I’m pleased to say that as of last Friday, the Photoshop CS3 beta had been downloaded by more than 500,000 individual users. (For the Rainmen among you, that’s 251,612,564 MB of P-shop goodness.) Wow… I really hoped people would be into it, but you never know until you try. Thanks to everyone who has made this effort a success!
I *love* the CS3 beta! Thank you guys so much for making it public. I’m very happy with the new features (Auto Align Layers and Smart Filters – although, I’m not taking to the latter like I thought I would) but the biggest improvement for me is usability. The new interface is very streamlined – I’m beginning to think I don’t need two monitors to run PS anymore. This has been a great preview and a real opportunity to cut out ramp-up time when the final version is released. Thank you.
[Cool! –J.]
Wow, that’s fantastic! As a matter of interest, how many of those were for Mac and how many for Windows?
[It’s been probably 60/40 Win/Mac, with Mac users being more heavily represented in the initial days and weeks (due, one imagines, to pent up demand for an Intel-native version). –J.]
Although I’m not part of the party yet (w/PS7), those are amazing numbers.
And it’s great that folks like Scott Kelby and others were busy ahead of time coming up with new tutorials, books and support for the latest version.
Kelby comes to town (LA) next month, for a Lightroom seminar.
That is pretty good, this new edition is so lovely.
I wonder how they will package it – would be great if they threw in Dreamwevaer and Flash into the Creative Suite bundle
[DW has been in the Suite since last fall (when Acrobat 8 was introduced). As for Flash, yes. 🙂 –J.]
…now if Adobe can just sell 500,000 copies of the software!
My tent in the line of buyers has been poled…hopefully my food supply will hold out ’til the actual release date.
Congrats!
[Thanks! –J.]
Just wanted to let you know that I am beyond CS3 beta. My CS3 extended and Light Room arrived yesterday and I am really happy with them. The result is in my blog. URL provided above. All photos are somewhat tinkered with in CS3. The latest post was opened in CS3 extended and resaved. But it was worked on in CS3 beta to make it almost monochromatic and change the mood of the scene. Exposure was also decreased with the exposure control in CS3. That feature itself is very powerful. Isn’t it the good old Hurter and Drifield Curve ? H&D curver ?Camera used was an Olympus E500. Enjoy.
http://gamini.org
[Solid–thanks. –J.]
If Adobe charged a realistic price in England for CS3 I might be tempted. In England twice as much as USA
In the UK we get hit twice.
Adobe charges more, then the tax added is a proportion of that price, so we also pay more tax than if we could buy at US prices!
Having spent a small amount of time ‘volunteering’ support to the beta group, I had no idea of how many people actually had grabbed the software from your servers.
That’s incredible. Something I might recommend for next time around — if a PB is in the cards for CS4 — is to encourage more participation by people downloading the app for beta. That would give Adobe more feedback from people outside the internal alpha/beta/gamma teams.
With 1/2 million betas out there, the participation in the forums concerning the beta is really small. How many were really up there from Dec 15 to April 15? No more than 500 I bet, right?
Poyssick in Tampa
I agree with Gary.
It would seem that perhaps 90% of the people who downloaded the Beta were “just there for the beer” and were either too lazy, or too selfish, to give any time to seriously testing CS3 and to providing any feedback.
Hopefully, the little feedback which you did receive will encourage you to find it worthwhile to issue a Public Beta for CS4.