Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium
Comprehensive suite of graphics, web and publishing
applications.
By Jon Deragon,
Visca Consulting
Thursday July 28, 2005; 2:30pm EST
Having an all-in-one web development suite is somewhat of a recent
phenomenon. Not long ago, web designers would need to coble together
applications from a variety of companies to establish a suitable web
production environment. Today, you can pick up a single shrink wrap
box, that will handle not only all of your web, but traditional
media publishing as well, in an attractive integrated cost effective
package.
For quite some
time, Adobe has offered a collection of popular tools to design graphics, create web
sites, and create internet portable documents - but it is now that
they have truly integrated them all into a single seamless
environment. The new Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium includes the
latest CS2 versions of PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and
Version Cue; the new Acrobat Professional version 7 and Adobe
Bridge. Something for every stage of the web design and development
process excluding the back end application environment. The wildly
popular PhotoShop, Illustrator and Acrobat applications used
extensively around the globe by design firms, have long been viewed
as some of the leading tools for their related categories, it's
great to see them all together.
This review covers
the Windows platform version; a Mac version is also available. The
premium edition we review can also be purchased in a less costly
($300 off the Premium price) standard edition that excludes the
Adobe Acrobat Premium 7 and GoLive CS2 applications. Installation of
this big boy in its entirety takes a whopping 4 CD's all carefully
prepared in a convenient "flip panel" style DVD box. The
attractively produced installation process is effortless, allowing
you to easily install as much or as little as desired; and your
progress throughout the install process is well indicated.
Once installed, you
now have access to several distinct tools all available off the
Start menu's 'Adobe' folder. Also during the sign-up, registration
and product activation process Adobe helps to foster a community
like atmosphere by inviting you into their user support community
offering product enhancements; discussion forums; tips, tricks and
articles for improving your Adobe product skills; and complimentary
fonts or trial subscription to your choice of design magazines. All
a nice touch to make you feel welcome.
Illustrator,
PhotoShop, ImageReady and GoLive load into a clean interface with an
abundance of creative tools for composing your masterpiece. Their
interface uses a left hand side floating toolbar featuring commonly
used tools; a left side collection of floating dockers and tool
attribute are configurable along the top fixed bar. Within each
docker, tabbed pages of settings hold a bulk of the configurable
parameters and object manipulation such as colour selection, layer
control and brush styles. Generally the interface is clean,
intuitive and for the most part offers quick access to commonly used
tools. While changing tool parameters such as rectangle border width
was easy in Illustrator; it was more of a challenge in PhotoShop, so
not all applications operate identically. Overall you have
significant control over customizing your work environment in these
applications, a critical feature for designers that are forever
looking for more screen real estate while still having the tools
they need readily available. Lets have a look at the key
applications included in the suite...
Illustrator, as the
name suggests, is the illustration package that allows for you to
create vector based drawn images. Providing you with a variety of
brush, shape and other artistic tools you can compose vector based
drawings and layouts that are excellent for print based media. A
major new feature to this version of Illustrator is a live tracing
format that converts images into vector based drawings you can
better manipulate.
