Adobe Creative Suite 5 extends its graphic reach

Twenty years ago, Adobe Systems Inc. introduced a little program called Photoshop -- and launched desktop graphics as we know it.

On April 12, Adobe introduced Adobe Creative Suite 5, which includes newly revamped versions of 14 of Adobe's products -- a collection that spans video, audio, graphics, print and dynamic Web content. The changes vary across products: Some (such as Photoshop) have relatively minor changes and feature additions; others (like Premiere Pro) have been rewritten under the hood to increase performance.

Photoshop has been part of Creative Suite since 2003, along with Premiere, Illustrator, Flash Professional, InDesign, Soundbooth and a bevy of other major and minor Adobe apps. Creative Suite 5 comes in several different editions with different mixes of products in each.

* Design Premium ($1,899) focuses on print and Web media, and omits the video and audio tools.

* Design Standard ($1,299) is the same as Design Premium but omits Flash and Dreamweaver, and uses Photoshop CS5 instead of Photoshop CS5 Extended (which contains more tools for doing 3-D graphics directly in Photoshop).

* Web Premium ($1,799) is similar to Design Premium, but it leaves out the InDesign publishing app.

* Production Premium ($1,699) focuses on video and audio, with Flash and Photoshop on top for good measure.

* Master Collection ($2,599) contains everything: 15 applications plus three support apps (Bridge, Device Central and Dynamic Link) and integration with several of Adobe's online services (Story, CS Review, BrowserLab, Acrobat.com and SiteCatalyst NetAverages).

One thing that Adobe has been pushing for, based on my conversations with Adobe's product evangelists, is for content creators to see all the Creative Suite products as different facets of their entire workflow. The cynic in me says this is so Adobe can sell that many more licenses for the full suite instead of just the individual products. But in many ways, Adobe is inching toward making each piece of the suite part of a true whole, instead of just different apps corralled together under a common banner.

In this article, I've looked at the five major components of Creative Suite 5 -- Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere Pro -- from the point of view of what's new and whether those features justify an upgrade.

Dreamweaver

If you're looking for an answer to the ongoing question of whether Dreamweaver is a Web programmer's tool or a Web designer's tool, Adobe's answer is a firm: "Both." In the past few years, there have emerged many more people who wear both Web design and Web programming hats -- blog theme designers, for instance. Dreamweaver CS5 aims to satisfy those programming for the Web from the inside out, and those designing for it from the outside in.

The program's layout hasn't drastically changed since CS4, so Adobe has preserved things like the pregenerated panel layouts for different types of users or tasks: Designer, App Developer, Coder, Minimal and the "classic" Dreamweaver layout. Where there are changes, they're for the sake of making things more immediately useful. The "New Website" dialog, for instance, makes it much simpler to create a new site without having to answer a whole bevy of questions upfront (such as "What's the site's FTP address?") that might be known only to the site's admins, not its designers.

Because Dreamweaver is used by both coders and designers, many new features are aimed at programmers and app developers. This doesn't just mean page templates and syntax highlighting for JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic and PHP, although all that is in there. It also means that if you use the popular open-source Subversion software as your version-control system, for instance, Dreamweaver can use Subversion to check pages in and out and will alert you to any compatibility issues between editions of Subversion.

One function that shows how the program has been written for both programmers and designers is the ability to store and publish files in four different locations for each site: a local folder, a repository, a staging server and a live server. A designer can stage his changes locally or on a staging server without touching live code. That said, I've never been fond of Dreamweaver's local/remote file explorer, which even after all these revisions seems really clumsy, but I suspect that's more my own pickiness than anything else.

By far the most powerful new features in Dreamweaver are contextual ones -- things that make it easier to change the design of something while it's live and in place. If you're designing a WordPress blog, for instance, you can plug directly into the blog and edit its design interactively, instead of going through that whole rigmarole of "mess with stylesheet/edit templates/upload everything/dump cache/preview in browser" most of us are familiar with by now. Minor gripe: the JavaScript engine doesn't support breakpoints or single-stepping through code, just enable/disable.

