Great news for fans of the Photoshop graphics editing program: Adobe announced today, March 22nd, that the Beta version of Photoshop CS6 has been released and is available for download for free on Adobe Labs. As Adobe put it, Photoshop CS has a whole new digital image editing experience to offer and is packed with groundbreaking new innovations, features and incredible performance enhancements.

So if you understand what Beta testing is about, go ahead and download Photoshop CS6 Beta; it is available for free for Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Apple’s Mac OS X. If you don’t want to bother with a potentially bothersome Beta, you’ll just have to wait for the final version to be released.

Adobe did not provide an exact release date, but it did mention that Photoshop CS6 is expected to be released in the first half of 2012. The Beta has all the features that Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended will have when the shipping versions will become available.

Before you go get Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta, here’s a quick look at the new features it has to offer:
Fresh new interface – the new interface features dark background options meant to make your images pop.

• Content-Aware Patch – select the area where you want to create your patch and Content-Aware Patch will blend the pixels for a very good looking result.
• Mercury Graphics Engine – provides blazing fast performance; near-instant results when using tools like Liquify or Puppet Warp.
• New and re-engineered design tools.

“Photoshop CS6 will be a milestone release that pushes the boundaries of imaging innovation with incredible speed and performance,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. “We couldn’t wait to share this beta of Photoshop CS6 with our customers and are looking forward to hearing from them and seeing the ways they are incorporating the beta into their daily creative workflows.”