PhotoShop the image
editing tool is well suited to designing web based graphics and
exporting them into your preferred choice of compressed format. In
addition to the plethora of creative filters, and tools usually
found in PhotoShop, some new goodies have been added. New to this
version is a vanishing point tool that attempts to assist you in the
process of extending the size of objects such as buildings while
retaining perspective. Our attempts at using the vanishing point
tool proved challenging, especially aligning the perspective of the
vanishing point with the actual object's perspective. We were
however impressed with the luminance feature which artificially
determined the lighting variance as the object was extended. A Smart
Objects feature that retains the quality of objects even after they
have been scaled in size was a highly desirable feature we expect
all designers to appreciate. An image wrap feature now allows you to
better wrap, stretch and bend an image to the shape you desire. We
were very impressed with PhotoShop's handling of fonts and text
manipulation. Fonts come out highly legible in any size, microscopic
to gigantic (even allowing half font point sizes) thanks to its
excellent font rendering, and the ability to apply "Sharp", "Crisp",
"Strong" and other styles to the fonts. Its ability to do live
resizing, rotating and scaling of text works beautifully and still
retains the quality of text unexpectedly well. It was strange
however that when you highlight text to experiment with fonts, that
the highlighting is in black with poor inverting - forcing you to
remove the highlight every time you make a change to see if the
desired results have been achieved. Adobe Bridge does a great job of
showcasing available images, and its live scaling allows you to
customize exact thumbnail sizes to your liking. Adobe Bridge is now
also an easy access point to stock libraries where you can purchase
licenses for use in your designs. PhotoShop is by no means an easy
application to master, and you should therefore allow for somewhat
of a steep learning curve to master its abilities.
GoLive, is the HTML
and web site development tool of the suite. GoLive is the all-in-one
site manager that allows page composition, asset management and
publishing to FTP or secured FTP servers. While we found it had all
the standard and enhanced tools you would find in such an
application, its overall intuitiveness was sometimes lacking. Some
of the live page composition tools were too fidgety such as the
table creation and manipulation tools; and editing individual Cells
required tabbing to the correct properties tab to change its
properties. When modifying the colour of objects, having to hold
down the mouse button to select the colour was awkward and could
have been more intuitively designed. Text seemed to require a right
mouse click and selection of the Font property from a laundry list
of items, when this should be an attribute available as part of the
common tool bars. New features for this version include the ability
to manipulate PhotoShop and PDF objects at the layer level while in
the GoLive environment. A feature that allows developers using Adobe
InCopy to dole out different segments of a document to different
developers to concurrently work on the same content. GoLive's multi
view options let you view your web page in WYSIWYG mode, code mode,
split mode, Preview mode and even PDF review mode. The ability to
zoom in the WYSIWYG was a nice touch we have not seen on other web
page design packages. GoLive is also very much into CSS, with visual
editing tools making it easy to produce CSS compliant visual
elements for both standard browsers and mobile devices.
Adobe Acrobat
enabled conversion of documents in other formats, multiple documents
in multiple formats, scanned images and web pages into portable
documents that are viewable by an incredibly large install base
around the world. The excellent part of PDF files is that they
retain their look and feel such as fonts, irrespective of where they
go, unlike many other formats. Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 isn't a
document composition program, but rather a way of changing other
documents into the Acrobat format. In addition to its ability to
retain the intended look and feel of a document, there are a vast
range of other features that can be applied such as secure
documents, managed document distribution, version control,
commenting and digital signature
capabilities. It even has the ability to create forms that users can
fill out, attach digital signatures and submit from the PDF to a centralized email address
for collection by a centralized entity. With
Acrobat Professional 7, it made converting documents to the format
incredibly easy by adding "Convert to Adobe PDF" drop downs in just
about every application imaginable. With a couple mouse clicks your
documents are converted over without any other input required.
Unfortunately, PDF
rendering time was considerably higher than expected. Converting a
typical one page invoice with one graphic and a handful of tables
took 16 seconds to fully convert into a PDF file. We were hoping for
slightly faster if this were to be a tool that is used on a daily
basis. Rendering of PDF files are generally very good, but not
perfect, with table lines continuing several pixels past there
intended stopping point and some images having a "jagged edged"
effect. Nothing major, but when being used as a brochure
distribution method or for invoicing you want everything to be as
close to perfect as possible. We did encounter a number of times
where the plug-ins to the applications we used such as Microsoft
Word would break causing the Acrobat program to stop producing PDF
files for that document format. Although the remedy is not
difficult, its continual reoccurrence was bothersome. Adobe has done
an excellent job, however, of improving the load times of existing
PDF files through the use of an 'Acrobat Speed Launcher' found in
the Windows Startup folder.