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One of the best new features of Dreamweaver isn't part of the program itself but is an integrated service: BrowserLab, a Flash-driven Adobe Web site that lets you examine a page as if it were being rendered by the most popular browser engines. "Useful" doesn't begin to describe it: You can perform side-by-side renderings of pages and even view them as onionskin layers, where the results of different browsers can be seen on top of each other and compared. If you want this function in a stand-alone application, Adobe Contribute (the suite's collaborative Web site editing tool) sports it as a native feature.

Flash Professional

Rumblings about HTML 5 knocking Flash out of the box aside, Flash has become -- love it or hate it -- a cornerstone for how rich Web content, especially video, is delivered. To that end, Flash CS5's stated mission is to allow people to package and deliver Flash (for content inside a browser) or Adobe Air (for content outside the browser) to any device that runs it. For people targeting more than one platform with Flash, this version is well worth the upgrade.

The new Flash not only adds development tools but tries to provide a more welcoming environment for newcomers as well. Adobe does this by offering not just blank templates but also customizable libraries of code ("snippets") that cover many common scenarios -- for example, drag-and-drop operations, or clicking an item to go to a Web page.

What's nice about these snippets is that they come documented -- they include inline comments that explain how to modify them and to what end. The blank Flash app templates that come with the program also cover many common scenarios (such as a video player), although they're often very minimal. None of this is a substitute for a full tutorial (there are links to basic tutorials on Adobe's site as part of the program's online documentation), but they're good ways to dive in and start swimming.

One area where Flash has not only been reworked but made much more consistent with other Adobe products is text handling. The text engine in Flash 10 has been totally rewritten to be more like the typography system for Photoshop or InDesign. It now has, among other things, proper support for Asian typography, right-to-left languages, and advanced font features like ligatures. To me, it looks like a sign that, in the future, content created in any one part of Creative Suite will be treated much more interchangeably between applications.

Testing a Flash movie for use in different devices is done through its sister application, Adobe Device Central. This program is used by other Creative Suite apps as well, but Flash makes the most use of it: You can simulate everything from screen sizes to accelerometer behavior to the ways different phones display different types of media (e.g., Flash embedded in HTML vs. Flash opened stand-alone).

Even better is the ability to publish a Flash project as a native iPhone app. The end result is a real iPhone app, not something running on top of an add-on Flash interpreter -- but you still need to be mindful of how the iPhone's attributes (such as screen size) will affect the behavior of your app. A blank iPhone app template is included to help you get started, although you do need to have a proper digital certificate from Apple to actually run the program on the phone.

(As of this writing, Apple had announced that it would ban developers from using rival programming tools. Adobe's official announcement just prior to CS5's introduction was: "We are aware of Apple's new SDK language and are looking into it. We continue to develop our Packager for iPhone OS technology, which we plan to debut in Flash CS5." )

Illustrator

The changes made to Illustrator CS5 are a lot like what's been done to Photoshop. Instead of reinventing the whole program (which would have helped no one), Adobe simply touched up a whole slew of features. Most of these changes are intriguing, a few spectacularly useful. Collectively, they make for a good reason to upgrade, if the majority of your work is intended to span more than one target medium.

Several of the new features in Illustrator are further evidence of how Adobe is trying to bring synchrony to a great many features across different product lines. The "bristle brush" feature in Illustrator, for instance, lets you paint with a brush defined by many real-world characteristics -- the stiffness of the brush, length/density/thickness of the bristles, and so on. (It works best with a drawing tablet.) Photoshop users will find that feature familiar, because the bristle brush has been added to Photoshop CS5 as well.

Another cool feature, symbol scaling, lets one part of a symbol object (essentially a piece of vector clipart) scale independently of another. For example, if you're using an icon on a colored field, the icon can be partitioned off from the rest of the field, so when the whole symbol is resized, the icon doesn't stretch. This is very handy if you're designing something that's going to be reproduced in variety of dimensions and aspect ratios -- for instance, a bus ad versus a Web banner -- and you don't want to waste time realigning things.

