Today sees the release of the much hyped Adobe Creative Suite 5. The Master Collection costing up to £2,303 will contain 250 new features and upgrades to Adobe’s flagship creativity products. There will also be five Creative Suite editions in total, offering assorted combinations of products which may suit those with slightly less deep pockets: the cheapest option will be Creative Suite 5 Design Standard, which will be around the £1,000 mark. So how has the Beta version of this new suite been received and which are the really hot features that we can’t wait to play with?
Apart from the obvious spat between Adobe and Apple (the Packager for iPhone OS tool was a centrepiece of Adobe’s new CS5 suite, but it has effectively been rendered obsolete by Apple’s changes to it’s licensing agreement) the suite has received great reviews and there is a real buzz in tech/designer world in anticipation of being able to get hold of the product itself.
One of the most written-about features, described by some as ‘awesome’ is Photoshop’s new ‘content-aware fill’ tool which allows users to delete areas of photographs and automatically redraws the background to make it appear that they were never there in the first place. Another improvement is that there is improved recognition of an image’s edges which doesn’t sound like much but it could take hours off a complicated image manipulation job. Photoshop’s object selection tools are also faster and more refined than before.
Illustrator’s main new functionality includes a perspective drawing feature which gives the ability to create paths along one, two of three point perspective for elaborate street scenes and visualisations. The upgrade also enables variable-width strokes using strategically placed width points.
Within InDesign there’s a nifty track changes feature enabling designers to tweak content as required and revert back to the original without any hassle. Exporting to PDF becomes easier and the programme also makes working across multiple page sizes more efficient with built in gatefolds and inserts. InDesign will also operate more like Illustrator in that it will give access to the objects in each document layer. The latest InDesign also aims to solve one of those perennial problems: getting fonts to a printer. Instead of worrying if a fulfilment house has the right fonts, you’ll be able to package the fonts you’re using, and deliver them along with the document.
We can’t let this opportunity pass without a plea: what we’d love to see at Solopress is a feature on screen that gives a more accurate representation of how colours will print on different paper types. Currently it doesn’t seem to matter if you have a super calibrated monitor the colour can still vary greatly between printing the same job on say silk and then pulp. We are obviously experienced in compensating for these differences but if you’re listening Adobe…
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since Adobe 1.0 was first released and today it’s used by amateurs and professional alike all around the world. If the reviews of this latest product suite are correct it’s going to be a huge success and we feel no longer will the workman be able to blame his tools! And if you aren’t really in the market for such a technical product then please indulge us – as in other industries, many of these features will filter down to more high-street products such as the Photoshop Elements which is bundled free with lot of scanners and cameras. You may have to wait but it will be worth it.
