved me losing out on a lot of time and work already!

The only small downside to all of this advancement is that you will need to have a fairly up to date system to take advantage of Photoshop CS6, if you're only using 4gig of RAM you will find your system may start to struggle so users of 32bit O/S will find that now may be the time to finally upgrade to a 64bit O/S to have everything running smoothly.

Adobe Creative cloud

When I first heard about Creative Cloud I was a bit suspicious; subscription based services aren't always good value for money, however Adobe has managed to offer something pretty reasonable (although yes, once again living in UK does mean we don't get as good a deal as Americans do, come on Adobe, you can fix this!). For the monthly subscription price you get access to the entire CS6 Master Suite, so if you find yourself suddenly needing to do something vectorised you could download the latest version of illustrator or if you needed to do some web design work you can download Dreamweaver, for example.

Creative Cloud lets you access your files remotely.

You're not tied to one specific version of the software either; you can download a Mac version of Photoshop for your workplace and a PC version at home (for example). You're also given access to 20 Gig of storage space; which isn't just to say that you've got another version of Dropbox available to you; the Creative Cloud allows other people to view your files without downloading them and let's them do things like turning Layer visibility is on and off to look at files in more detail. It would be perfect for showing clients files that are 'work in progress'.

Adobe aren't resting on their laurels either; the Creative Cloud subscription offers continual updates to software and new features exclusive to creative cloud members. In the latest batch of updates you can now download a desktop sync app called Creative Cloud Connection, this allows you to automatically sync files just by saving into a desktop folder.

You can find out more details about Adobe's Creative Cloud pricing structure and features below: 

Adobe Creative Cloud lets you choose from various pricing options

 For more information please visit
www.adobe.com/uk.

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