Adobe Creative Suite 4

The last time I was heavily involved in the world of graphic design and pagination was when PageMaker ruled the day. At least on PCs; in the Mac world it was all about Quark. So when we received a copy of Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 for evaluation I turned to the experts – IT World Canada’s production department – to put CS4 through its paces and share their thoughts with our readers.

We tested the Design Premium sku of CS4, which includes the latest editions InDesign, PhotoShop Extended, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Acrobat Pro, Adobe Bridge, Device Central and Version Cue. It sells for US$1,799, or US$599 for an upgrade.

Our production department uses earlier versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications to produce Computer Dealer News and our sister publications, so they were well positioned to comment on how Adobe has done with CS4.

Here’s some early impressions from our creative manager, Jeff Coles:

General:

* All of the menus in the programs have been cleaned-up, making things a lot more organized and making features a lot easier to find. The most noticeable improvement was in Dreamweaver. The interface in Dreamweaver CS3 can get really cluttered and confusing if you’re not careful, but the menus in CS4 are a lot cleaner.

Adobe Illustrator

* It could be our creative manager’s imagination, but he says working with object nodes seemed a lot easier than it was in previous versions.

* Multiple artboards is a huge bonus, and a long time coming. A great feature us that you can even paint across multiple artboards in one continuous stroke.

* We also liked the blob brush tool and the grunge and hand drawn brushes that were included in the new edition.

InDesign

* Again, our production team noted the cleaner and less cluttered menus, and liked that new, cleaner flyouts don’t clutter the screen. Icons are also more intuitively placed placed. For example, flip/mirror is easily accessible.

Flash

* “Timeline defaults to the bottom; go figure.”

PhotoShop

* The image adjustment icons incorporated into the right-hand menu bar are really handy.

* The addition of the 3D rendering tools is interesting, but our production manager notes it’s something he could see taking “gobs of time” to learn properly.

Acrobat

*The merging of multiple documents is now quick and painless.

*We found the Print Production tools really smooth. Live cropping, ink manager and preflight all seemed to work better and faster.

While they were generally impressed with some of the innovations in CS4, our production team did have a few notes from the “cons” side to share as well.

For example, they wondered if we really need another edition of Creative Suite so soon? CS3 was launched in March of 2007, and CS4 debuted in October 2008, a year-and-a-half later. Even with upgrade pricing, it’s a steep bill for many production shops.

More specifically, they noted neither Illustrator CS3 nor CS4 has a font preview, or at least they’ve been unable to find a way to turn it on. It’s an inexplicable omission.

Also, the bitmap trace feature in Illustrator still crashes when you give it something big to chew on. This feature has been available since CS2, but our production manager still uses the vintage Adobe Streamline, which has much less to muck around with.

Finally, we tested CS4 on a top of the line workstation, HP‘s recently released z800 workstation, which we have on loan from HP for testing. It’s an Intel Xeon-powered, quad core machine designed for users working with applications such as 3-D animation, broadcast video, oil and gas discovery, and medical imaging. Needless to say, it handled CS4 like a dream.

We haven’t yet tried CS4 on our much less powerful production machines, so how the older generation hardware most production shops will be using would handle CS4 remains to be seen.

For the record, on a Windows PC, here are Adobe’s system requirements (remember, these are only minimums):

* 2GHz or faster processor
* Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) or Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista)
* 1GB of RAM or more recommended
* 9.3GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on flash-based storage devices)1,024×768 display (1,280×800 recommended) with 16-bit video card
* Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
* Some features in Adobe® Bridge rely on a DirectX 9–capable graphics card with at least 64MB of VRAM
* DVD-ROM drive
* QuickTime 7.4.5 software required for multimedia features

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Jeff Jedras
Jeff Jedras
A veteran technology and business journalist, Jeff Jedras began his career in technology journalism in the late 1990s, covering the booming (and later busting) Ottawa technology sector for Silicon Valley North and the Ottawa Business Journal, as well as everything from municipal politics to real estate. He later covered the technology scene in Vancouver before joining IT World Canada in Toronto in 2005, covering enterprise IT for ComputerWorld Canada. He would go on to cover the channel as an assistant editor with CDN. His writing has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen and a wide range of industry trade publications.

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