Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium
Complete suite of web related graphics and publishing
tools.
By Jon Deragon,
Visca Consulting
Tuesday September 4, 2007; 8:30pm EST
When Adobe initially launched the Creative Suite product line, the
concept of having all your critical web tools in a single
application suite sounded great and was long overdue. Now that Adobe
has launched their third and latest installment named CS3, it has
gone from a great idea to a necessity for any serious web designer.
With the application suite concept taking off and competitors such
as Microsoft offering their own application suite, the question is
how does the latest CS3 version stack up? Let�s find out�
Adobe Creative Suite 3 comes in a whole new variety of versions
catering to the particular needs of different design specialists.
The comprehensive range of suite versions essentially add or remove
products depending on requirements from the �Design Standard�
edition that gives you the essentials to the �Master Collection�
which includes everything except the kitchen sink (or maybe there is
a kitchen sink, there is so much packed in there it�s quite
possible!), and everything in-between. The edition we will divert
our attention to for the sake of this review is the �Web Premium�
edition which focuses on the needs of advanced web designers and
developers wanting to develop rich and dynamic multimedia sites.
The Web Premium edition has an excellent line up of Adobe
applications including PhotoShop CS3 Extended, Illustrator CS3,
Acrobat 8 Professional, Dreamweaver CS3, Fireworks CS3, Contribute
CS3, Bridge CS3 and Version Cue CS3. Additionally the package
includes a limited range of fonts and stock photography to get you
started. Once you rip open the attractively styled packaging,
getting the program from the discs to your computer is a quick and
painless process. With minimal effort you will have the entire suite
installed and ready to roll in minutes. Product activation is
required and is performed the first time any of the included
applications are launched. Activation takes seconds and caused no
issues or problems whatsoever.
When installed you have a seamless environment containing just about
every tool imaginable to take your web ideas from prototype to live
on the web � essentially handling all aspects of the development
life cycle. Each application has undergone a number of enhancements
since the CS2 version, and appears to have gone through even further
seamless integration between each program and the third party
applications they connect with. All of the applications share a
clean, easy to use interface that is the predictable combination of
drop downs menus, tool bars and docks - everything you typically
need is relatively accessible with little effort. The interfaces are
low on clutter giving you ample work space, but always the ability
to customize docks to show exactly what you want. While these
applications offer plenty of work space, like most new generation
applications and suites a widescreen display goes a long way to
making your work a whole lot easier.
The PhotoShop CS3 Extended image editing tool, takes the standard
PhotoShop concept and drops in additional tools suitable for not
only image work but 3D objects as well. New to CS3 is nondestructive
editing, which retains the original image data of objects you edit.
This is great for when you filter, scale and rotate objects and
later on need to change the object again. With many editing tools,
once you have edited an object, a lot of the image data has been
lost making further modifications a nightmare later down the road.
Design professionals know you're only as good as your selection
tools, and PhotoShop has added it's new Quick Selection tool. Simply
draw around the perimeter of the area to select and Quick Selection
will attempt to automatically cut right to the edge of the object
within the area you chose. It works quite well when cutting objects
from images with limited backgrounds or simple gradients, requiring
only minor cleanup afterwards. Trying to extract objects from
complicated background was a different story, and the tool often
became confused when even vaguely similar colored objects were
present and required extensive clean up or retracing in areas. The
previewing system allows you to further refine the selected area
with a host of variables, but in many cases cleanup was still needed
afterwards. Despite all of this, since selecting can be tedious and
time consuming, Quick Selection does ultimately help to cut down the
work involved quite considerably - leaving you only correctional
type work to do.
Getting back to the
'Extended' functionality of this version of PhotoShop, you can now
load and manipulate 3D models in a wide variety of formats (3DS,
OBJ, U3D, KMZ and more) directly inside of PhotoShop and incorporate
them into your images. Not only can you do things like rotate the
objects, but you can actually edit their texture bitmaps. Finally,
your ability to share what you do in PhotoShop
has also been improved - allowing you to now easily drop images
directly into Dreamweaver projects and import into Flash or After
Effects. One thing I had noticed with both PhotoShop and Illustrator
is how cleanly it renders text and shapes such as circles or
rectangles that are on an angle - the anti-aliasing is excellent,
making anything you do crisp and highly legible.
