PS 1.0 - Feb. 1990 (Mac only)

PS 2.0 - Nov. 1992 (PC Windows finally)

PS 3 - June '95
First use of layers.

PS 4 - Nov. '96
Added adjustment layers and Actions (programmed scripts).

PS 5 - Oct. '98
Introduction of the awesome History palette.

PS 5.5 - July '99 (my next version of PS)
The first "Web ready" version of PS.

PS 6.0 - Oct. 2000
Significant user interface improvements.

PS 7.0 - Apr. 2002
Version 7.01 introduced ACR 1.0 plug-in for Camera Raw processing.

CS1 (PS 8) - Oct. 2003
ACR at version 2.x now. New Shadow/Highlight tool.

CS2 (PS 9) - Apr. 2005
Bridge 1.0 -- the new photo image file browser.
Smart Sharpen tool new; ACR up to version 3.7

CS3 (PS 10) - Apr. 2007
Large upgrade, now with ACR 4.5 (June 2008) as most current raw tool.
This upgrade cost me $199 from my CS2 install.
(I started running CS3 as a free beta test version Nov. 2006)

CS4 (PS 11) - Announced by Adobe on 9/23/2008 - shipped Nov. 2008, full 64-bit support. With ACR 5.0.

Future guesses of PS:

CS5 (PS 12) - on/before Oct. 2010
Actual release and ship dates were 4/30/2010. I installed CS5 on my Windows-7 Ultimate, 64-bit PC. Another $199 upgrade for me.
ACR 6.0 can do nearly everything for you now, except prep for print. ACR 6.1 Beta was release mid-May 2010 already.

CS6 (PS 13) - Oct. 2012 - video editing probably.

[ Adobe official info]

Sources: personal use and knowledge, Wikipedia.org, and official Adobe.com Web site.

Article last updated 19-May-2010
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