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News on Digital Print Technology
| Saturday, 01 November 2008 12:56 |
Suite smell of successSophie Matthews-Paul puts Adobe’s new Creative Suite 4 to the test and explains why everyone should be clapping their hands.Before you get jittery about what that means in terms of cost, rest assured that despite the vastness of Adobe’s CS 4 Master Collection, many elements are available as stand alone options and Adobe has also packaged chosen elements into sensible suites. There are various pricing options for CS4, both because of its upgrade paths and the choice of suites available. To work out the cost for the package best suited to your needs go to Adobe’s website (www.adobe.com), but even the most expensive option, the Master Collection, is a bargain if you consider what you get for your money. Illustrator is probably the first program most of us remember as coming from Adobe, it being a major development as a vector-based design package that offered various useful extras. Without doubt, the company’s best-known product is Photoshop, used universally by photographers and designers, and which is usually the first port of call when working with imported images. It’s become such a standard product that, with its cut-down version called Elements bundled with many digital camera packages, most serious users can’t resist the temptation of working with Photoshop proper, and tend to head for a full-blown upgrade. Surprisingly, perhaps, Adobe didn’t involve itself in the desktop publishing market for quite some time. Instead, it bought Aldus’s Pagemaker not long before Quark XPress was introduced and these two programs were mainly responsible for seeing off the competition and dominating this market sector for some time although, for some specialist applications and layout preferences, other options continue to be used. You may remember that early investment in PageMaker and QuarkXPress didn’t come cheap – indeed, anyone who hasn’t been able to take advantage of upgrade options over the years will be faced with a hefty investment if they now decide to become first-time buyers. Largely geared towards Apple, perhaps Adobe slipped up by failing to appreciate the likely growth in use of Windows-based computer platforms in graphics environments and not only as office and home systems. In fact, in desktop publishing terms, this was only really addressed for the first time when the company developed and introduced InDesign. The latest suite of programs is certainly Adobe’s finest and most comprehensive to date, containing everything anyone is ever likely to need across the creative spectrum. In total, the new Creative Suite 4 product line incorporates elements for photography, design, print, the Internet, mobile and interactive applications, plus film and video production. The Master Collection covers almost every kind of design and development application, technology and service in a single box, and the company claims it is the most all-encompassing creative environment ever delivered. Whilst this is probably true, there are few individual users whose expertise covers every area on offer and one of the tailored editions will probably be enough to satisfy most needs. Overall, users can choose from six suites or four version upgrades of the 13 stand-alone applications. These include Photoshop, and an extended version of the program, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash professional, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and Premiere Pro. Holding the entire Creative Suite together is a simplified workflow that Adobe has engineered to make it easier for handling common tasks, letting users switch between mediums without having to leave one specific project to work on another. With increased online collaboration playing a cogent part in the design and graphics processes, this functionality will be welcomed by print shops and clients alike. For the purposes of the wide-format market, the most relevant products are InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, with Acrobat 9 being a useful add-on. These elements come under the CS4 Design Premium umberella which also includes Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and the newly integrated Fireworks used for prototyping websites. Adobe says there will also be a new version called Design Standard which presumably will be missing some of these additional elements whilst retaining the core essential products. If you are already accustomed to the interface of any or all of these programs you won’t find a steep learning curve when working with these new versions. Adobe has cleaned-up its interface so that there is commonality in structure across the different programs within the suites, the result being a workflow which is easier to control. This is complemented by the ability for users to be able to move seamlessly between applications thus simplifying overall operation when more than a single program is involved. It’s also now possible to handle multiple documents either in the traditional way as individual elements or via tabs. Bridge has been tweaked to make file previewing and organisation faster and easier, with Adobe Lightroom users doubtless recognising some of the elements now incorporated. Within Photoshop, both standard and extended versions can be purchased as stand-alone applications which will be beneficial to users who really have no need for any other parts of the suite. Photographers and image