Adobe Creative Suite

Productivity and feature enhancements make this upgrade a must for designers.

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Price: £927.08

Manufacturer: Adobe

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Verdict

Pros:

Tighter integration and new file management features.

Cons:
Some new features haven't materialised; Golive lags behind Dreamweaver.

Verdict:
An upgrade opportunity no professional designer should overlook.

Ken McMahon, Personal Computer World 16 Feb 2004

In a typically bold move, Adobe has abandoned version numbers and combined its four design products - Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Golive, plus the Acrobat 6 pdf authoring application - into a suite of applications entitled Adobe Creative Suite. Each of the new applications (with the exception of Acrobat) carries the CS suffix and, although you can still buy them individually, it wouldn't make much financial sense.

Adobe upgrades have always been as much about redefining workflows and improving productivity as well as rolling out new features, and Creative Suite is not merely an exercise designed to save on packaging. As well as extending integration between the four applications, Adobe has added a fifth - Version Cue.

Version Cue is a networkable file management and administration system designed for those with no experience of file management. Particularly in small to medium-sized production departments, file management and versioning is a logistical nightmare often with ad hoc arrangements for location and version naming of files. Version Cue provides a solution without imposing an onerous administration burden.

Version Cue is installed on a host machine and is available to all users within a workgroup. Its projects don't exist as volumes on the desktop, but are accessed from within the save and open dialogue boxes of CS applications. As the name suggests, Version Cue's primary task is to transparently save CS documents as successive versions, rather than overwriting the existing one.

Each version is date and user stamped and, if desired, annotated. In an emergency any prior version can be reinstated. This obviously has to be managed if terminal disk bloat is to be avoided, but Version Cue makes this a simple deletion task.

Documents are locked to other users in the workgroup while they are being edited and also if they have been saved outside of Version Cue, for example, to work on them at home.

Version Cue lacks the sophistication of more capable file management systems which, in our view, makes it perfect for the task - a utility that will become indispensable for everyone from the lone freelancer up.

Indesign CS

As with other applications in the suite, Adobe has concentrated on workspace and productivity improvements, rather than adding major features to Indesign CS. A context-sensitive control palette - a superior version of the Quark measurements palette - takes over the functions of the character, paragraph, transform, stroke and table palettes.

With the type tool selected, the control palette can be toggled between character and paragraph views. Select an image and it displays the transform palette data and the stroke type and weight menus, together with dedicated buttons for content fitting - fit content to frame and so on.

The new info palette, similar to that of Photoshop's and Illustrator's, provides all you need to know about an object and the means to edit it. It's remarkable how much information Adobe has succeeded in presenting while avoiding clutter and overload. With an image selected, the info palette reports the file type, colour space, profile and resolution at the original and scaled size. With the type tool selected, character, word, line and paragraph counts are also provided.

Like most of the other palettes, the info palette can be docked in a collapsible side tab, or free-floated on screen alone, or in combination with other palettes, as before.

A layout-independent story editor that provides a word processor-style view of the text and permits copy and style editing has long been a feature of Pagemaker, and Adobe has at last added this capability to Indesign.

The already excellent Pre-press features have been enhanced by the addition of a new separations preview palette which provides previews of individual and progressive CMYK and spot colour plates. Another new palette, the Flattener preview palette, shows how transparent effects will output when rasterised at various resolutions.

Other improvements include new pdf authoring and export tools, support for Photoshop spot colour channels, improved master page handling, pathfinder commands, bleeds and slugs and a new package for Golive command which prepares layouts for web authoring.

Photoshop CS

A new Photoshop release is always keenly anticipated, and this one is no exception. Last time around it was the healing tool that caused the excitement, this time the big new feature is the shadow/highlight command. The nearest thing we've seen to this is Photoshop Elements' Adjust Backlighting command, but shadow/highlights provides much more control.

Essentially, it improves badly exposed images such as those shot with strong backlighting and no fill-in flash, where the subject is in deep shadow. It works by comparing pixel values with neighbouring pixels over a given radius and thus confining changes only to the shadow or highlight areas.

