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."

Comments

Re:Content-Aware Fill = Old

[supersloshy]

Except that actually involves using GIMP... GIMP. People like me can't stand the interface despite the nifty features it may or may not have.

From what I can gather, the main reason people despise the GIMP UI is because they're so used to the designs of other programs. I've heard it said before that people that get used to GIMP, when they try Photoshop, find its UI to be "horrible" as well. Personally I like the GIMP interface and I don't see what's so horrible about it; might I remind you that if you hate its current UI so much, GIMP 2.8 (being released later this year) will have a single window mode so people don't complain as loud.

Re:FLOSS alternative?

[MrNaz]

There's no FLOSS alternative to the Adobe suite.
Photoshop vs GIMP = No contest
Illustrator vs Inkscape = Maybe passable alternative
Premiere vs Cinelerra = Don't make me vomit
OnLocation vs dvgrab+kino+some other misc tools = Well, it's like saying that you can do anything emacs can do with sed, awk, grep and cat.

InDesign has no FLOSS alternative. Yea, there are toolsets that can do the things that OnLocation, Encore, AfterEffects etc can do, but they're just a bunch of tools with no integration. The Adobe suite is a whole, integrated polished set of products.

I think if you want to see an example of what the open source method of software design (many people scratching their own little itch and putting the resultant code into a gigantic unsorted global code library) can *not* do, look at the Adobe Suite.