Adobe Illustrator CS6 v16.0.0

Adobe's flagship vector drawing application gains a new look and much-enhanced performance

Adobe Illustrator CS6 is a powerful vector drawing tool that includes everything you'll need for design, web and video projects.

One major headline this time is the new focus on performance. True 64-bit support and Adobe's Mercury Performance System play a big part in improving responsiveness, but Adobe have also been identifying and resolving bottlenecks all around the package. The previous Gaussian blur implementation wasn't the best, for instance, but it's been optimised for CS6, and as a result Gaussian blurs (and effects which depend on them, such as drop shadows and glows) are now much, much faster.

It's a similar story with the interface. There's an obvious new look (you can even tweak the UI brightness to your personal taste), but Adobe report making more than 40 usability tweaks to the Illustrator interface, from easier font changes to inline editing of layer names.

And workspace management just generally works a little more like you'd always hoped. So even options which were previously hidden away, such as the Shape and Pen tools, can now be torn off and docked. And you can dock tools horizontally or vertically to organise your workspace just how you'd like.

You're looking for something more? Illustrator CS6 is relatively short on the big new features. There's a new image tracing engine to help you convert raster images to vectors, for instance, and the program can now easily create seamless tiled vector patterns, but that's about it.

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