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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...
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.
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 can't stand the interface either. Have you tried GIMPShop?
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.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Content-aware filling is old in the same way anything else is old. It was around a long time ago but it sucked. Hopefully this one is much better.
You just got troll'd!
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?
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
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.
I hate printers.
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~
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.
While I was just joking re the torrent, I think this is a legitimate reason to pirate the software if you're in the field (or want to be) and not well off. In fact I doubt if Adobe would lose much money if they just made the package free for private individuals. I don't think I'm alone in seeing a difference between personal and corporate copyright violation.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Translation:
"I believe in morality but I don't think I'm significant enough to have to abide by it".
You can get a steep discount if you're a student. Take a class at a community college & buy it through the bookstore if you want to learn the suite. The alternatives should really be ok, though, if you're not doing it commercially, and if you are you can afford to buy it.
Then how do you suggest that software developers who target people instead of corps make money?
Absolutely none. There are no video editing apps for Linux that are anything but toys or core dump makers.
You CAN do most photo shops stuff in Gimp if you are not whiney and afraid of learning... print media though no CMYK but that is only a tiny segment of the graphics market anymore.
But for video editing, composting and CG there is absolutely nothing that is use-able for pro or even semi-pro use.
Hell even for idiot level video podcast making adobe owns the market.... Visual Communicator has no match.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's an awful lot like the MS/Apple interface wars. If I sit down at an Apple machine I find its interface confusing and difficult to use. My co-irker, raised on Macs, can't stand the Windows interface. We both like Gnome though.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
by not charging a month's pay-check for the package. And sometimes by being sufficiently unherd of for a torrent to be freely accessable.
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!
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.
That would be because you are not a drama queen. A rare commodity here. The UI you are used to is the one that you find easier. Simple as that. Gimp, Blender, Open Office, you name it. The UI is only an issue to the twits who are desperately searching for a means to make themselves appear more important. And to be honest, some kid with a pirated copy of a professional package he would not be able to afford if he had to pay for it, is not really an objective critic. But then neither is some kid with a burning need to convert everybody to Linux. Use what you like. Or what you can afford, or what you need. Not what "everybody says is the bestest one evar" The fun bit is going to be watching Photoshop fanboys fending off not only FOSS fanboys, but Apple fanboys too. Pull up a chair.. I think Photoshop's UI is going to be called more things than intuitive this time.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
"I believe in morality but I don't think I'm significant enough to have to abide by it".
Can't help but notice that the only time people talk about morality is when they want money. I happen to think that my point of view is entirely moral, but then I suppose our morals must differ. Babypuncher.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Try http://www.getpaint.net/ as an alternative to Photoshop.
It is very nice and free (as in beer).
Then how much to you feel I should charge?
Photoshop vs GIMP = No contest
Wrong.
I can't speak for any of the other programs, however.
"... 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?
probably 5-200USD is what id consider a reasonable price for software intended for personal use, depending on what is is. A small single purpose app would be in the 5USD range, or maybe even donationware, whereas a more powerfull multi-purpose program/suite would push into the higher end of that range. What you should charge without knowing more is like asking you to value my camera.
Indesign has no FLOSS alternative?! WTF is Scribus then? I'm not saying it's quite as cool but it gets the job done nicely.
Heck - just MAKE some ID. Invent a school. "Iceberg college" located in Teptula, Motana. Print it up all nice on thick paper and laminate it. Done. IT will take you a few hours, and save you hundreds of dollars. The stores don't bother checking. Just show your ID. As long as it has your picture on it, you're good as far as the knuckle-dragging idiot at Best Buy us concerned.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Photoshop vs GIMP = No contest
No kidding. Since Photoshop isn't even available on my desktop, Gimp is the clear winner.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
> Photoshop vs GIMP = No contest
If you're talking about earlier versions of Photoshop, then I agree - but have you seen what a bloated pig the latest Photoshop has become? I tried the demo and there's a noticable lag drawing brush strokes, effectively making it useless as a painting tool.
In GIMP, the everything is a separate window is a window. Unlike other modern interface, like IRIX, the hovering of the mouse does not select the tools windows. This means that two mouse clicks are necessary for such simple things as moving between a pen and erase. Since I forget that I need two clicks, I often have the wrong tool selected.
On topic, there have been some talk about if CS5 is worth the money. I am sure it is, but it is a little too expensive for me, and I am not even sure what I need to buy. If there was something for $500 that adobe would sell for basic development, and then add on packages, that would be great. But they have these complex $2K packages which are really a bit intimidating for someone that isn't sure what is needed.
Somewhat on topic in terms of Apple and Adobe. I can see why Apple does not want people to use Adobe tools. They are kind of dreadful and expensive. I recall when I used code warrior. At first it provided value, but then the price just kept going up. It became an issue. Xcode and Eclipse are pretty nice.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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
CS actually makes this really easy to do.....
Illustrator vs Inkscape = Maybe passable alternative
*sigh* Inkscape is not trying to ape Illustrator. Inkscape is a clone of Xara. And that's the way I like it. The sooner the world can forget an over-complicated monstrosity like Illustrator ever existed, the better. =)
(...Still sort of bitter that the Xara open source project went nowhere, but hey, Inkscape keeps getting more awesome with every release...)
