Slashdot Mirror
Review of Adobe Creative Suite 5
Barence writes "Adobe today updated its Creative Suite software to version 5, and PC Pro has an absolutely massive collection of reviews. Along with an overview of the entire suite, from Design to Web to Production bundles, every individual component gets the full in-depth treatment. It includes video demonstrations of Photoshop CS5's fabulous Content-Aware fill trick and new Puppet Warp function; a long-awaited step up to 64-bit for Premiere Pro CS5; and big updates to Dreamweaver CS5, After Effects CS5, and the rest."
Aw man, my CS4 torrent had just finally finished.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Hope they atleast release the Actionscript to Obj-C cross compiler so that people can at least attempt to use it for themselves, if not distribute it through the App Store.
This space for rent.
It's not an overview, it's a gushing, excited press release. And it doesn't even drop one word on my most important concern: is Adobe continuing their trend of writing awful, inconsistent, ugly, usually-slow UIs?
The fact that that, after Macromedia's was acquired, I'd actually pay extra to get Flash 8's UI back... well, that tells you something. How the hell do you write a UI worse than Macromedia's? That takes the kind of talent only Adobe can offer I guess... IBM should hire these guys to do Lotus Notes next. ;)
Comment of the year
I just purchased Dreamweaver CS4 3 weeks ago. I wonder what their upgrade policy is?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I TOLD my company to wait a couple months, but noooo, they just HAD to go and buy CS4 last week...
Ships within 30-days.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
n/t
Aaaaa quit ur bitchin' beatch, mods are all-knowing and your posting would be redundant in the future. Future times, so rejoice!!
I really want to see how content aware fill deals with missing text. What happens when it tries to reconstruct half of a no parking sign or a billboard? i bet it does some funkly things when it has to add in a face.
i'm not picking on it. i just think the results would be interesting and amusing.
For the record, GIMP has had a functionality similar to the content aware fill for YEARS. It's called the GIMP Resynthesizer plugin and if you're running a linux distribution that uses package repositories, it's probably in there. This blog post is one of the many that points this out.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Depends. Did your friendly neighbour pay for next-day delivery?
I think a Bench Marks applied here would be most telling.
I predict a flood of funny photos on the Interwebz using Content-Aware Fill and Puppet Warp – probably with silly captions. More practical applications: removing an ex from all your photos, adding a secret crush to all your photos, and of course implausible uses in movies like removing the hero from live feeds so he can sneak past security cameras.
I cannot wait until poor applications of puppet warp show up on magazine covers and movie posters! http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/
As much as I have tried (and I have really, really tried) I cannot use GIMP to anywhere near the same level as PS. I think it still has some way to go before it is a serious competitor (but on the other hand, GIMP is really useful for the odd resizing a photo for the web and little things like that).
Sadly after their ridiculous always broken DRM in CS3 I stopped buying Adobe products. The only unfortunate thing is that I've still yet to find a replacement for Illustrator since Freehand was killed. Ahh well...
I know PS is what is taught in the Secondary Schools, and several Colleges. There is a "Skin" that gives GIMP the look and feel of PS. But I do wonder what the equivalent to Illistrator would be?
I haven't been able to find the Linux version anywhere.
*** Don't be dull.***
Seriously, how could the design team at Adobe not realize there's a problem when they put all of their names on the splash screen, and each program loads slowly enough that the user can actually read them ALL?
I'll view it as substantial progress if Adobe ever just cleans-up the disaster that is their CS product to the degree that each app is no more than 10x the size of GIMP. It just never ceases to amaze me how a company can be so violently oblivious to the needs of its customers that it will say, "Go screw yourself!", when they complain about issues with a product. How long before people just start using Corel or GIMP instead of Photoshop? How much longer before PDFs fall by the wayside?
We're (hopefully) on the verge of seeing Flash, which has enjoyed unprecedented success as the primary web page interaction and video presentation engine, get kicked to the curb by HTML5. Why? Well, if it wasn't broken, it's not terribly likely anyone would be looking for a solution to replace it with. Maybe Adobe will take that as a cue to start looking at its other products and work on some optimization before it's too late.
Inkscape?
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
... did Adobe pay to have this thread here?
Web work, sure. Corporate print work, not a chance. No Pantone support. Plus most of your clients will be sending you photoshop, illustrator and indesign files...
