On December 15th 2006, Adobe released a public beta of Adobe Photoshop CS3. Aside from this being the first time their flagship application has received a public beta, it is significant because the Mac build is a Universal Binary. This means owners of Intel Macs no longer have to put up with sluggish rosetta emulation, or use the faster but inconvenient methods of running the application in either Parallels or Bootcamp.

The beta is available at http://labs.adobe.com/. If you have an existing Photoshop CS2 license you can use it to get a serial number for the CS3 Beta to unlock it until CS3 actually ships. If you don’t, you are limited to a 2 day trial period.

I had a license for CS2… but for windows as I run it in Parallels (my main dev machine is a MacBook Pro), and wanted to try out the Mac Universal Binary Beta. However a CS2 Win serial generates a Windows CS3 Beta key. Luckily I was able to contact Adobe and receive a CS3 Mac key… There is a helpful article on the process in general up on John Nack’s blog, which includes the following:

If you’re still having problems with serial numbers and CS3, please send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com. Important: in order to handle the process efficiently, your email needs to contain the following info (I suggest copy/paste):

• Email address in the subject line (a weird eRoom quirk, but without it we can’t reach you)
• First and last name:
• Issue statement:
• CS2 serial number (24-digits long):
• CS3 serial number (if applicable):
• Are you a CS2 single or volume license customer? (Y or N):
• If volume license, approximately how many CS2 licenses do you own?
• Daytime phone number with area code:
• Daytime e-mail address:

Customer service says they’ll turn things around in 48-72 hours. (There’s no need to call them, as phone support is not available for the beta.)

Some free videos tutorials showcasing some of the new functionality are available at lynda.com’s online training library and at NAPP (the national association of photoshop professionals).