Illustrator CS3, the vector illustration design application, enjoys
a number of tweaks this time around. Better integration with Flash
means you can drop your Illustrator files directly into Flash -
which makes perfect sense being that they are both vector programs.
This could certainly reduce development times for Flash animation
work - as the Illustrator interface is more inductive for detailed
vector design. Designing specifically for web or mobile applications
has become easier with HTML, GIF and JPEG exporting built-in, and an
ability to preview mobile pages using the included Adobe Device
Central software. Other new features include document profiles for
web and mobile devices; live color for web and interactive allowing
you to create multiple color version of a design while prototyping;
and a crop area tool for selecting specific areas as web designs or
mobile device screen dimensions.
Flash CS3 Professional is the vector animation and enhanced
multimedia application used for producing the incredibly popular
Flash multimedia format. While little has changed interface wise,
this version has a treat many have been waiting for... The ability
to import PhotoShop and Illustrator files while keeping the layers
and structure in tact, and even being able to edit them within
Flash. You can also now convert animations into ActionScript for
easier editing and reuse later on. ActionScript 3 with a new
debugging system increases scripting efficiency all-round. And new
drawing capabilities let you in design time change shape properties
on the stage with a variety of tools inspired by Illustrator.
Finally Flash CS3 has enhanced QuickTime format exporting options to
allow nested movie clips and runtime effects. While each iteration
of Flash works to improve its functionality and ease of use, there
should be more to lessen the learning curve for beginner users of
the software, such as a more visually based method of ActionScript
coding.
Dreamweaver CS3 is the web site production tool of the suite, and is
definitely a stand out winner. It is an absolute pleasure to design
pages with Dreamweaver. Whether you�re producing web pages in
design, code view or a combination of both as most do, it has
handfuls of features and attention to detail niceties that make your
job infinitely easier. Any web designer knows that time crunches
come with the job, and it ends up being the small detail types of
features that make or break a timeline commitment. The interface has
a fantastic combination of a traditional drop down menu, tab based
Insert menus, docks for things such as CSS styles, and a great work
area.
When in 'Code View'
the color of the source code is fully context sensitive making it
easy to program with; it suggests tags and variables as you type to
quicken coding; and can instantly highlight invalid code or validate
the entire HTML with a single button click. You can rest assured
your code will work for everyone with complete browser compatibility
checking, and accessibility compliance checking built-in.
Dreamweaver natively supports all the major scripting standards such
as XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, ASP and JSP so you are
not limited to specific formats when working on the variety of
client requirements you encounter on a day to day basis. The coding
is clean, rarely requires more than minimal clean up afterwards for
optimization and is fully standards compliant. We simply didn't see
some of the ridiculous coding decisions we have seen on other HTML
editors, the code makes perfect sense and is a perfect blended use
of CSS and traditional non-depreciated HTML tag use. It is also a
pleasure to work with CSS font and layout styles in Dreamweaver,
which isn't always the case with other HTML editors, even new
generation versions.
The 'Design View'
is fantastic and definitely the best we've encountered. Effortless
creation of tables with pixel perfect precision assisted by highly
intuitive sizing tools that give you exact measurements with
immediate pixel width feedback. Thank you Adobe! When Dreamweaver
detects server-side include tags, it automatically attempts to
emulate as if the page were running on the server and displays the
includes on page during design, fantastic! When selecting or
creating an object, there are tons of variables associated with them
that are easily editable in the properties dock. And the 'Split
View' accurately remembers your split point on the screen for future
sessions. I cannot stress enough what a joy it is to work with
Dreamweaver CS3.
