The new Adobe Creative Suite arrived on Friday. I’m going to list my initial impressions, keep in mind that I’ve only used the apps for a few hours. The “pro” version of the suite ships with the following applications:
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Acrobat
- GoLive
- Version Cue
I will not be discussing Acrobat (since it’s just version 6 that’s been out for a while now), GoLive CS (I do most of my coding by hand these days and to me Dreamweaver seem much more powerful with its Application Server support) or Version Cue (Adobe’s go at CVS which actually looks like it will work rather well). I’m going to make a few points about the applications I know, that are new to this suite.
Photoshop CS — Dynamically updating histograms! If you do color correction “by hand”, you’ve been waiting for this feature for a while, it’s here and it works (although it sometimes caches the histogram). Match Color is a nice feature that will give you quick and dirty color matching on an image based on the color of a another image, (this should good for quick comps). Layer Comps are another cool feature that let you A-B-C-D… a multitude of layer settings with the click of a mouse. Now any menu item can be assigned a keyboard shortcut, (this was theoretically possible before with Actions, but this is much more customizable) just like previous versions of Illustrator and InDesign had.
InDesign CS — I was still getting my feet wet with InDesign 2.0 when this was released, so it’s difficult for me to give this a full evaluation. Like Photoshop you can now save palette locations in Workspaces. Speaking of palettes, the new side-of-screen docking really works. The Preview Separations palette is also great. And while I haven’t had a chance to play with Nested Style sheets, they do look very powerful.
Illustrator CS — 3D! Illustrator now has the old Adobe Dimensions engine rolled right into it so you can do some amazing live 3D effects with your work. Better Typography, Illustrator now has InDesign’s type functionality built-in Professional Swashes, Ligatures and Fractions are now a menu item away. Performance, yes you can now scroll a document that contains copious amounts of complex objects without going for a cup of joe while the screen redraws. The workspaces feature (save your palette locations) that is present in both InDesign CS and Photoshop CS is mysteriously absent from Illustrator CS. Also, where is the Separations Palette in Illustrator CS? InDesign CS, Acrobat 6 and Photoshop give you the ability to see “seps”, we want the same with Illustrator.
Good stuff — all three of these apps seem to support multi-byte character sets, but I haven’t had a chance to give them the real test and exchange files across platforms to see if the all the hi-bit characters remain when viewed on a Windows machine. Palettes are in alphabetical order in all three apps, now it’s much easier to get to a palette when you know its name.
Bad stuff — All three of these Apps allow you to save your customized keyboard shortcuts, none of them allow you to “load them back in” easily. To load your shortcuts you need to put your shortcuts file in the proper folder deep inside your user/system, preferences, not what I would call easy. All three apps are OS X only (yes you can get them for Windows too, but I’m talking about Mac OS here), so if you want application version parity with others, they’ll need to make the move to X as well.
More bad stuff — Versioning - no I’m not talking about Version Cue, I’m talking about Program file versions. In the past you’ve always been able to “save down” to a lower version of a file, so that you vendor that was still using Illustrator 8 could open the file you were working on in Illustrator 10. You might loose some modern features of the file you were working on if you “saved down” (and were warned so) but you still had the ability to save to files that could be opened by early 1990a versions of that application. As far as I can tell “save down” is gone from both Indesign CS and Illustrator CS. Can you say “lock-in”. (Update: Illustrator CS does inded have a “save down” feature, it’s cleverly hidden under the file menu as “Export…”. From there you can save to a variety of file formats inculding lower versions of Illustrator AI & EPS. I’ve assigned cmd-opt-L as a keyboard shorcut to this menu item.)
I’l mention a few things in passing as I close. No printed manuals were included with the Preimium Suite upgrade, I’m not sure if the manuals are on the CD-ROMs electronically. As far as finding things on the CD-ROMs goes, look for the included “Over 100 OpenType Fonts” that are cleverly hidden in your /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/ folder.
I can’t end the Adobe CS discussion without briefly mentioning the unusual upgrade pricing policy that Adobe came up with. Let’s just say that if you own only Photoshop and no other of the suite’s apps, you’ll benefit. If however you’ve kept your Adobe library of applications current, you already probably own the included Acrobat 6, for you the pricing for the Adobe CS suite may not seem so shall we say … sweet.