Photoshop CS3 Public Beta Launched

The rumours of a public beta of Photoshop CS3 have been proven to be true ... I downloaded and installed mine last night and I must say, I'm quite impressed overall, many of the features and proposed changes I saw whilst working with Adobe, have made it into the Beta. The download for the Photoshop CS3 Beta is available here. The beta will only run for 2 days without a serial number. In order to qualify for a non-trial version you must have an existing and registered licence of Photoshop CS2, Creative Suite 2, Creative Suite Production Studio, Design Bundle, Web Bundle or Video Bundle serial number. Use your CS2 serial number to get your CS3 beta serial number here. In addition to Universal Binary Support for Intel based Macs, a new UI and a vastly improved Bridge and Printing capabilities, other feature enhancements for Photoshop CS3 include improvements in Camera Raw, the Quick Selection Tool, Curves Capabilities, Black and White conversion control, Improved Cloning and Healing and a really useful smart filter capability, which is not unlike Smart Objects, but even more useful. I really liked the Refine Edges feature, which affords you even more control over the selection capabilities in PSCS3. They've also improved the panoramic picture creation capabilities with an enhanced Auto Align and Auto Blend feature. System Requirements For Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta, recommended system requirements are as follows. For Macintosh: Mac OSX 10.4.8 or 10.5, 1 GHz PowerPC® G4 or G5 processor, Intel based Macintosh. For Windows: Intel® Xeon® , Xeon Dual, Centrino® or Pentium® 4 processor, Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, Microsoft Windows Vista. Both platforms require 512 MB RAM and a 1024x769 resolution screen. Photoshop CS3 beta will expire soon after the launch of Photoshop CS3 in Spring 2007. Details on final pricing, system requirements and availability have yet to be determined. For more in depth coverage visit photoshopuser, where Scott Kelby has produced a good article on Photoshop CS3. The article covers these new features, in much more depth. To read the full press release from Adobe, follow this link.