The help tool
provided with the suite did an acceptable job of answering common
questions. Our search for "text rotation" came up with a variety of
highly applicable results that answered our questions and more.
Performance was not
the suite's strong point. While going through the various applications,
load times were by no means fast. GoLive for example takes upwards
of 10 seconds, PhotoShop a full 15 seconds, and Illustrator a whopping 26
seconds to load on our well specified test box (Dell Dimension XPS
Gen3, Pentium 4 3.6GHz with 1GB memory, SATA 160GB drive, and ATI
X800SE graphics card). Even Adobe Bridge (several seconds), took
longer to load than hoped considering it is just for viewing images.
Overall Adobe
offers a solid package for all of your creative endeavors, it really
is a creative "suite" in the truest sense of the word. With all the
components you need, conveniently wired together to help you
expedite your design and document projects. There were some
shortcomings in the intuitiveness department and generally slower
than average load times. However, each application is absolutely
brimming with features and functionality that is frankly rare to
find in such concentration -- essentially allowing you to do fully
exercise your creativity. If you look at the individual tools and
compare them to competition such as PhotoShop to Corel PhotoPaint or
GoLive to Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage they are in
stiff competition, and at this point are more to be decided on a
personal preference level than anything else. PhotoShop handles some
image and text manipulation better than PhotoPaint, but PhotoPaint
has an easier interface and lesser learning curve to deal with.
GoLive does well at utilizing the latest CSS and design methods;
while FrontPage again offers a more intuitive interface and design
tools but suffers from relying on less leading edge technologies.
Direct competition to Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium would be
Macromedia's Studio MX 2004. While Dreamweaver MX could arguably be
a more attractive HTML design tool, Adobe's suite would crush
Macromedia's suite in the graphics design department without
exception. However Macromedia's Flash is an essential animated
graphics tool that is widely used in web design and viewed by an
enormous install base that Adobe's suite could certainly use.
Ultimately trying these applications either in a suite or individually
by means of trial downloads is the best way to get a feel of what
tools work best for your needs and working style.
Creative Suite 2
comes in Windows and Mac varieties. Windows installations require a
Pentium III or 4 processor; 512mb to 1gb memory; 3gb of drive space
for full installation; 1024x768 24-bit colour display; and Windows
2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP1 or SP2 installed. Mac
installations require a PowerPC G4 or G5 processor; 512mb to 1gb
memory; 4gb of drive space for full installation; 1024x768 24-bit
colour display; and Mac OS X v.10.2.8 to v.10.4 and the Java Runtime
Environment 1.4.1. Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium has a recommended
retail price of $1,199.00USD with an upgrade version available for
$549.00USD for users with qualifying products. Academic pricing is
available for qualifying students at $399.00USD. Note that from time
to time Adobe may have rebate offers specific to this product.
Creative Suite 2 Premium is available immediately at all major
computer and electronics retailers; and the Adobe web site online
store. Product activation is required for this title.
PROS - All your favorite industry leading design tools in one
convenient package; all included applications are incredibly feature
rich; some positive new enhancements to the individual applications; great integration between applications and 3rd party
applications; help system provides useful responses; package price
is affordable when considering the sheer wealth of tools included;
little niceties added throughout applications that are not apparent
in competing offerings.
CONS - Bugs in relation to Acrobat plug-ins; sluggish
application load times even on a well specified machine; steep
learning curve to get around interface for some included
applications; slow PDF rendering times and slight inconsistencies
from the original; design tools sometimes cumbersome or unintuitive.
About The Author
Jon Deragon is president and founder of Visca Consulting, a firm
specializing in web site design, development and usability for
businesses of all sizes. His many years in the technology industry has
enabled him to write quality, in-depth product reviews to assist
businesses make more informed technology purchases. He welcomes any
questions or comments you may have regarding his company's services,
this review or interest in having your company's products reviewed.
info@viscaconsulting.com
http://www.viscaconsulting.com/
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