Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection Review

The Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection is one of four Photoshop product suites recently released that enables users to create, manipulate, and edit images digitally and save them in any of the main raster graphics file formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF. The other three Adobe Creative suites are Design Standard, Design and Web Premium, and Production Premium. An additional suite called Creative Cloud is a subscription based package within which you can access all four suites for $49.99 a month.
This is a part of a series of reviews that will list what each product provides as well as information on additional features that the new version provides. The Adobe Suite CS6 Master Collection contains two editions – the standard Photoshop and the Photoshop CS6 Extended edition. The second one targets those in film and television graphics, medicine and science, architecture and engineering, manufacturing and 3D rendering.

New features in Adobe Creative Suites 6 Standard Edition
A hardware-accelerated new Crop tool that uses multiple overlays to work with the Rule of Thirds, Golden Ration, Golden Spiral, Diagonal, Triangle, and Grid. You can also now be sure that you won't lose any of your work while working with the crop tool. An additional Perspective Crop feature enables you to straighten elements of a scene when the photo was taken at an angle, by making use of a flexible marquee.Two new retouching tools in the extended Content-aware type of applications. The Patch and Move tools that you use when repairing images, and moving or extending objects within a picture. You can now have greater control when you use these tools, and they also automatically make adjustments to help blend the repairs and objects into the picture.

There are new design controls across all text formatting type styles, including paragraph and character styles. You have the ability to create custom styles in various ways and apply them to groups of documents and pictures.Create lines, shapes and objects and then style each by customizing them with fills and strokes using new Vector Layers. You can control all vectors that you create by adding, subtracting or grouping them in any way you want. To polish shapes up, use the pixel grid for precise design. In complex documents, you can use new filtering options to sort and find distinct layers.

You now have the ability to quickly create a variety of geometric patterns using either custom pattern scripts or preset scripts. You can apply custom scripts to as many projects as you want.The Skin-tone aware mask lets you easily isolate faces to adjust skin tone, or keep skin tone constant and adjust all other object colors.You can edit, enhance and create video within adobe suite CS6 by using any range of Photoshop tools along with the Adobe Media Encoder. 
A new video playback engine lets you import a wider range of video formats. Adjusting and editing of audio that is either coupled with or independent from the video is made easy.Curvatures in panoramas and specific objects shot through a wide lens or fisheye can be straightened using the Lens-aware filter.Three new Blur effects have been added – the Iris Blur that starts with a sharp center and gradually blurs towards the edges, the Field Blur lets you customize a gradient blur effect, and the Tilt Shift option that recreates the miniature model effect that it normally obtained using a special camera lens.

The Adobe Camera Raw 7 is an updated tool with more intuitive controls that provide better management of important image adjustments like the spread of tones in highlights as well as shadows in images, managing contrasts and applying a wider range of alterations to different sections of a photo.Have greater control and variety while painting within a photograph, using presets and various new paint effects that can be customized easily. The Mixer Brush can be used for realistic color blending, the Airbrush tips for spray can effects, and the Erodible tips and Bristle tips for lifelike strokes. For a natural look and feel of pencils that wear down with use, use the Erodible pencils and pastels. Paint illustrations with a 3D conical spray, the style of which can be changed using Granularity, Hardness, Spatter, and Distortion controls, and the spread of the spray by changing the distance between tip and canvas. There are many more options of Artistic filters that you can easily use to create the look of a painting.

New features in Adobe Creative Suites 6 Extended Edition
All features in the Standard edition are included here.A simplified UI allows easier in-context and on-canvas scene editing, especially for new users. 3D objects can have shadows and be animated, and objects can be made into cartoons, etc. The Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine allows you to quickly create and render artwork and assemble scenes. Importing existing models is easier, as industry-standards of describing the orientation of objects are now supported. It is also easier to create and edit 3D text and increase realism through the use of the 3D Extrusion engine.

The new default interface has a darker and sleeker look, but you can revert to the old grey scheme if you want to.

The Adobe CS6 is a great upgrade that was brought about by the Premiere Pro CS5's Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine. With an up-to-date graphics card and newer operating system, you can get impressive speeds even while using processor-intensive tools, by making use of Liquify, Puppet Warp, or Transform. With so many new features and the new graphics engine, it is really worth the upgrade to CS6.

Students can avail of an Adobe student discount of up to 80%, making it easy for any adobe creative suite student to also upgrade to the adobe creative suite 6 master collection from the older version.
There are separate versions available of the creative suite for Mac and the creative suite for Windows. The Mac version works on OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.6. The Windows version is for Windows 7. The CS6 does not work on Windows XP, and will instead revert to CPU mode.