Our massive guide to Adobe's huge overhaul of the Creative Suite, including reviews of Photoshop CS4, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver.
The new standard in professional power has arrived for designers working in print, web or video production – or any mixture of the three. And for the first time, Adobe has managed to get all of its design flagships sporting the same interface and released simultaneously.
While Adobe has been talking up news of its online Photoshop.com site, the real excitement for power users is the Creative Suite 4 platform. With 14 separate releases in all, as well as key supporting programs such as Adobe Device Central for mobile device design and Adobe Bridge for creative asset management, it’s a formidable range of power.
There’s more than enough for you to sink your teeth into here – nine products. And with an incredible depth of power on offer as well as a breadth of features, Adobe looks to have once again strengthened its creative software offering.
So what's new?
If you can overlook the huge discrepancy between US and Australian pricing, then the CS4 Master Collection certainly offers the best value of the suites on paper. It lets you buy all the applications at a fraction of their combined standalone cost. It's expensive, but if you’re looking for a bundle that includes InDesign, After Effects and Flash Professional all together, the Master Collection is the only choice you have. Read the full review.
Adobe Photoshop is universally recognised as the most powerful photo-editor available, but Adobe isn’t resting on its laurels. With Photoshop CS4, it has made the best even better. The one real jaw-dropper is the new Content Aware Image Scaling, which lets you drag to resize your image in real time and, while you do so, Photoshop CS4 automatically removes just the ‘uninteresting’ areas. When you first see this, the effect is magical. Read the full review.
In its Design Premium suite, Adobe has been able to take advantage of its takeover of Macromedia to drop its own second-rate web offerings and replace them with the web industry standards: Dreamweaver for producing code-based web pages and Flash. Paper-based publishing remains central to Adobe’s mission, but in this release of CS4 the importance of onscreen electronic publishing via the web comes a close second. It’s difficult to argue with the flexibility, power and value that each one offers. Read the full review.
Compared with rivals such as Xara and CorelDRAW, the Illustrator program is still heavy going. But with this CS4 release, Adobe is determined to make the program work on the side of its users, not against them, starting with the interface. New features include a Workspace switcher with more presets to choose from, tabbed documents, plus the ability to split the screen and control which layout appears in which window. The level of advanced creative control that Illustrator offers is unmatched, and this CS4 release adds important new features and makes existing power more accessible. Read the full review.
Despite the occasional shortcoming, the improvements and enhancements to InDesign CS4 means it remains a step ahead of Quark and looks set to further strengthen its hold on the publishing industry. The big new focus for InDesign CS4 is outputting projects for screen display, and InDesign CS4 makes it easier to add text-based hyperlinks and to test them. The fact that it’s significantly cheaper merely serves to seal the deal. Read the full review.
Macromedia also chose Adobe for good reason. The trump card that Adobe offers is integration with its other design applications. For the first time all four flagship components - Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks, and Contribute - now share the full CS interface, and each of the main three has been the focus of serious development effort. Web Standard in particular has progressed strongly on all fronts and is more dominant than ever. And the truly valuable integration that the CS4 apps introduce is to be found specifically in the new XML-based Flash format, XFL. Read the full review.
Dreamweaver’s range of support for other web technologies remains extraordinary. In fact, you could argue that it’s too wide, adding complexity and losing focus. Ultimately Dreamweaver CS4 is a strong release and strengthens its position as the most powerful web page authoring package available. However, this role is both more complex and less important than it once was. The web is moving away from Dreamweaver’s core focus on web pages crafted by the central designer. Read the full review.
Fireworks CS4, Adobe’s dedicated web graphics application, finally becomes a fully paid-up member of Adobe’s flagship suite and gets a complete interface overhaul. It’s not just the interface, though – Fireworks CS4’s whole working approach has been streamlined. This new version of Fireworks sees the program pushing forward strongly on all fronts, with the future looking bright – a refreshing sight when just a few years ago development had all but stalled. Read the full review.
Flash CS4 Professional shares many of CS4’s new interface features such as tabbed documents, but it hasn’t received quite the overhaul that the rest of the applications have. With this release Adobe is repositioning Flash, turning it into a universal platform for rich online delivery for all the CS apps – a screen-optimised equivalent of PDF. The fact that, in the process, Flash CS4 Professional’s role as central authoring application becomes less important is a bonus. Read the full review.