

Also note that the Premiere beta is available for Macintosh as well, and that the After Effects beta requires a licensed serial number for version 7. Note that the two linchpins of the Production Premium suite, After Effects CS3 Professional and Premiere Pro CS3, are currently available on the Adobe site as public betas. Expected for release later this year is the Production Premium suite, tailored for video work. If you want to design for both online and hard copy, the Design Premium is the choice for you.

If you're interested in print, there's the Design Standard suite. If you're interested in the Web, there are the Web Standard and the more deluxe Web Premium suites.

It’s these costs that can make some creative professionals decide to hold on to their existing versions when considering whether to upgrade to new Adobe releases.

A single product upgrade can be costly, too: moving from Photoshop CS4 to Photoshop CS5 Extended would set you back $350. And that would have been a pricey proposition: Upgrading from Creative Suite 3.x Design Premium, for example, to Creative Suite 5.5 Design Premium, costs $950. Thus, anyone running Adobe CS3 or CS4 would have had to upgrade to the current version, Adobe CS5 or CS5.5 first, and then pay an upgrade fee yet again when the new CS6 arrived. Adobe offered a 20 percent discount until the end of the year for users to upgrade to the current version. Instead, the company instituted a new policy that supported discounted upgrades only for the previous main version-in this case CS5 or CS5.5. In a November 2011 blog post, Adobe revealed that it had abandoned its traditional upgrade policy, which had supported discounted software upgrades for owners of up to three previous versions. This upgrade pricing offer marks a significant policy reversal for Adobe.
