Reports of users with Retina-enabled Photoshop betas, Tuesday’s keynote for Adobe’s Create Now Live webinar conference — along with a leaked video on YouTube — suggest that the company plans to announce that CS6 Photoshop and Illustrator users will finally get support for Retina displays. The keynote, scheduled for 10AM PST, will come as overdue but welcome news for users with Retina display MacBook Pros. As reported previously, the company is also expected to reveal a sneak peek at the next major version of the CS suite, expected in late spring.
The update is also likely to compatible with other HiDPI type displays, since reports indicate that the betas can detect the screen resolution and adjust accordingly, making zooms accurate and scale percentages look sharp and clear as they should. The promotional video (seen below) used as a teaser for the event showed Photoshop CS6 running on a Retina MacBook Pro, and includes some close-ups that betray the higher-quality graphics. Some additional features are noted as well, foreshadowing the announcement of a new version.
The conference will be streaming live from San Francisco and is free for users to watch. It had originally been planned to kick off on December 5 but was delayed a week for logistical reasons. Speakers of note will include Adobe pro app seminar and magazine publisher Scott Kelby, A Liar’s Autobiography animation director Justin Weyers and various Adobe executives and evangelists. One of the main themes of the conference is to assist creative professionals in moving their skills and work across various devices and cloud services, promoting the company’s Creative Cloud software-rental and storage service along the way.
If both Photoshop and Illustrator gain Retina support, it would accelerate the software maker’s frustratingly slow adoption of HiDPI across it’s lineup. The company chose Lightroom, its photo workshop and management software, to be the first major product to get a Retina-grade graphics update. The version of Photoshop teased in the video features glimpses of Smart Filters, CSS swatches, an automatic layout-to-CSS-code generator, conditional web buttons and a drop shadow editor among other highlights.
Adobe will likely preview its next major version of the CS suite during the webinar. It is not expected to release it until the company’s next major professional conference, Adobe Max, which will be held this year in May.
