Adobe Creative Suite 5 Review

Every time you’ve convinced yourself that Adobe can’t take its array of design and production products any further, another version of the Creative Suite comes along to prove you wrong.Creative Suite 5 (CS5), for both Mac and Windows, injects many of Adobe’s existing killer apps—such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash—with some mind-boggling new capabilities, and introduces a new program or two you may not have known you needed. But with the exception of Acrobat, version 9 of which was released in early 2008, every CS5 app has received either a major or minor refreshing, which makes CS5 one of Creative Suite’s most extensive updates yet.

In some cases, it’s even dazzling. Take the app that’s unquestionably Adobe’s best-known: Photoshop. Though it’s been the industry standard for years due to its dizzying selection of tools for tweaking every aspect of bitmap images, it performs what seems like literal magic this time around. This is thanks to its Content-Aware Fill feature: Just select the part of the image you want to excise, hit the delete key, and away it goes—leaving the background of the image intact. (For more on how this feature works, check out the ExtremeTech story, “Digital Prestidigitation with Photoshop CS5’s Content-Aware Fill.”) But loaded with new ways to select portions of images and process photos before and after they come off the camera, it’s got a little bit of something for everyone.

InDesign CS5 doesn’t introduce quite as much that’s new, but makes a grand show of revitalizing what’s been around for a while. Its designers have blown dust off previous versions (which didn’t seem as intuitive as fluid as other parts of the Creative Suite) and have finally brought this app up to date with its siblings. Changes to image placement and manipulation, captions, text flowing, and a lot more make this previously arcane (and sometimes frustrating) program now one of the easiest to learn and use in all of CS5.

Some of the programs have received major performance or usability enhancements. Chief among these is Premiere Pro, which has a completely rebuilt 64-bit playback engine and numerous other tiny fixes to speed working with large film or video projects and reduce the amount of time they take to view and render. Other programs get smaller changes still, but ones that will still be appreciated by longtime users. Illustrator, for example, introduces new ways of working with and arranging multiple artboards (which were themselves introduced in CS4), as well as more ways to deal with strokes and brushes. Web design app Dreamweaver has been treated with new concern for CSS, PHP, and cross-platform testing.

Flash Professional has received a new text engine and new video and drawing tools, to help streamline the expert’s creation of exciting animation and multimedia content. What if you’re far from a guru, but have always yearned to design scrollbars or buttons, or add simple animations to your own Web creations? Adobe has you covered there: With the new Flash Catalyst CS5, just a few clicks can get you and your creations moving, using skills not that much different than those you’d use in Illustrator.

That represents perhaps Adobe’s most significant focus of CS5: getting all these individual apps to play nicely together. Collaboration and interoperability are present here in ways they’ve never been before. Illustrator and Flash Catalyst have a very close relationship that simplifies editing graphical elements when you need them; InDesign’s new animation capabilities make it a natural for brotherhood with Flash Professional, and you can export your InDesign documents directly to it—with no loss of content or fidelity. CS Review, one of the new parts of the Adobe CS Live online service, makes it even easier for people to work with each other on multiple projects. If you like functionality of Adobe Bridge for collecting assets, Mini Bridge is a new version that exists directly within several of the programs (including Photoshop and InDesign), so you never have to switch windows in order to find what you’re looking for.

There’s a lot of innovation here—even more, it seems, than was present in CS4 when that was released a year and a half ago—and that doesn’t come cheap. You can buy the apps individually—each one, except for the hot-off-the-presses Flash Catalyst, has pricing for both new and upgrade versions, the latter spreading across several generations so you don’t need to worry about being too out of date. Or you can buy grouped products within various collections according to the overall job at hand: Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium (Web Standard has been eliminated), and Production Premium include different combinations of software at different prices; the $2,499 Master Collection gives you everything. Check out our pricing chart for a full rundown of what the collections offer, as well as the pricing for them and the individual apps.

Any version of Adobe CS5 may be an expensive proposition, but a lot of what’s been added this time around may make it worth it—particularly if you haven’t upgraded in a while.

Source: pcmag.com