Other new features close the gap between vector and raster output, so you can design for the former without making compromises in the latter. The "Align to Pixel Grid" option ensures that vector objects are snapped to the nearest pixel edge. This way, you won't end up drawing horizontal and vertical lines that end up anti-aliased across pixel boundaries, and so rasterized versions of the drawing look much cleaner. Use this in conjunction with the "Pixel Preview" option, and you can see a pixel-accurate version of your drawing -- a little like you've copied it into Photoshop -- without having to export it.

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In the same vein, Illustrator CS5 adds anti-aliasing for text, so you can see in the same way how fonts rasterize. Note that Illustrator CS4 already had advanced text-handling features (ligatures, hanging punctuation), akin to what we see now in Flash CS5; Flash has been playing catch-up to Illustrator.

Speaking of Flash, those who use Illustrator to create graphics for Flash will like how Illustrator integrates with Flash's sister app, Flash Catalyst. Catalyst lets you add Flash programmability to Illustrator images -- which can be re-edited in Illustrator without losing the programmer's markup added in Catalyst.

Photoshop

The changes to Photoshop -- arguably CS5's, and Adobe's, flagship product -- are minor. This is probably good news, since almost every Photoshop user I've talked to hates what they see as unnecessary changes. Photoshop CS5's interface is only minimally different from CS3's and CS4's, so people with experience on the previous two iterations of the program can get to work without too much retraining.

The most striking new feature has already gotten a lot of buzz: Content-Aware Editing. This function, which works with a number of tools (such as the Fill function and the Spot Healing Brush), attempts to use the characteristics of surrounding space when touching up an image. For example, in a photo that featured a bird sitting on a sidewalk, I lassoed the bird and used Content-Aware Fill to replace it with the adjoining texture of the sidewalk in one click.

As with any Photoshop tool, practice and experimentation pay off, since they don't always work as you might expect. Content-Aware Fill works best for small areas within larger areas but can produce weird results if you use it near the edges of an image. Using the Spot Healing brush seems to work best for spot touch-up jobs, since you can delineate a little more precisely how you want changes applied.

Another powerful feature, Intelligent Selection, takes the old Magic Wand tool a little further. With it, you can select an object against a background a great deal more easily, even an object with an irregular edge (such as hair). You can tune the scope of the selection as you go, by grabbing the bulk of the object in one or two clicks and then narrowing the diameter of the selector to add outlying regions that weren't caught the first time. (After Effects's Roto Brush function works in much the same way.) I also liked the Puppet Warp function, which lets you treat an image like an elastic mesh and distort it in highly controlled ways.

Given how many cameras on the market can save to raw image formats, raw image processing isn't a luxury feature anymore. Consequently, Photoshop ships with Adobe Camera Raw 6 as a standard-issue item, with support built in for tons of camera models. (Photos from my Canon Rebel XS imported with no problems.) One really nice touch: The default setting for the raw-processing plug-in can be made specific to cameras by serial number, ISO setting or both, which is handy if you have several cameras with different tweak factors. I also like how you can make nondestructive changes to the way raw images are interpreted by storing the changes in a sidecar file.

For even more precise camera- and lens-specific corrections, you can take photos of Adobe's calibration chart and feed them into Photoshop's Lens Profile Creator, which can automatically detect and compensate for chromatic aberrations or other problems.

In short, the name Photoshop is more appropriate than ever.

Premiere Pro

As with most of the other products in CS5, Premiere Pro -- Adobe's video editing product -- has most of its big fix-ups under the hood.

The most radical change, and the most useful, is the newly rewritten Mercury media playback engine. The more processor cores you have to throw at it, the better it'll perform -- and it takes advantage of Nvidia's CUDA parallel-processing technology, which uses your GPU to accelerate real-time effects performance. The bad news is that only a very small subset of Nvidia cards are supported: the Quadro FX 3800/FX 4800/FX 5800/CX and GeForce GTX 285. (Note that this doesn't preclude you from using GPU acceleration in, say, Photoshop -- just Premiere.)

Another major change, but one that I suspect won't be a deal-breaker for the program's core audience: 64-bit Windows is required to use Premiere Pro from now on. This allows the program to routinely make use of more than 4GB at a time. You'll need it.