The defaults are set to rectify the backlight problem described but, by using the amount, radius, tonal width, colour correction and midtone contrast sliders, a variety of exposure problems can be addressed.

The new Match colour command matches colours between multiple images, layers or selections. This might be used, for example, to remove inconsistencies in studio shots taken with different lighting conditions. The dialogue box requires you to specify a source and target document, but there are also sliders for luminance, colour intensity and fade.

The layers palette has been revised and it's now possible to nest layer sets up to five layers deep. Another feature that will make layer management of complex images, such as web pages, much simpler is Layer Comps. These allow you to record the state of layer visibility, position, blending options and effects for future recall.

The new Filter Gallery allows you to experiment with and apply multiple filters simultaneously from within a single dialogue box. This can be resized to fill the screen with a big preview window. As well as applying multiple filters, you can easily change the stacking order, but only the artistic, brush strokes, distort, sketch and stylise filters are included.

The browser is much faster and now has its own toggle button on the toolbar. You can perform batch processing from the browser, add flags, keywords and even edit metadata, saving this header information without resaving and recompressing jpeg image data.

This version of Photoshop has just one new tool - the colour replacement tool. Other new features and enhancements include fully integrated support for 16bit colour, text on a path, live histograms, lens blur effects, non-square pixel support, photo filters and the Camera Raw plug-in and Photoshop Elements' Photomerge panoramic stitching tool.

Illustrator CS

The most noticeable thing about Illustrator CS is its speed. Top of the new features list is the 3D tools which allow you to extrude, revolve and rotate 2D shapes to create and manipulate the third dimension.

The dialogue box for the revolve and extrude commands includes controls for three-axis rotation, perspective and shading and lighting controls. You can set the extrusion depth and add a bevel, and the revolve dialogue will provide an angle setting so you can stop the revolve at any point, for example to produce a quarter-turned 3D object. You can also apply an offset so the object rotates about a point other than its centre - useful for creating cylinders and other hollow objects.

While these new 3D tools don't provide anything like the functionality of 3D applications such as Lightwave or Maya, they are, nonetheless, a useful addition to Illustrator's toolbox.

Adobe has had a blitz on Illustrator's typographic features, bringing it in line with Indesign. The first thing you'll notice is that fonts are now displayed in Wysiwyg form in the font menu and their type - Opentype, Truetype or Postscript - is identified by an icon.

Typographic enhancements include character and paragraph styles, improved support for Opentype features, including a glyph palette, optical kerning and margin alignment, tab leaders, hyphenation and justification, and easier linking of text boxes. In fact, Illustrator now has just about all the typographic features of Indesign, including the every-line composer that examines blocks of text to determine the best line breaks.

'Type on a path' options have been expanded with a new Path type submenu with five alignment options. You can also control character alignment from the 'Path type options' dialogue box.

A new 'Save for Microsoft Office' option optimises files for Word, Powerpoint or Excel, while improved output options and a generous package of templates, brushes, swatches, symbol libraries and fonts will all help to broaden Illustrator's appeal beyond the professional design market.

Golive CS

With this release of Golive Adobe is clearly out to tempt web designers away from Dreamweaver by providing tighter integration with applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. For those who need to repurpose print content for the web, Indesign's Package for Golive command prepares XML content for drag-and-drop import to Golive via a viewer application, a more workable arrangement than HTML export filters.

A new code completion engine offers a selection of syntactically correct code elements based on what you're currently typing. This includes support for CSS, Javascript, PHP, SMIL, SVG and XML, and is as much a learning tool as a convenience for more experienced coders.

Contact: Adobe 020 8606 4001
www.adobe.com

Price Details:
RRP Standard Edition £927.08 (£789 ex VAT)
Premium Edition £1115.08 (£949 ex VAT)
Photoshop upgrade £663.88 (£565 ex VAT)

System Requirements: