Assessing
Adobe’s pricey creative suite update
by
Alan Zisman (c) 2009 First published in
Business
in Vancouver March 31-April 6, 2009; issue 1014
High Tech Office column
What do you do when your
best-known product’s name is used as a verb and virtually all your
potential customers already own a copy of your powerful but pricey
creative suite?
That’s the quandary faced by Adobe in upgrading
and marketing the newest version of Photoshop, whether on its own or as
part of its new Creative Suite 4.
Released last fall, Creative Suite 4 comes in six overlapping editions:
•a standard design edition (US$1,399) is aimed at print designers;
•a US$1,000 standard web edition targets online designers;
•premium design and web editions (about US$1,700) include varying mixes
of print and web tools;
•a $1,700 premium production edition bundles video and audio tools with
other Adobe products; and
•a $2,500 master collection combines all of the above.
Discounted upgrade pricing is available for users of previous versions.
Photoshop,
which is a single CS4 application, costs $700 for its standard version
and $1,000 for its extended release. So suite pricing is a less
expensive way of buying multiple Adobe applications. (Photoshop’s
extended release includes tools aimed at medical and scientific
professionals and animators and is bundled with the various premium and
master CS4 versions.)
None of these are aimed at typical home or
office users, but some combination of Adobe’s tools are used by nearly
all graphics and design professionals, whether producing work for
print, film or online publication. In the previous CS3 version, Adobe
focused on integrating Flash and Dreamweaver – web design tools bought
from competitor Macromedia with the rest of the suite. This time
around, along with interface improvements, the biggest changes are
aimed at making it easier for designers to work with multimedia-rich
content, moving it seamlessly between multiple Adobe applications.
While
editing a video clip in premiere pro, a user could touch up a frame in
Photoshop, tweak the audio in Soundbooth, all without having to save
the file, quit one application, open it in another application, save,
quit, etcetera, etcetera. Doing this, however, means multiple
resource-hungry applications are all running at the same time. Graphics
professionals upgrading to CS4 will not be happy working on older
hardware.
CS4 and most of its components are available for
Windows and Mac. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows are
supported – 64-bit Windows better supports the huge amounts of memory
needed for good performance when working with multiple CS4
applications. Mac users are left behind, with only less-powerful 32-bit
support; Adobe promises Mac 64-bit support with its next generation.
Photoshop
gains interface improvements with support for multiple tabs, new
keyboard commands and other streamlining. The extended edition sports
new 3-D and animation abilities, though only users with high-end
graphics hardware will be able to make much use of them. Flash users
also gain increased control over animations.
Designers creating
content aimed at mobile users can use device central to test their
content on a range of virtual phone models. Web design tool Dreamweaver
gets the biggest interface changes, becoming more Photoshop-like.
CS4’s
pricing, power and complexity are far above what most of us need. Even
graphics professionals – if they spend most of their Adobe-time with
Photoshop – may find themselves waiting for the next version,
especially if they’re not prepared to buy new hardware to accompany
this version.
Designers creating rich online content, however –
especially if mobile platforms are among their targets – will be
wanting to keep their Adobe Creative Suite (and their hardware) up to
date. •