Release history

Version Platforms Release date Code name Notable Features 1.0 Mac OS January 1987 Picasso 1.1 Mac OS March 19, 1987 Inca 88 Mac OS March 1988 2.0 Windows January 1989 Pinnacle 3 Mac OS, NeXT, other Unixes October 1990 Desert Moose graph creation 3.5 IRIX 1991 4 Windows May 1992 Kangaroose 3.5 Solaris 1993 5 Mac OS June 1993 Saturn layers, live editing in preview mode 5.5 Mac OS, Solaris June 1994 Janus spell checker, find/replace text 5.5.1 IRIX 1995 6 Mac OS February 1996 Popeye gradients, eye dropper, paint bucket 5.1 Windows 1996 Pavel 7 Mac/Windows May 1997 Simba tabbed dockable palettes, transform palette, align palette, Photoshop pixel filters, rasterize, punk, bloat, free distort, layout grid, vertical text tool 8 Mac/Windows September 1998 Elvis pencil tool, bounding box handles, smart guides, actions palette, bitmap eyedropper, gradient mesh, live brushes, links palette 9 Mac/Windows June 2000 Matisse Flash & SVG output, pixel preview, release to layers, drop shadows, transparency, feathering, opacity & layer mask, native PDF support 10 Mac/Windows November 2001 Paloma live pathfinder shapes, symbols, slicing, css layer support, ODBC data link, variables palette, save for web, live distortion, warping, envelopes (warp/mesh/top object), liquify tools, grid/line/arc/polar grid tools, flare tool, magic wand CS (11) Mac/Windows October 2003 Pangaea/Sprinkles 3D effect, OpenType support, character & paragraph styles, template file format, scribble effect, columns & rows, optical kerning, optical margins, every-line composer, custom tab leaders, WYSIWYG font menu, Japanese type support, path type option, save for Microsoft Office CS2 (12, 12.0.1) Mac/Windows April 27, 2005 Zodiac live trace, live paint, colorized grayscale, Photoshop layer support, expanded stroke options, control palette, Adobe Bridge support, Wacom tablet support, SVG-t export, PDF/X export CS3 (13) Mac/Windows April 2007 Jason live color, Flash integration, eraser tool, document profiles, crop area, isolation mode CS4 (14) Mac/Windows October 2008 Sonnet multiple artboards, transparency in gradients, blob brush, live gradient editing, separations previews, in-palette appearance editing CS5 (15, 15.0.1, 15.0.2) Mac/Windows May 2010 Ajanta perspective drawing tools, variable-width strokes, control over opacity in points on gradient meshes, shape builder tool (similar to pathfinder tools) and a bristle brush, which enables users to imitate real life brush strokes while maintaining vector format. CS6 (16, 16.0.2) Mac/Windows May 2012 Ellora Adobe Mercury Performance System, 64-bit memory support, new user interface, gradient on a stroke, pattern creator tool, ImageTrace (replaces Live Trace)