Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Releases Updated Creative Suite
jonknee writes "MacMerc just noted that Adobe has dropped the motherload and updated most of its core non-video apps in a bundle called the Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, InDesign and InCopy (a new product).It looks like Adobe PR popped the press releases a little early as not much is up on their site yet. The official debut will be tomorrow at a press event that looks to have a webcast."
I don't know what a "motherload" is. Is that about two toddlers, three bags of groceries, a purse, keys, coffee mug and cellphone?
It also occurs to me that perhaps we're talking about a mother lode, taken from gold mining and referring to a specific area of rich quartz veins, and now used to indicate "striking it big" or discovering a wealth of materials or information.
...
While I agree with the DMCA issue, please understand that you are comparing apples and oranges. Try doing alpha channels, and hexachrome separations from any MS product. You will find that for production work, Adobe products are the best, and pretty much the only, option.
I would love to see a competitor come along that could challenge Adobe, but for now, we are stuck. But, their products are decent, and get the job done very well, so things could be worse.
The interesting thing is that Abode is having exactly the same problems as Microsoft. That is, of application maturity.
Photoshop as a tool is completely mature. It has been for quite a while now. For many people that use it, there is no reason to upgrade. This is also true of Microsoft Office, and to an extent some of Macromedia's tools such as Dreamweaver.
The sad thing about all of this is that these companies are trying to find ways of forcing people to upgrade. Macromedia is especially guilty to this I think - it is trying myriad ways of squeezing more money out of the purchasers of their software. Well, I for one am not playing their game - I don't like being strong armed into purchases.
In the long run, I think these companies are going to die out, because they can't improve their applications much more but OSS solutions are going to evenutally catch up and become equally mature. Still, they've got a few years yet. I give them a decade.
Please provide me links to a product that provides press-ready output in CMYK, with consistent color management, support for postcript fonts, and that can provide files that are supported by most printers, and I will gladly give up Adobe's tools. In the meantime, as a graphic designer, i'm stuck using them. Believe me, I'd switch to linux and drop the PC as a graphic design platform, but until those issues are resolved, I'm stuck in the adobe/macromedia/quark vortex...
Now on to the meat of the matter, as has been discussed here numerous times before (albeit with the GIMP). Show me the CMYK and spot color handling (with licensed PANTONE libraries, no less) in these MS applications. Show me the fast super-high resolution image editting that these apps provide. Show me the strict adherance to the PostScript Level 3 file specifications. Show me a job house that will be able to take output from these consumer level applications and do anything worthwhile with them.
waiting...
Thought so...
And that is just for a replacement to Photoshop. Now provide me with software on par with InDesign. After that go find equivilents for Premiere Pro, Audition, After Effects, and Encore DVD.
Some Russian company built a circumvention device for Adobe's (arguably laughable) eBook encryption, yes. They sold it in the US. They got called on it. They were acquited. They stopped making it. If I were to catch someone using my copyrighted works in improper/illegal ways I'm pretty certain that I would pursue the matter to the extent of my abilities. Stealing is stealing. The DMCA, as written, gave Adobe the powers they used. Are the circumvention and reverse engineer portions of the DMCA wrong? Probably. Is that Adobe's fault? no. Your anger should be directed at the lawmakers that passed the DMCA and yourself for not asserting yourself to your representatives and ensuring that they understood that you didn't want it passed.
Care to tell us how many letters & phone calls you made to your senators and representatives against the DMCA?
Now with Product Activation
http://www.adobe.com/activation/main.html
Alot of people have animosity towards Adobe, myself included over various issues, but there is one thing that Adobe has that nobody else can hold a candle to:
Photoshop.
This one software package is single-handedly keeping me from migrating to Linux. For those who say "But what about Gimp? It's just as good..."
Those people have also never done professional graphics for print, video or even the web. The toolset within Photoshop is unrivaled, it's color acuity precise, and it's workflow caters to multiple mind sets. For every one way to do something there is a handfull of other, equally successful methods to achieve exactly the same result. It is an artist's tool.
Mature? Nope. There are dozens of features that the community has been begging to have integrated for years, and slowly but surely Adobe has listened. I can understand not implementing every little widget and gizmo that has been suggested by crackpot users over the years into their flagship product line, and each new upgrade offers something useful that can either save me time or opens up a new realm of creative flexibility. Photoshop has many years to grow, become better and more refined. Most people just don't see it because a histogram is this wierd spikey deal that screws up an image, filters are normally reserved for creating 'L3nZ FL4r3s', and the layer effects were the perfect time saving device for all those bubbly drop shadowed graphics with glowy mouse-overs your client is begging for.
There is no alternative, and by glancing at the top 10 new features, it seems that Adobe has not forgot that Photoshop is not a toy program. I didn't see any "Improved Applesque Button Creation" feature.
(yet)
Sorry, but have you actually tried to use Photoshop 7.0 to process images from a digital SLR like the Canon 10D? I have, and I can tell you I'm eagerly awaiting Photoshop 8.0.
Adobe has no built-in support for RAW image processing, you have to buy their $99 add-in, and even that doesn't support the Canon 10D without gross hacks. With Photoshop 8.0 this should now be included and cleaned up.
Photoshop 7.0 still only has rudimentary support for 16-bit editing. Try going and applying the vast majority of the filters when working with a 16-bit image. Sorry, out of luck, need to drop back to 8-bit.
Want to resize your picture to a specific inch dimension and resolution so you can print out your digital print at your favourite Costco or on your home printer? Sure, it's possible, but it's not exactly obvious how to do it.
Photoshop 7.0 went a long way to helping web designers use Photoshop for web content. Hopefully Photoshop 8.0 will go just as far to make it a valuable tool for digital photographers.
Those who think that Adobe software is overpriced clearly are hobbyists, not professionals. If you bill by the hour, this stuff pays for itself in a couple of days.
For example, one single feature of Photoshop CS would make it worth the full purchase price for me, let alone the upgrade price, let alone the other new features:
Native non-square pixel support!
Since video doesn't have square pixels, it's always been something of a pain to author graphics in Photoshop. Getting this to work right will save me 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. At $300/hour, I only need to use this feature three times for it to pay for the upgrade!
For those who aren't professionals, the cheap Photoshop Elements is a great alternative at fraction of the price.
My video compression blog
Everyone here seems to be missing the point of this release. This is Adobe's attempt to kill off Quark. With InDesign, Adobe has arguably a better product than Quark, but most design houses have been slow to even give it a look. By selling the products design houses already use (Photoshop, Illustrator) as a package, and as a reasonably priced package ($1200 whereas Quark alone is $1000), they're going to put InDesign on the desktop of every graphic designer. Most will at least take a look, and many will probaby switch over. The production flow management tools are also a bonus.