I expected to see a LOT of Adobe hate here... And wasn't disappointed. Let's just use one example: Dreamweaver This is about the most unintuitive piece of overpriced trash I have ever used. I have never liked Dreamweaver and sadly it has only gotten worse over time. I suspect that they have a very rough future ahead. Flash is doomed IMHO. Someone needs to go slap the Adobe execs several times and yell "WAKE UP" until they realize how badly they're screwing themselves. /rant
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
That content-aware feature has been all the rage with the general Internet population lately. I can agree how awesome it is, I've been enjoying it a lot with the Resynthesizer plugin for GIMP for over a year now!
Cause if they haven't, then it's still the same PoS as before. IMO, the entire CS suite has become nothing more than another glorified MS Office release. Lot's of stuff...nothing new.
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
"But I do wonder what the equivalent to Illistrator would be"
Inkscape.
The most important questions are:
1. Will it work correctly when the user doesn't have administrative rights.
2. Will they have a network license system.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Heh the review failed to mention the inclusion of a HTML5 export feature in flash. could be one of the biggest changes in the suite since its a WYSIWYG HTML5 editor, and maybe the only one currently on the market?
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
Stay with it! Eventually you will come through the other side prefering Gimp for most of your tasks. I have the choice between PS CS3 and Gimp at work*. I almost never use PS.
I was seriously annoyed by Gimp for ages, but eventually it changed.
*architect, heavy on the visualisation side.
I don't use the tools on a daily basis like I did 5 years ago, but I've been playing with Blender since 1.25 days in 1998. And to this day, I still can't produce as good of results out the box without tweaking the hell out of things in blender as I can with Lightwave. And I started using Lightwave about the same 1998 time frame. And if we want to talk horrible UI interfaces, Blender takes the cake. I remember it was like someone took the worst features of Lightwave's 5.4's UI and designed an entire program around them. Really, it took me a couple YEARS to master the UI and about the time I had, they went and changed it all. And then proceeded to make more changes about every 6 months. It seems like every time I finally get a Blender UI down, it's time to upgrade and suddenly something has moved or doesn't work the same way any more. The biggest example was with the particle/physics engine. I had about 20 minutes worth animation finished (60k frames). Then suddenly the particle engine changed and at least half those files no longer worked. That kind rapid development cycle hurts it in professional production shops. It seems like Blender gets a feature that you've been dying to see for ages the price is anything you've been working on has to be redone. But even then, it seems like a lot of "new" features are stuff that I've seen Lightwave/Maya/MAX for years and at this point, they've got it refined.
Now as far as a tool to learn 3D animation, Blender is great to learn the basics. And if you have time, you can produce some amazing results. It's perfect for the hobby/enthusiast.
GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop Elements. It does a lot of what I need up and until the point I really need to use filters and plug ins or really do some advanced color tweaking. That's where Photoshop has GIMP beat hands down. I have a few plugins I've bought over the years that allow me to do in minutes what would take a couple hours in GIMP by hand. As far as UI's go, GIMP has a better over all UI than Photoshop now other than the Tool bar in the image window instead of at the top of the application. That still annoys me. .
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I, for one, welcome our new content-aware photoshop overlords.
Unbundle the fscking apps already.
Even Microsoft lets you buy "just Word" for less than the price of Office.
All I want is Photoshop, so why am I paying for all of those other marquee apps as well? I'm using them on a Mac mini which cost less than the price of the suite.
Wait... don't tell me... that IS the price for Photoshop, and you just get all the other apps for free. I knew it! Damn you, Adobe!
"... startup time and responsiveness."
Agreed. Adobe has been taking Creative Suite backwards in some ways. Why? Incompetence? Does Adobe want to create problems users will pay to fix later?
No, they are far too lazy and incompetent to plan that far ahead. Steve Jobs nailed Adobe's corporate personality perfectly when he called them lazy. They just throw feces^H^H^H^H^H features at the wall and see what sticks, and if they break things in the process, they don't care. Heck, the entire Carbon API was put in almost entirely to placate Adobe because they were too lazy to port to Cocoa ten years ago. Now after giving them TEN YEARS to clean up their mess and move to new APIs, they're STILL whining that they have to rework their GUI to move to 64-bit. They've known that this was coming for a DECADE and still they whine that they're having to do actual work. AMAZING!
I spent several hundred dollars to buy CS3, only to find out after I bought it that they didn't support my machine (and didn't mention it in their specs). I had to spend three days hacking up their worthless software just to get it to install and launch on my case-sensitve HFS+ root volume.
