Adobe Creative Suite 5
Standard production suite for the design industry, Creative Suite hits its fifth iteration - but is it a high five?
22 June 2010
Every eighteen months or so, Adobe releases a new version of Creative Suite. It's fair to say that the product has got better and better with each release, although CS4 was solid if a little underwhelming.
Creative Suite 5 has just landed. If you're already a Creative Suite customer, with (say) the Design Premium version of the suite, the upgrade will cost you around £550. If you're not, then you're looking at the thick end of £1700. Whichever way you look at it, that's a lot of money. So, is it worth it? We took a look at the Design Premium version of the suite.
Well, you do get a lot of applications for your money. With Design Premium, you get Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Flash Catalyst, and InDesign. At full price, that's a very reasonable £240-odd per application, which is not bad when you consider that these are all pretty much best in their class. If you're upgrading, the cost is around £78 per application - which is very good indeed.
Overall, the suite is vastly improved. Once you've installed it (which, as you can imagine, takes some time) and got the applications running, the first thing you'll likely notice is speed. Despite the various new features, CS5 seems much quicker than CS4. It's very snappy and responsive - and also very solid. This is especially true of Photoshop, which is now coded as a native 64-bit application, enabling it to also edit much larger files. You'll need a 64-bit OS to take advantage of this - OS X Snow Leopard is 64-bit by default, but with Windows you will need to install the 64-bit version.
Photoshop
Let's say this at the start: the changes to Photoshop alone are worth the suite upgrade price. A few of the new features are such impressive time-savers that they will pay for themselves very rapidly.
The most impressive of these is the content-aware fill. You know the scenario: you need to delete something from an image, but the background is so complex that you can't just delete the item and clone the new background - you can always tell that it's been edited. Content-aware fill makes this a reliable and one-click process - you just roughly select and delete the item, and Photoshop makes its best guess as to what to replace it with. And its best guess is very good - usually so good that no further work is needed. An example of how it works might be a road through a desert - where the desert has rocks, bushes and so on. Select and delete the road, and Photoshop creates a seamless continuation of whatever rocks and bushes surround it. It's stunning.
Another great time-saver is the lens correction filter. Let's say you have a photo with pin-cushion or barrel distortion created by the lens. Correcting this manually can be a time-consuming pain - and you never really get it perfect. Now, the lens correction filter does all of the hard work for you - based on profiles of common lenses (and you can download more profiles).
The new puppet warp filter is equally useful. So, let's imagine you have a picture of a horse, but the head is in slightly the wrong position. You apply a mesh over the object, so that Photoshop 'understands' the shape - then you can manipulate it, stretch, twist and so on, until it's exactly right. With just a little care, the results are amazing. Another real time-saver.
There are lots of productivity enhancements, too - for example, it's now much easier to straighten an image.
This version of Photoshop marks the product's 20th anniversary - and it's a feature-rich upgrade that is worthy of such a milestone. If Photoshop is one of your key tools, don't even think twice: it's well worth the upgrade.
InDesign
InDesign is typically referred to as a 'competitor to Quark', acknowledging Quark's dominance in the desktop publishing arena. However, that has been changing - to the point where the market share of Quark is declining in favour of InDesign. And with good reason: the product gets better with every release - and this version sees it jumping even further ahead.
Perhaps the greatest new feature is quite a subtle one. The way layers are displayed in the layers pane now also shows the hierarchy of each element within the layer. This makes it easy to locate, select, reorder or delete items - without first having to ungroup the item (if it is part of a group). It's a real time-saver that you'll use every day. Another nice new feature is the 'mini bridge' panel that allows you to find graphics on your hard drive without using the 'place' dialog box - it's a panel like any other, you keep it open all the time and then just drag in files as you need them. A new feature we really, really liked is the content grabber - resizing pictures within a frame used to be quite long-winded, but now you just hover over a picture and the content grabber appears. You select that, then you can resize the image - without having to double-click or use the direct selection tool.
Documents can have different page sizes within the same file - excellent for brochures where one page (such as a flap) is a different size. Better still, you can now set text to have different numbers of columns, all within the same text box. So, if your design has a heading that spans three columns, then three columns of text, then two, it can all be done in a single text box.
Interactive publishing is also vastly improved, with far better support for different types of animation, buttons and timings - allowing you to create documents which are then exported to Flash. This iteration of InDesign sees it step up to be a more accomplished interactive design tool.
Illustrator
Illustrator has been around even longer than Photoshop: the first version was released in 1988! However, for the first time, we've found that Illustrator is a programme you can love. As well as new features, refinements along the way have now made it much easier (and less frustrating) to use.
Probably the biggest improvement is that any kind of stroke can now have its width changed at any point along the stroke - that's right, strokes can now be easily and controllably variable width. This feature alone rewrites how effective you can be with the product.
Illustrator now has the ability to handle perspective, via the new perspective grid tool - you create a perspective grid with a drag and a click, then anything you draw on that grid aligns to the perspective of the grid.
Even small changes, such as the 'align to pixel' feature, have a big impact - ensuring that single pixel lines in a website design aren't then anti-aliased.
Fireworks
Fireworks is an often overlooked part of Creative Suite, but for website design professionals it is a core working tool. There are fewer major enhancements to the programme, but it is significantly quicker and more robust. More attention has been paid to usability, so (for example) you can browse through different pages by selecting thumbnails - an obvious enhancement that saves lots of time. Like Illustrator, snap to pixel ensures that website graphics are clean and sharp, with unnecessary anti-aliasing avoided.
Flash Professional
With the current battles between Adobe and Apple, Flash is getting a bit of a bad name for being processor-intensive and buggy. However, the fact remains that it's still by far and away the Web's most popular way of displaying video, animation and interactive content. Flash is another product with vast improvements. A key one of these is that video can now be encoded on import - so that when a video is placed on the timeline, it can be scrubbed through directly, making it far easier to work with. Finally, Flash gets decent typographical control, using the same framework as other CS5 products, to provide access to kerning and ligatures - so now Flash files can have professional-looking text. Better still, Flash now has proper text blocks - allowing for multicolumn layout and inline graphics. This is a real move forward for the product, making it far more flexible than ever before.
Flash Catalyst
The problem with Flash is that it's a big, complex product. When you want to create a prototype, or just a basic animation, it can seem too much like hard work. New to Creative Suite, Flash Catalyst allows Flash files to be created with much more ease - especially when you are taking an originating design from Fireworks, Photoshop or Illustrator. We found it to be an interesting but still slightly immature product - experienced Flash developers will probably shun it, and novices will still find it too intimidating - Microsoft's Expression Blend is a far better example of an easy-to-use interactive design tool. Catalyst is not a bad product, but ultimately we found it to be a swing and a miss. Roll on version two.
Acrobat
Acrobat is also bundled with CS5, but sadly it's the current version (9) - which means that you'll have to pay separately to upgrade that at a later date.
Overall, Creative Suite 5 is a truly fantastic upgrade to an already solid product. When you consider the number of versions that have already been released of some of the component products, it's astonishing that Adobe can find anything new to add. But the quality of the new features, their number and the solidity of the product make this nothing less than an essential upgrade.