Acrobat 8
Professional and the PDF format have enjoyed wild success over the
past several years at least. The newest version of Acrobat, the
program used to compile and view PDF files has benefited from a
faster rendering engine and better integration. Gone are the
cumbersome Office plug-ins that we found less than stable in the
prior version, replaced by Print output from your favorite
applications. While rendering times for converting documents such as
Microsoft Word are still not stellar, they have certainly improved.
It is strange that Microsoft's Office 2007 export option for PDF is
in fact faster than Adobe's but that margin has lessened in the
latest version. Render quality, while again has improved, still
shows imperfections, particularly when handling document tables
where some bordered cells are adjacent to borderless cells
(typically found in invoices and other table based documents).
Fireworks, Contribute, Bridge, Version Cue have also all enjoyed
improvements. Most notably Fireworks CS3 now has multipage support
for having multiple pages within a document that share layers;
Contribute now has extensive authoring permissions for controlling
content updating at a granular level as well as support for
publishing directly from Microsoft Office applications.
Are there any downsides to the CS3 Web Premium suite? Applications
could stand to use a bit more pep at load time. While some like
Dreamweaver and Flash have improved load times, PhotoShop and
Illustrator were less than enthusiastic in loading. Also, many of
the variables fields such as where you enter zoom, widths, heights,
and other numbers require manual entry with the keyboard - editable
drop down menus with commonly used values (example, zoom
measurements of 25%, 50%, 100%, 200%, 300%) would expedite modifying
these numbers. As you can see, this is a pretty minor list of
problems... we really didn't encounter any other notable turn-offs
or problems with the suite.
Overall I was excited to see that most of our issues with CS3�s
predecessor were resolved, and that what we have now is a clean cut,
incredibly feature filled all-in-one solution that allows any
webmaster with $1,500 to have a complete design studio on their
workstation. If in the market should you consider Adobe Creative
Suite 3 or arguably it's main competitor Microsoft Expression
Studio? The simple fact of the matter is that Adobe has the market
cornered when it comes to standards� Flash and PDF are the industry
standards we all work with daily. Whether Microsoft�s competing
formats such as Silverlight or XPS will ever enjoy similar
saturation or even become competitive is debatable at this point.
The install rate and use of these new formats will ultimately
dictate the outcome. If you have CS2 is it worth the upgrade? It
depends on your usage of the suite... in many instances it would
most likely be worth the somewhat affordable upgrade costs. Just the
improved ability to share between the core applications would make
it worth it for many designers. It's all a matter of determining
whether the new features will deliver productivity gains that
justify the cost - for hardcore designers, probably yes.
Creative Suite 3
Web Premium is available for both Windows and Mac platforms. Windows
system requirements include all Windows Vista editions excluding
basic or Windows XP SP2; Pentium 4, Centrino, Xeon or Core Due
processor; 1GB memory; 5GB of drive space; modern video card and
monitor specifications. Mac requirements include OS X 10.4.8; JRE
1.5 for Version Cue; Power PC G4 or G5 or multi-core Intel
processor; 1GB memory and modern video equipment. Retail pricing
comes in at $1,599.00 USD for the full version and $499.00 USD for
an upgrade (prices may vary store to store). Creative Suite 3 Web
Premium is available immediately from all major computer and
electronics providers. The product can be purchased as a shrink wrap
product at retail stores or as a 3.2GB downloadable file from Adobe.
PROS - Dreamweaver is a dream to work with... slick
interface and attention to detail, clean and intelligently produced
code, standards compliance, CSS to the max, browser compatibility
checking, great include handling during design time. The seamless
integration of applications and the ability to share between
programs. Reasonable price when considering the amount of pro tools
you get. More reliable PDF exporting from third party applications.
Quick Selection tool in PhotoShop reduces selection times.
CONS
- Some slow application load times; limited fonts included compared to
some competitors; applications may have challenging
learning curve for beginners; no drop downs for commonly used
settings where variables are entered; slow and sometimes
inaccurate rendering of PDF documents.
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/
|