The Adobe suite is a whole, integrated polished set of products.
We don't need a "whole integrated set of products". We don't need a walled-garden comfort zone where we have a set of "working" applications, and when you step outside of that boundary, you start griping about everything.
You're looking for one application that does everything you need. I'm looking for applications that do everything I need. We need to accept the fact that programs may have deficiencies that they make up with extra features. I don't need one application that does everything; I just need applications that do what I need with minimum hassle. If I need to save a file in one program and open it in another, that's generally not slowing me down too much.
I love the GIMP, but I recently really, really started to love MyPaint. MyPaint doesn't do everything The GIMP does. It doesn't claim to do that. It makes it up by focusing on the infinite-canvas/natural-paint-tools features. I need to use both programs, and I accept this isn't a bad thing. I draw sketches on paper, scan in GIMP/XSane, ink and colour in MyPaint and give final touches in GIMP again. No problems.
Yet, I've seen a lot of Photoshop zealots who just can't accept the fact that there's programs out there that might complement their existing set of tools. No infinite canvas in Photoshop? Tough cookies, you're not allowed to leave the comfort zone. Because once you do, you start craving for the missing features in the other programs. Missing features are evil... unless they're missing from Photoshop, in which case you can't mention them. Because the Suite is perfect.
So, we don't want integrated suites. We want an universally implemented set of file formats. This works to some extent; if I want to feed in text data, OpenDocument or HTML copy/paste usually works. Vector images? Just use SVG or export to PDF. Plain old bitmaps? PNG or JPEG. What we really need right now is a commonly agreed multi-layer image format; PSD is generally considered too difficult to implement. GIMP's .xcf isn't implemented any-frigging-where, and no one cares about the formats other OSS apps have for this purpose. I'm hoping OpenRaster will be an interesting direction.
Sorry, but Linux is a pretty DAMM good plataform for hollywood film studios. We've got Autodesk Maya, Softimage XSI and don't forget Blender, Cinepaint, Mentalray. Crap, even disney is using Photoshop over Crossover (wine) to cash-in some money. http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/case_studies/WaltDisney.pdf http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html But, for the enthusiast and casual video editing, there is no good option yet. This is also true for music compositors.
I agree that if Microsoft is Sauron, Adobe is Saruman. If the FOSS hobbits are going to take down Microsoft, we're gonna have to deal with Adobe first. Whenever someone comes to me with questions about whether they can/should switch to Linux, I ask them if they make heavy use of Adobe stuff and games. If they do, I tell them to hold out. In other news, VLMC (NLE from Videolan) will be released soon, shortly after VLC 1.1 makes it out the door, let's see if they can change the picture a little. Then later this year we're supposed to see GIMP with the new UI...
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
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 is it moral for you to take what others make for free?
I'm of the opinion that most of your ilk are borderline OCD cases who simply can't wrap their noggin around somebody not following the rules. It's not like you don't understand my position. Lord knows that with your UID you've seen it hashed out again and again. You simply can't bring yourself to believe someone actually holds it. Because of rules.
Well let me tell you something, daldardedge, not everything fits into the neat bubble-wrap case you've made for it in your brain. Life isn't a series of collectible action figures, to be kept mint and safely tucked away each in their own place. Sometimes it takes a slightly broader view than the one you get peering over your viewsonic (yes, im insulting you by saying that, through choice and not necessity, you still own a crt). You need to wake up and realize that you are not the only person on god's green earth, but are rather one of a multitude of opinions and voices. Most of which are telling you to get stuffed.
So crawl back to your masters and let them know that men still exist who are willing to stand against them. That men still exist who are capable of leaning into the rushing tide of corporatism with the firm footing that comes with the knowledge of a righteous cause passionately pursued. Men who apparently write increasingly purple posts on self-important message boards. Men who will take free software, partially because they know it to be a victimless crime, but mostly because fuck you.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Who will make all that content you are stealing once everyone goes out of business from lack of sales? What will you watch then?
I write my own code, I own it. Why is that so hard for your to understand?
PS. It isn't a Viewsonic it is a Dell 30 1600p LCD.
You are one humorless motherfucker. I hope there's joy down in Whoville tonight, because there certainly isn't any at your house.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
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.
If there was something for $500 that adobe would sell for basic development, and then add on packages, that would be great. But they have these complex $2K packages
You don't have to buy the big packages. You can get Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for about $100 and the PLUS version for $140 and add anything you like from there...
polished
CS4 is one of the buggiest pieces of software I've ever seen, it was actually pretty shocking.
You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favourite artist is Picasso.
Isn't Maya like that now? I think think that its a very smart move. Provide free software to those who want to learn and use it privately, thereby increasing the user base and making that the defacto standard for the companies that are paying for the software and are faced with a choice as to what to get.
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.
Plus it will (probably) run under Linux if you use mono.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I LOVE DOCTOR WHO!
/.*
*crys at the decline of