Apple Reviews

Four great packages for the price of two! The Adobe Design Collection is graphic design studio in a box. You need Photoshop in any studio and version 6 has some really nice interface enhancements and web features. ImageReady 3 (part of the Photoshop install) makes very quick work of page slicing, and gif animation for those times that you are working on web content instead of print. Adobe won the vector drawing war years ago, and Illustrator 9 does a great job. Got a Wacom Tablet? If you do, Photoshop and Illustrator have fantastic tablet support. If you don't have a tablet, this is the best excuse to buy one. The last "must have" in this box is Acrobat. Clients and many printers expect you produce PDF documents and you'll need the full version of Acrobat to tweak things like thumbnails, and bookmarks for clients or adding pages before prepress.

The last application in the box is InDesign. I love InDesign, Adobe's new page layout tool. Not everyone shares my opinion. If you're doing books that require heavy indexing or foot and end notes, you may be better served by PageMaker and the Adobe Publishing Collection or FrameMaker. Also, many commercial printers won't support InDesign files because of bugs in version 1.0 (current version is 1.5.2). If you're in a heavy production environment like a magazine, you should look at Quark Xpress, because your staff will probably already be trained but Quark is known for horrible tech support. InDesign will do all the above, and elegantly, but you may need to buy a plug-in for indexing or other special needs. The bottom line is that you won't find a better deal for a complete professional package.

I bought this product because mainly, I've heard Photoshop is a good program & I've also always wanted to make those little ".pdf" files you get in README's sometimes. The product is excellent, and although the price is somewhat high, it's worth it. It takes a bit of getting used to if you're not a computer geek, but I would definitely recommend it for the professional, web designer, or overachiever. If you have the money, you might want to invest in it.

The CS series offers a great new horizon for Adobe products on OS X. As a designer at an extremely busy design agency, we have found the CS series to be a huge improvement. InDesign is proving to be the victor in the war with Quark. The massive diversity and ease of use of this program is paramount to cross media integration (print to web). These versions of Photoshop and Illustrator are simply the best. The usability of GoLive needs some tweaking, I much prefer Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004. But all in all, hats off to Adobe!

Photoshop... Not much needed to be said about it! Not much out there with as much to compare it to.

Illustrator... I simply love this product! It is easy to use and the results port perfectly into the rest of the suite.

InDesign... It takes a little getting use to, but then, it is EXTREMELY easy to use. This one is finally very stable! It is actually fun mixing this with illustrator. The two work extremely well together and produce expectional results! Add a few Photoshop edited graphics to the mix and there is nothing to slow you down!

Version Cue... Haven't used this very much. Nice addition though.

GoLive... If you need an editor and you use Photoshop, This fits in really well.

The one thing that puts this set above all the rest is the integration of PDF across the entire platform and the interoperability between the product.

The down side is that they still need to work on a SINGLE interface. I like the way InDesign's interface works with the tool bars hugging the sides of the screens. I wish they would impliment that across all of the products. Still, in terms of pure functionality, it is really hard to beat this suite!

...then i needed to contact their technical support because illustrator crashes when you try to label layers. they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible. no email support. instead you have to ring an area code 206 number and wait until some overworked undertrained person tells you to reinstall the product or the operating system... very helpful. just like their software.

i'll look elsewhere the next time i look for an illustration package or a graphics editor. and i won't even bother discussing their inept page layout program.

I grew up on Adobe products. They used to include great manuals and tutorials. Now I have paid more and received less. I am trying to learn how to use GoLive but the online manual doesn't make a whole lot of sense. How come a printed manual isn't included? Oh, I have to pay more for it? How come I seem to be paying for printing costs then? Customer support? To get real help I'll have to pay for it. I used Adobe Premiere for Mac but that product got abandoned. I will not buy another Adobe product until they either give more or charge less. If you are getting started with web design I would suggest going somewhere else. That being said... Illustrator and Photoshop are both still great products and the upgrades were easy for me to understand (probably because the last versions I had included a printed manual and tutorials). Let's face it, if it wasn't for OS X, I would have just stuck to the older versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and PageMaker and bought Dreamweaver instead. Photoshop CS - Classroom in a Book = $45. Illustrator CS - Classroom in a Book = $31.50. GoLive CS - Classroom in a Book = $45. InDesign - Classroom in a Book = $45. Acrobat Pro - Classroom in a Book = $45. $211.50 in manuals right there. Its a good product but it keeps on costing you in time and money.

No software is perfect, but Adobe comes as close to well designed, intuitive, user-friendly software as I have ever seen. Photoshop and Illustrator have always been the industry standards, and here they are both improved - particularly the digital photographer will be happy with the new photo filters in Photoshop CS, and the much improved file browser and the new filter gallery are also excellent additions. As far as publishing programs are concerned, InDesign is a greatly more intuitive program than Quark at a fraction of its cost, and because its pallets function much the same as in Photoshop and Illustrator, it is an easily acquired program if you are familiar with Adobe software.

I use these programs on a Mac OS X platform and for me they are very stable. I have had none of the crashing problems or tech support difficulties that another reviewer of the Adobe Creative Suite has had. For anyone using many design programs at once, enough RAM is always a requirement for smooth operation. But if you have enough RAM and a Mac platform, you should have no significant problems at all. PCs crash more by their nature because their operating system is not as stable as a Mac's, but still Adobe products are not only more intuitive than Microsoft's (for example), they also will crash far less on a PC than most other types of software (like Microsoft's).

Photoshop and Illustrator have always defined the state of the art for photo editing and raster graphic software respectively, and here Adobe is carrying on the tradition. InDesign looks as though it is fast replacing Quark in the publishing industry as well, so if you are a creative professional you will be more than happy in the end to own the Adobe Creative Suite. What else would you use?