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."

Re:Upgrade policy?

[Aladrin]

According to everything I read on the web, if you purchase it after the announcement (which is today) then they'll give you a free upgrade. But before that, you get bupkis.

Re:Gushing, ignoring the important issues

[PenguSven]

is Adobe continuing their trend of writing awful, inconsistent, ugly, usually-slow UIs?

This came up a while ago, on John Nack (PS product manager)'s blog. Basically they think their custom UI stuff for CS is the beez knees, and you unlucky shmoes who "have to use" CS will be getting MORE not less of their crap in future (including CS5) versions.

Re:Aaaaargghh

[LifesABeach]

for an extra $900, they can upgrade...

Re:Gushing, ignoring the important issues

[rinoid]

They also blame all bugs on Apple or in the case of not being able to save file error "Could not save (file name) because the file is already in use or left open" ...

Seriously. Check out this thread. The only app on any Mac or Windows computer I use (and that's a handful) which gives this kind of error and Adobe blames the OS vendors. All those other apps which save files never report this problem, EVER!

What is Adobe's reply? It's outside of Photoshop, it's NOT ADOBE's problem.
Check out the thread at Adobe forums:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2712066 [adobe.com]

Also required reading for this thread:
http://innerdaemon.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/sorry-adobe-you-screwed-yourself/ [wordpress.com]

Adobe has become quite arrogant and unfocused IMO. The problem is for me the lack of a Photoshop competitor. I use Illustrator less than a long time ago so the various replacements work well in this space.

Re:Upgrade policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out KB article from Adobe. Maybe it will answer your question? [adobe.com]

At my work we always get the 24 month upgrade plan with any software we purchase from the Creative Suite. We buy Design Premium for $320 and the upgrade plan only costs an extra $120, although we do get the software at educational pricing so I'm not sure how much it would be for others.

Re:Any update on the export to iPhone?

[TheRaven64]

Uh, why is this flamebait? Corporate customers can push apps to their iPhones without going via the App Store and, as far as I know, the restriction on non-native apps only extends to the App Store.

Re:Waste of time...

[Devout_IPUite]

Have you played with Inkscape? If not, check it out. If yes, shucks.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Gushing, ignoring the important issues

[Blakey Rat]

I can't comment on Maya (maybe it's worse, I dunno), but Adobe's current set of projects are pretty damned horrible.

Take a look at this blog (not mine): http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ [tumblr.com] Even ignoring the stuff that plain does not work at all (the majority of the Fireworks entries), there are tons of extremely obvious errors in the UI.

Re:FLOSS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Any update on the export to iPhone?

[Anonymous Coward]

From my understanding, you can only push to 200 (? 400) different iPhone devices, and *you have to have the identification number off of each device built into the app to do it*

Quite frankly, from an enterprise standpoint the AppStore and Apple's iPhone app signing model are an unmitigated disaster.

Re:Gushing, ignoring the important issues

[zalas]

The core of Photoshop CS5's content-aware fill is not the texture synthesis algorithm, which has been around for some time now, but the Patch-Match optimization for approximate nearest neighbors, which lets them do it orders of magnitude much more efficiently than previous techniques.

Re:FLOSS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Adobe has been taking Creative Suite backwards.

[dgatwood]

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 [apple.com].

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 [pixelmator.com]. 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.

Re:Biggest Improvement They Could Make

[djlemma]

Who ever said you couldn't buy Photoshop by itself? It costs about $700, but it's a lot less than the full creative suite.
Try looking at amazon [amazon.com] next time.

Re:FLOSS alternative?

[Adriano ML]

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 [codeweavers.com] http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html [linuxmovies.org] But, for the enthusiast and casual video editing, there is no good option yet. This is also true for music compositors.