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Digital Media Software
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium
5/30/2007
Some of the most common applications IT professionals have to administer (besides the usual, ubiquitous office and productivity tools) are to be found in the Adobe's design software portfolio--Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, and InDesign, among others. And, no doubt, those of you who have not yet upgraded to Creative Suite 3 are feeling the pressure to do so. And, beyond that, you're probably also feeling the pressure to upgrade to the Premium Editions of the design suite. Is it worth it?
The answer is an emphatic "yes" for organizations that rely on Adobe design tools. In particular, for those moving to Intel-based Mac systems or migrating to Vista, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Edition (Premium or Standard) solve basic compatibility and performance issues. In those situations, the upgrade is, essentially, mandatory. But the value of the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium Edition does not lie solely in the performance and compatibility enhancements. The individual tools have been upgraded, in large part, to bring a vast array of powerful, new functionality that will benefit your creative users. And, of course, the Design Premium Edition has been expanded in scope to include important and universally desirable applications that had not previously been available in Adobe suites.
The CS3 Design Premium Edition comprises the following primary applications:
- Dreamweaver
- Flash professional
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- Photoshop Extended
- Acrobat Professional
In this review we'll take a look at the three principal design tools in the suite (Photoshop Extended, InDesign, and Illustrator). Acrobat Professional is not new; and we have a separate review of the Creative Suite 3 Web Premium Edition that covers Dreamweaver and Flash Professional. You can find that review by clicking here.
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Performance, compatibility
For compatibility, Photoshop CS3, like all apps in the Design Premium Edition, offer native support for both Windows Vista and Mac OS X running on Intel hardware. Statistically speaking, slightly more than half of your creative users are on Mac (more on the design side, fewer on the Web development side), and those users have either transitioned to Intel-based Macs by now or will in the near future. And it's this group that will benefit the most from the performance improvements in Photoshop CS3.
In our previous look at Photoshop CS3 Extended, I posted some benchmark results showing the improvement in performance from CS2 to CS3 based on a pre-release version of Photoshop. Those results are exactly the same in the final retail release of Photoshop CS3 Extended. Here's how they look.
I ran three extensive tests comparing the performance of Photoshop CS3 Extended against Photoshop CS2 running on both Mac OS X and Windows XP Professional SP2 on exactly the same machine (an Intel Core Duo-based MacBook running at 2.0 GHz). Here are the details of the tests.
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