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Adobe Creative Suite 3 comes in a whole new variety of versions catering to the particular needs of different design specialists. The comprehensive range of suite versions essentially add or remove products depending on requirements from the ‘Design Standard’ edition that gives you the essentials to the ‘Master Collection’ which includes everything except the kitchen sink (or maybe there is a kitchen sink, there is so much packed in there it’s quite possible!), and everything in-between. The edition we will divert our attention to for the sake of this review is the ‘Web Premium’ edition which focuses on the needs of advanced web designers and developers wanting to develop rich and dynamic multimedia sites. The Web Premium edition has an excellent line up of Adobe applications including PhotoShop CS3 Extended, Illustrator CS3, Acrobat 8 Professional, Dreamweaver CS3, Fireworks CS3, Contribute CS3, Bridge CS3 and Version Cue CS3. Additionally the package includes a limited range of fonts and stock photography to get you started. Once you rip open the attractively styled packaging, getting the program from the discs to your computer is a quick and painless process. With minimal effort you will have the entire suite installed and ready to roll in minutes. Product activation is required and is performed the first time any of the included applications are launched. Activation takes seconds and caused no issues or problems whatsoever. When installed you have a seamless environment containing just about every tool imaginable to take your web ideas from prototype to live on the web – essentially handling all aspects of the development life cycle. Each application has undergone a number of enhancements since the CS2 version, and appears to have gone through even further seamless integration between each program and the third party applications they connect with. All of the applications share a clean, easy to use interface that is the predictable combination of drop downs menus, tool bars and docks - everything you typically need is relatively accessible with little effort. The interfaces are low on clutter giving you ample work space, but always the ability to customize docks to show exactly what you want. While these applications offer plenty of work space, like most new generation applications and suites a widescreen display goes a long way to making your work a whole lot easier. The PhotoShop CS3 Extended image editing tool, takes the standard PhotoShop concept and drops in additional tools suitable for not only image work but 3D objects as well. New to CS3 is nondestructive editing, which retains the original image data of objects you edit. This is great for when you filter, scale and rotate objects and later on need to change the object again. With many editing tools, once you have edited an object, a lot of the image data has been lost making further modifications a nightmare later down the road. Design professionals know you're only as good as your selection tools, and PhotoShop has added it's new Quick Selection tool. Simply draw around the perimeter of the area to select and Quick Selection will attempt to automatically cut right to the edge of the object within the area you chose. It works quite well when cutting objects from images with limited backgrounds or simple gradients, requiring only minor cleanup afterwards. Trying to extract objects from complicated background was a different story, and the tool often became confused when even vaguely similar colored objects were present and required extensive clean up or retracing in areas. The previewing system allows you to further refine the selected area with a host of variables, but in many cases cleanup was still needed afterwards. Despite all of this, since selecting can be tedious and time consuming, Quick Selection does ultimately help to cut down the work involved quite considerably - leaving you only correctional type work to do. Getting back to the
'Extended' functionality of this version of PhotoShop, you can now
load and manipulate 3D models in a wide variety of formats (3DS,
OBJ, U3D, KMZ and more) directly inside of PhotoShop and incorporate
them into your images. Not only can you do things like rotate the
objects, but you can actually edit their texture bitmaps. Finally,
your ability to share what you do in PhotoShop
has also been improved - allowing you to now easily drop images
directly into Dreamweaver projects and import into Flash or After
Effects. One thing I had noticed with both PhotoShop and Illustrator
is how cleanly it renders text and shapes such as circles or
rectangles that are on an angle - the anti-aliasing is excellent,
making anything you do crisp and highly legible. When in 'Code View' the color of the source code is fully context sensitive making it easy to program with; it suggests tags and variables as you type to quicken coding; and can instantly highlight invalid code or validate the entire HTML with a single button click. You can rest assured your code will work for everyone with complete browser compatibility checking, and accessibility compliance checking built-in. Dreamweaver natively supports all the major scripting standards such as XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, ASP and JSP so you are not limited to specific formats when working on the variety of client requirements you encounter on a day to day basis. The coding is clean, rarely requires more than minimal clean up afterwards for optimization and is fully standards compliant. We simply didn't see some of the ridiculous coding decisions we have seen on other HTML editors, the code makes perfect sense and is a perfect blended use of CSS and traditional non-depreciated HTML tag use. It is also a pleasure to work with CSS font and layout styles in Dreamweaver, which isn't always the case with other HTML editors, even new generation versions. The 'Design View' is fantastic and definitely the best we've encountered. Effortless creation of tables with pixel perfect precision assisted by highly intuitive sizing tools that give you exact measurements with immediate pixel width feedback. Thank you Adobe! When Dreamweaver detects server-side include tags, it automatically attempts to emulate as if the page were running on the server and displays the includes on page during design, fantastic! When selecting or creating an object, there are tons of variables associated with them that are easily editable in the properties dock. And the 'Split View' accurately remembers your split point on the screen for future sessions. I cannot stress enough what a joy it is to work with Dreamweaver CS3. Acrobat 8
Professional and the PDF format have enjoyed wild success over the
past several years at least. The newest version of Acrobat, the
program used to compile and view PDF files has benefited from a
faster rendering engine and better integration. Gone are the
cumbersome Office plug-ins that we found less than stable in the
prior version, replaced by Print output from your favorite
applications. While rendering times for converting documents such as
Microsoft Word are still not stellar, they have certainly improved.
It is strange that Microsoft's Office 2007 export option for PDF is
in fact faster than Adobe's but that margin has lessened in the
latest version. Render quality, while again has improved, still
shows imperfections, particularly when handling document tables
where some bordered cells are adjacent to borderless cells
(typically found in invoices and other table based documents). Creative Suite 3
Web Premium is available for both Windows and Mac platforms. Windows
system requirements include all Windows Vista editions excluding
basic or Windows XP SP2; Pentium 4, Centrino, Xeon or Core Due
processor; 1GB memory; 5GB of drive space; modern video card and
monitor specifications. Mac requirements include OS X 10.4.8; JRE
1.5 for Version Cue; Power PC G4 or G5 or multi-core Intel
processor; 1GB memory and modern video equipment. Retail pricing
comes in at $1,599.00 USD for the full version and $499.00 USD for
an upgrade (prices may vary store to store). Creative Suite 3 Web
Premium is available immediately from all major computer and
electronics providers. The product can be purchased as a shrink wrap
product at retail stores or as a 3.2GB downloadable file from Adobe. CONS - Some slow application load times; limited fonts included compared to some competitors; applications may have challenging learning curve for beginners; no drop downs for commonly used settings where variables are entered; slow and sometimes inaccurate rendering of PDF documents. About The Author
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