Beta testing periods are a common practice among many software manufacturers these days. It’s rare for these tests to be met with the kind of reaction that the Photoshop CS6 beta has met. Of course, Photoshop rarely gets beta releases, so I guess the excitement is understandable.

Adobe has revealed the initial figures from their CS6 beta release and the numbers are pretty staggering. They have seen over 500,000 downloads of the beta in less than a week. They say the download number keeps going up and I’m in no position to disagree with them.

Photoshop CS6’s social media campaign has helped the beta reach those numbers. When the beta was announced last week, it became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. On top of that, the CS6 “sneak peek video playlist” has received nearly 3 million views on YouTube and the CS6 beta videos have received half a million views.

Going even further, over the past week there has been over 12,000 Facebook likes, over 2,000 comments and over 110,000 tweets. That’s the kind of social media campaign success that other products and companies would kill for.

As a final bit, Adobe went to Photoshop World and showed off the CS6 beta to a crowd of people who paid money to see nothing but Photoshop. These are the kind of people that would flip out over a small update. Seeing all the changes being made in the newest version of Photoshop must have been like heaven for them Good thing Adobe was on hand to film the people at the convention and what they thought about the new version of Photoshop.

The Photoshop CS6 beta is stil available for download. Head to the product page to help them hit a million downloads.