manipulation specialists obviously fall into this category. Photoshop has had some nice added extras incorporated, such as its ‘content aware’ screening tool which recomposes an image automatically when it’s resized, and preserves essential areas whilst adapting to new dimensions. Users who work with layers (and a surprising number don’t) should like the adjustments panel which has received an overhaul to make it quick and easy to work with different elements, improving the speed with which images can be adjusted and manipulated. However, this is a program that benefits greatly when used with dual screens. To get the best of its benefits, you really need a generous viewing and working area. There is now a very slick pan and zoom feature within Photoshop, and cropping and rotation options are now completely smoothe. The brushes and clone tools, being just two examples from the conventional Photoshop palette, have also been refined and the overall result makes everything to do with image manipulation far more logical, tidy and user-friendly. The difference between the two versions of Photoshop is that the extended option adds 3D manipulation - which means you can paint directly onto models and surfaces. You can also merge two- and three-dimensional images which, in turn, can be animated, taking this program outside the more traditional user base within the photographic and graphic arts segments. Illustrator has been an Adobe mainstay for many years and it’s a little hard to believe that, in CS4, we see this program appear in its fourteenth version. Again, Adobe has added some nice touches, including the ability to create multiple artboards or pages. A more logical working backgrounds fits in with the rest of the suite, and new application bars and frames make management easier. Again, individual windows can be held as tabbed options, with easy switching and drag-and-drop; path selection via an ‘isolation’ mode and clipping masks have also been improved since being introduced in earlier versions. InDesign now features a live pre-flight function which runs in the background, picking up potential production errors during the layout stage, and making easy to resolve problems on-the-fly. Once again, the overall interface is far neater, and a customisable links panel now means you can locate and display all external elements being incorporated within the document. Other options relevant to the wide-format print market area are smart tools to assist the precise placement of objects, and these can be positioned more accurately than by merely relying on the human eye and using manual tweaking. There are also nested styles which can be set up and implemented swiftly, and Adobe’s InDesign Markup Language, or IDML, provides XML representations of documents to enable third-party developers to apply modifications using standard XML editing tools. Overall, the Creative Suite 4 family of products can be segmented into Design, Web, Production Premium and Master Collection editions. There are 13 products, 14 integrated technologies and seven services. Not surprisingly, investors in the Master Collection might be awed to find most of these new design and development applications and technologies in a single box. The availability of separate suites or full version upgrades and standalone applications is a sensible move; people only have to pay through the bits they really need. To efficiently run the beefed-up programs within Creative Suite 4 you really need a fairly decent Macintosh or PC set-up to handle system hungry programs. CS4 has been quite happy with this tester’s 24in Apple iMac 3.06 GHz with 4 GB of RAM and an upgraded graphics card. The addition of a second to 23in Apple Cinema display has been a huge operational benefit and none of the elements, separately or combined, has had a problem functioning within this relatively modest configuration. There are different specification requirements depending on which programs are being used within each suite. The best guidance is offered on Adobe’s website but, using the Master Collection as an overall system needs’ consensus, Macintosh users will need a Multicore Intel machine running OSX version 10.4 .11 to 10.5.4, which is the current version of Leopard. A minimum of 2 GB of RAM is stated but, particularly when running several elements at once, the more memory the better. For Windows users, a dual 2.6 GHz platform, again with a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, is essential. On PC platforms, in terms of operating system, you’ll need Windows XP with Service Pack 2 although SP3 is recommended. It will also run on Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate and Enterprise with SP1. To sum up, this latest version of Adobe Creative Suite is an absolute essential for anyone working within the graphic arts industry. People might grumble at some of the prices, along with the fact that most of the programs are fairly heavy on system resources. On the other hand, where else can you find a family of programs which offers you everything within a unified interface, and where all the elements will sit together quite happily without fighting one other, refusing to let go of shared elements and, inevitably, falling over. Yes, there are packages around which will handle specific individual requirements but today, CS4 is really the only option available where everything you’re ever likely to need comes from a single stable source. 
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