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Edit Review — Adobe Creative Suite 2

Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Frank McMahon

Updated programs are loaded with new features.

Adobe has unleashed another new version of its Creative Suite: CS2. The first version of CS seemed hard to top, but this second version actually has a lot of robust advances across all of its programs. Adobe has really added a great deal to each program. With hundreds of tweaks and new features, it would be impossible to cover them all, so we'll just go over the most usable, as well as some of the coolest.

The suite consists of Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, InDesign CS2, GoLive CS2, Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Version Cue CS2, Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Stock Photos.

Linking all the CS programs together (as well as perhaps future Macromedia software additions to the suite) are Adobe Bridge and Version Cue. Adobe Bridge is like a file browser kicked up 50 notches. The last version of Photoshop saw a greatly advanced way to search visually for images; now that internal browser has been extracted and is its own self-running program. Bridge offers complete control over all your assets, from searching to organizing to browsing to viewing to even setting ratings. It's a total creative hub, around which all the CS2 programs swarm. The suite provides advance scripting support that lets users control the whole suite from one location, as well as dramatically improved support for RAW camera files, with RAW batch processing, resizing, and labeling. One of the best parts of Bridge is it lets you set your color settings across the board from one location now, to provide consistency as you move your projects and images from program to program within the suite.

Version Cue is back and has been improved and made easier to use. Probably the most underused program of the first CS, it offers a way to track changes to multiple versions of project files. You can also go back to any version or set up PDF reviews. Adobe clearly has kept in mind workflows with multiple project members, while taking strides to show that it's very usable for just a single user as well. All of the changes you make in Cue can also be incorporated into the embedded metadata for more flexibility.

Photoshop CS2 has a bunch of cool stuff jammed into it, including a very handy new 3D feature called Vanishing Point. You may have to see it in action to fully understand it, but basically, it makes the process of mapping a 2D image into three dimensions amazingly easy. For example, say you had a photo of a building or billboard and you wanted to map a bitmap onto a section of it. Vanishing Point does it automatically and also offers features to clone and paint in the same 3D plane. Smart objects are finally here in Photoshop, providing a new way of performing non-destructive editing on raster graphics. Photoshop work is typically destructive. The program doesn't have the vector advantage of Illustrator when it comes to backtracking and changing an already-processed bitmap image. You can also now bring in Illustrator images and preserve their editability within Photoshop.

The new Photoshop CS2 RAW plug-in simply rocks, allowing level processing, exposure tweaking, shadow correction, and brightness and contrast control, as well as providing many other professional tools. Between the new load requester and the Bridge batch commands, there is absolutely no reason not to use RAW on a continuous basis if you want to. Other new features include an image warp command for wrapping pictures in 3D, support for 32-bit HDR (high dynamic range) images, improved noise reduction for eliminating grain from high-ISO and JPEG images, a new spot healing brush, one-click red-eye correction (which works very well), and much more. Also, you can now completely customize menu sets in Photoshop, showing only the commands you want for specific projects. Photoshop CS2 has close to 500 menu options — the program now lets you eliminate the ones you don't use. Video producers will appreciate the new IEEE 1394 video preview — yes, now you can preview your image right on your monitor from within Photoshop CS2.

Two of the biggest new features in Illustrator CS2 are Live Trace and Live Paint. Live Trace allows you to import any bitmap for conversion within seconds to a fully editable vector image. Over the years, various third-party software and some internal tools in the program have handled this function, but this new feature does it quickly, accurately, and with fantastic results. Live Paint solves the age-old problem of coloring in overlapping gaps. With most vector programs, coloring sections can become tedious. One wrong click and, boom, you've just accidentally filled in half the canvas. Live Paint does it right and does it smart: The fill tool “snaps” to available sections to fill. After you fill an area, you can easily alter it. The program now finally sports a control palette bar across the top of the screen, which provides more than 80 percent of the pulldown menu tools in one handy location. The new version also lets you create customized workspaces and provides improved support for Photoshop PSD files.

Adobe InDesign, the CS2 desktop publisher for print/PDF, has cool new features including object styles, which you can use to produce a certain look or color scheme across many elements of your project (think of it as text styles that now incorporate all graphic styles as well). InDesign also now has snippets, little elements that hold objects and formatting (and even page positions) that can be shared from document to document and even user to user. Also new is better support for RTF and Microsoft Word import, smarter text handling, and improved XML.

Rounding out the suite are GoLive CS2 and Stock Photos. GoLive has always been a very visual web design program, and the new additions take it even further, making it a very creative tool. Several new features focus on creating content for non-web platforms, in particular mobile phones and portable devices. Support for standards including CSS, XHTML, SVG Tiny, MPEG-4, and SMIL is now included. Creating style sheets is substantially easier with this new version. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) set up the look and feel of your page (via items such as text formatting) ahead of time, making development go much more quickly. However, CSS has always been a little tricky to master. Now, GoLive CS2 features a new built-in CSS Editor that lets you create CSS visually and much more easily. It also lets you develop CSS for mobile devices.

Adobe Stock Photos is a new addition to the suite, and, as you might assume, it's an easy and automated way to purchase photos right from within the Creative Suite. With almost a quarter-million images (and growing), the stock photo section allows you to access the photo section while you're working on a project in Photoshop or any of the other CS2 programs. You can search, preview, and buy — all within a few minutes. This is certainly handy if you need something quickly, and the variety of photos ensures you will find something close to what you are looking for.

There is not much to find fault with in the new Adobe CS2 programs. Adobe, as always, takes really great software and makes it better. However, with all their new features, the programs are getting bigger, and certainly taking longer to load, depending on your processing speed and RAM. With previous versions, you could run several of the programs with 512MB. Now that amount might run only Photoshop and Bridge. If you want to run multiple CS2 programs, 1GB-plus might be a better option. Current computers will work best with the new Creative Suite.

Adobe programs are amazingly bulletproof overall. I probably take this for granted now, but I never have problems with crashes or odd behavior when using Adobe's Creative Suite. It just works, and works well. What more could you want?

Upgrading is recommended, of course, because aside from the topics here, there are hundreds of tweaks and new features across all the programs, many of which you will want. It's too soon to tell what the merger with Macromedia will mean, but it doesn't really matter because, as media artists, we have the best visual toolkit available for us right now, the new Adobe Creative Suite 2.

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BOTTOM LINE

Company: Adobe San Jose, Calif., (408) 536-6000
www.adobe.com

Product: CS2

Assets: Updated features across the programs, including centralized asset control (Adobe Bridge) and a new 3D mapping feature in Photoshop.

Caveats: Larger programs require longer load times, depending on available RAM.

Demographic: Media artists who want an integrated design solution for image manipulation, desktop publishing, and website creation.

Price: $1,199 (full version)

$549 (upgrade from Creative Suite Premium 1.1 or earlier)

$449 (upgrade from Creative Suite Premium 1.3)

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Frank McMahon is a director/designer who hosts a blog and podcast for creative professionals called “Media Artist Secrets” at www.mediaartist.com.

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