Anyone who uses even a moderate amount of effects processing in video -- which, these days, might well be everyone -- will quickly appreciate what the 64-bitness and Mercury's rewrite will give them. GPU acceleration means a lot less time wasted rendering footage just to see accurate results for one change, or having all four CPU cores gobbled up by a single effect. (Rendering in Adobe Media Encoder is also GPU-accelerated.) Not every effect can be sped up this way, but Premiere at least lets you know which effects are accelerated and which aren't.

GPU acceleration is doubly valuable when you're working with HD video -- and Premiere Pro comes with tons of native format support for HD cameras. This includes video cameras like the Red line of high-end digital cinema systems. These sport their own proprietary file format (bad) but can shoot imagery that gives full 35mm a run for its money at a fraction of the cost (very good). Premiere Pro's new maximum image size is 10240 by 8192, which shouldn't pose any format problems for a while yet.

Another new addition for the effects-centric filmmaker (and actually part of Premiere's brother application, After Effects) is the Roto Brush -- a compositing/rotoscoping tool that uses a Photoshop-like interface to make separating an object from its background a lot easier. Roto Brush attempts to detect how the edges of an object (and the edges of its matte) move between frames, so you generally only have to do touch-up work between frames instead of re-creating the matte from scratch each time.

After Effects, like Premiere's other brother app, Media Encoder (which handles rendering of video to output in parallel with other tasks), can be set to share memory with Premiere so that you can efficiently run them side by side.

Many of the other changes in Premiere are aimed not simply at editors, but at moviemakers. The clearest incarnation of this is the auxiliary application Adobe Story, a combination of Web service and Adobe Air-powered program designed to close the gap between a screenplay and the actual footage shot and logged in for editing. You can take an existing script or create a new one from a template, break it down by scene and shot, associate specific takes or video files with those elements for easy editing, and collaborate with others on the results.

Some things are missing: For example, you can associate characters with a project (e.g., for lines of dialogue), but you can't yet generate a call sheet for that scene with props and such, which seems like the next logical step.

Wait, there's more

There's more to Creative Suite than just these five applications, of course. Here's a quick rundown of everything else you'll find in the various Creative Suite bundles, each of which has been upgraded since the last edition:

* After Effects complements Premiere Pro, adding the creation of visual effects such as rotoscoping and title sequences.

* Acrobat (and its online service, Acrobat.com) should be familiar to most people: It's Adobe's application for producing .PDF documents.

* InDesign would nominally be called Adobe's desktop publishing app, but it has also been devised to create documents in any number of Adobe's formats, such as Flash and Acrobat, and so now includes features like embedding video.

* Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder are new tools for creating Flash content. Builder is for people developing cross-platform apps (e.g., AIR), and Catalyst is for those who want to develop in Flash with minimal use of programming.

* Fireworks is something of a scaled-down halfway-house between Photoshop and Illustrator, a mixed vector/raster drawing tool for creating graphics for the Web. New features include better handling of vector images and gradients, integration with Adobe Device Central for better development of graphics for mobile devices, and the redesigned font/typeface engine also seen in Flash and Illustrator.

* Contribute allows collaborative authorship of Web content, either from Dreamweaver or through an online editor. New features include native XML editing (no need to launch an external editor), cross-browser preview and support for Subversion code control.

* Soundbooth is Adobe's audio editing suite, akin to ProTools.

* OnLocation performs video capture and footage logging as a complement to Premiere.

Conclusions

So, is CS5 worth it as a whole? For CS3 users, yes. You'll gain a whole panoply of features. You will need to adapt to some minor new UI changes -- mostly how tool panels and the workspace are styled and presented, although they remain functionally identical for the most part.

For CS4 folks, your money and mileage will vary. If you normally use only one application that is part of CS4, keep in mind that not every application in the CS5 suite is worth an upgrade. (Note: You can get upgrade prices if you own one of the applications and want to move up to the suite, but if you own the suite, you won't get upgrade pricing on single applications.)

However, if you use the suite rather than just one or two programs alone, the majority of the apps are worth the upgrade. The programs are available individually for free 30-day trials, so if you're more than one revision behind, they're absolutely worth a look.

Serdar Yegulalp has been writing about computers and information technology for over 15 years for a variety of publications, including InformationWeek and Windows Magazine.