I didn't buy the CS4 upgrade because I would have to go through the same hell. I won't be buying CS5 because I would have to go through the same hell. Until an Apple OS upgrade breaks CS3 in some show-stopper way, I won't be buying future versions of their suite. If I'm paying several hundred bucks for a piece of software, I expect it to work. If there are bugs, that's fine, but not even being able to install the piece of excrement crosses a line. I was sorely tempted to file a class action suit, but I'm just too busy to be bothered.
The worst part is that it would take Adobe less time to fix these problems than it took me to hack their piece of s**t app for myself. Yet two updates later, they STILL haven't bothered to spend two or three days of a single developer's time to fix them. Maybe it's because they don't have a single competent developer among them to do the work? After all, Apple even provided detailed directions.
Or maybe it's just because they don't care. As far as they are concerned, they own the market. They have no competition, so they have the right to make every user conform to their specifications with impunity. No matter how bad they make things for their users---no matter how many hoops we have to jump through---we'll still have to use their shovelware. Fortunately, there are alternatives. If Apple ever makes a change to the OS that breaks CS3, I'll just drag it to the trash rather than pay the crooks at Adobe hundreds of dollars for another update that won't install without hackery.
I hope for everyone's sake that HTML5 buries flash and Pixelmator buries Photoshop. The world would be a better place without companies like Adobe.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Very funny. I like it that his voice gives no indication that what he says is completely fiction.
I've beet a tester since CS3 and a user since CS1. If you haven't used their applications in a while the biggest improvements you'll see are the tabbed interface, more uniform interface across application, cross-application work-flows, better responsiveness, 64bit support, tons of support for content publishing across all sorts of mediums with a particular focus on mobile and web, and GPU acceleration. Premiere, After Effects and InDesign have been improved by leaps and bounds. Streamline is now a feature of Illustrator (Live Trace). OnLocation was rewritten from the ground up so the interface is nicer but many features have not been rewritten (but there is heavy development). Other than Flash, acquired Macromedia applications (Fireworks, Dreamweaver, etc) seem to be evolving slower. Tons of CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY COOL new features like content aware photo fill, content aware resizing and automatic rotoscoping edge detection.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Wow what a whiner... :(
I hope Chromium and Windows bury Apple instead.
how dare you be so unkind, apple are having a hard time! LEAVE THE IPAD ALONE!
The day you drop $350 of your own money to buy a current version of a piece of software that won't even install and don't complain about it, you'll be allowed to complain about my complaining. Until then, piss off.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
How about this: Straight Line Tutorial.
Now consider that for a moment. A tutorial for drawing lines? This is a graphics software purportedly meant for image manipulation, yet the developers haven't created a simple Line icon.
I rest my case.
So you run a non-standard configuration, and then you complain when you run into bugs that no one else is encountering (and thus, software developers have no incentive to fix)? You really shouldn't be surprised: when you put yourself in a superminority with respect to your computer's configuration, you're going to break shit and no one's going to give a damn about your problems.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
Non-standard? Case-sensitive HFS+ has been part of Mac OS X since 10.3 and has been available in the GUI for end users since 10.5 (or 10.4 in server). It may not be the way Apple ships machines, but it is hardly nonstandard. In fact, it's rather common to find this in use among web developers (one of Photoshop's major target markets) because 99% of the web servers out there are case sensitive and it's dangerous to deploy on a case-sensitive server when all your development and testing is done on a case-insensitive computer.
The fact of the matter is that I've only found two apps in the entire time I've been using case-sensitive HFS+ (two years) that didn't work correctly, and of those two, only Photoshop took more than a couple of hours to get working, largely due to their utterly craptastic copy protection. Far more annoying than the problem, though, is Adobe's response to it. Instead of spending a few hours of developer time to fix this, they instead deliberately hacked up their installer to prevent installation at all on case-sensitive volumes, and proceeded to ship it that way for three more releases. That's not just ignoring a problem. That's deliberately going out of their way to make it as hard as possible for me to use their software. I say screw them.
The ironic thing is that the cracked warez versions would probably have been better than the paid versions because at least I wouldn't have accidentally triggered copy protection authorization failures every time I turned around while getting the d**n thing working.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The sad thing is that they still didn't fix it!
From the link:
You should always build and test iPhone applications using a case-sensitive volume.
Because case-sensitive HFS Plus performance is comparable to that of standard HFS Plus, case-sensitive boot volumes are becoming much more common. Time Machine and iPhone OS also use case-sensitive volumes[...]it no longer makes sense to assume that only a handful of your application's users will use case-sensitive volumes.
Apple != Adobe.... Unless you're saying that some Apple app doesn't work on case-sensitive HFS+, in which case please file a bug @bugreport.apple.com.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.