COOL-TECH REVIEW: Adobe's CS4 An Upgrade Worth Having.
Sometimes it’s a little difficult to do whatever it is that I do here at Eclipse. Last June, the folks at Adobe brought a bunch of us tech reviewers and writers up to New York to take a look at the latest and greatest of their offerings – Adobe CS4, with the caveat that everything was embargoed until they officially announced it in September. The problem with embargoes is, I’m very much a in the moment kind of person, where I’m excited and really want to talk about something the day I learn about it. When I have to wait months before I could even mention I even went to New York, my excitement level for CS4 kind of waned. I finally got my retail copy of the Adobe Master Collection a few weeks ago and have been playing with it. This is the most feature rich update that has come out in quite a while with numerous changes and tweaks to some of their key apps where needed, and in other cases they smartly left well enough alone.
The Master Collection is a beast of a collection and at almost $2,500 for the full version – upgrade pricing (at $899) is a lot cheaper, you are getting everything Adobe has to offer including OnLocation, InDesign, Premiere, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Contribute, Photoshop, Acrobat, Fireworks, and all their million little utilities. With an application toolbox this big it is almost impossible to review everything, so I’m going to touch on the highlights. It’s hard to figure out where to start….
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Adobe
Back in June, the fine folks at Adobe flew me up to New York to participate in a two day training session on their latest and greatest Adobe CS4. I’ve been playing with the beta for the last few months but have been under NDA not to talk about it until today. Below is the official press release, I’ll give you all an update later today on what the new features are. On the surface it is a much improved product line this year, with tweaks and additions in all the right places. I was really impressed with the changes in Flash, the surprising power of Adobe Elements, and the fact that OnStage finally has an user interface. I still don’t think it’s worth the price of an upgrade, but if you don’t already own it, it’s a must by.
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today unveiled Adobe(r) Creative Suite(r) 4 Web Premium, the next major release of its award-winning Web design and development
software. Packed with new features and offering significant productivity gains, Adobe CS4 Web Premium drastically simplifies creative workflows and reduces the time it takes creative professionals to develop high-impact, interactive websites and online experiences. Adobe CS4 Web Premium includes new releases of Adobe Fireworks(r) CS4, Adobe Dreamweaver(r) CS4, Adobe Flash(r) CS4 Professional, Adobe Photoshop(r)
CS4 Extended, Adobe Illustrator(r) CS4, Adobe Contribute(r) CS4, Adobe Device Central CS4, and Adobe Acrobat(r) 9 Professional software. For the first time Adobe Soundbooth(r) CS4, the latest release of its
innovative audio editing tool, is also included in Creative Suite Web Premium edition. A version of Adobe CS4 Web Standard will also be available.
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Adobe
I’ve been a fan of Adobe products for a few years now, but the one Adobe product that has been the bane of my existence has been Adobe’s ubiquitous PDF format. While most people do create amazing looking, print ready documents with Adobe Acrobat, I find the closed nature of the PDF format incredibly annoying. Primarily because of all the built in security features in PDF files. A lot of times publishers will lock down the ability to copy and paste from their PDFs. You have to use Adobe Reader to open and view PDFs. It’s these security features, the flexibility, and power of Acrobat that has garnered it such a huge and loyal following. With a lot of publishers going digital for their Magazines, we’ll see a lot more magazines testing out the digital waters. Already several major newspapers and national magazines are testing out digital subscription services. I’ve even been thinking about doing a digital “print” version of Eclipse. [click to continue…]
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Adobe
If you are looking for a solid, easy to use and cheap video editing application look no further than Adobe Premiere Elements. This product has come a long way from it’s first release a few years ago. It’s stable and pretty fast. A few weeks ago I complained about the interface in Photoshop Elements. Adobe uses the same interface in Premiere but somehow it works much better; maybe because I spent more time with Photoshop, or it’s because the workflow feels more logical to me in a video world than a photo one.It’s pretty simple and straight forward to create a project. You start by creating a project directory and dropping your video and the related files into it. The interface is so slick and simple that it becomes pretty self evident what to do. [click to continue…]
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Adobe,
Video Editing Software
Everyone who has read EM for any length of time knows that I’m a fan of Adobe. I generally love working Premiere but never had much use for Flash or Photoshop. Not because I think they are bad products, but because they are overly complicated for my simple needs. I actually use Premiere to create a lot of composite video and animation instead of Flash. So a few years ago Adobe heard my complaints and created a simpler version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements and they even have a simpler version of Premiere called Premiere Elements. You can purchase each of these separately for $99 or get a both for $149. Recently I discovered that since I stopped working with Video and switched to photos my life has been a lot easier. But I’m a terrible Photographer and need some post production help. That’s where Photoshop Elements come in.
At first glance this looks like a sexier version of the industry standard Photoshop. Adobe really needs to hire some UI folks if they want to go after the casual crowd with Elements. The Organizer isn’t as user friendly as I would have liked it to be. Once it’s set up, it works perfectly fine, but on first blush it’s pretty intimidating because it doesn’t do a good job of just finding your photos and you know, organizing them. No, it opens a screen that lists all the folders on you hard drive, but it doesn’t import anything or even prompt you to import your photos – there’s probably a way to do this, but since it didn’t do it by default I lost interest for awhile. I downloaded Google’s Picassa tool last week and was up and running in a few minutes. It automatically searched my entire drive, imported my photos and organized them by directory. Photoshop Elements didn’t do that and it’s disappointing. I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out the interface and gave up for awhile. I just wasn’t in the mood to play with "complex" software. If I’m not up and running in less than 10 minutes, I have very little interest in using it. But since I did want to review this, I stuck with it. I eventually realized that, duh, all you have to do is drag your photos over to the organizer and then it’ll do the rest. It doesn’t automatically sort your images (again, I’m sure this feature is buried somewhere in the options tab). You have to tag them, then you can go and look at images by tags/keywords. Unsorted you get something like the image below.
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Adobe,
Image Editing. Photoshop
One of my favorite programs, Adobe Captivate recently had an update and I thought it was time for me to take another look. What is it? It’s a screen capture software application that does more than simple screen captures. It records your every movement and mouse click on the screen and then creates snazzy flash movies out of them. It’s great for creating training material, self running presentation and more. You can also use it to create animation – although that’s not what it’s designed for. [click to continue…]
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Adobe,
Adobe Captivate 3,
Screen Capture,
Technology Reviews
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