CS4 smooths out a lot of the rough edges of CS3 | Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium [Mac]

The de facto standard | Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium [Mac]

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	• Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium [Mac] Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger \| Adobe, 2008 average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Adobe: 100% Satisfaction

As a small business owner, I am very pleased with the latest version of Adobe's Creative Design Suite. I can create rich documents for internal use, distribution to my customers, and vibrant product catalogs/newsletters without having to pay a graphic artist (sorry guys!). Many of the documents have helped me simplify my workflow and save both myself and my employees valuable time.

This product more than pays for itself and is an incredible resource to help small businesses keep themselves viable in a more competitive marketplace.

CS4 smooths out a lot of the rough edges of CS3

Lots of great updates in this release.

Bridge has gone from a product I never even opened in CS3 to a program I use even more than the Finder is CS4 (when searching Adobe files.) I have two major gripes still. Bridge's smart collections are painfully slow where smart folders in the finder are very fast. Also Bridge is unable to detect Photoshop files that are located in the iPhoto library. Bridge can find other formats from with in iPhoto library just not Photoshop. Unfortunately that is the format I primarily use.

Flash currently crashes for me whenever I make a symbol so I haven't been able to use it much at all. That being said that are making great steps to simplifying the interface. Action Script is still unnecessarily complicated.

Illustrator has multiple artboards like FreeHand did except it works a lot better. You can now also bring in most FreeHand files fully intact since both software contains pages now. The blob brush is great. As a long time FreeHand fan I like on they seem to be making Illustrator functions easier like FreeHand but with more powerful features.

I see two problems with Illustrator. One is that they put the rotating canvas feature in PhotoShop but left it out of where it was really needed which is in Illustrator. The other is that I find it much harder to do a simple eye dropper sample in Illustrator than FreeHand especially when applying a color's stroke to another objects fill or a fill to another objects stroke.

Fireworks is an ok upgrade but didn't build on pages feature from CS3 like was badly needed. Fireworks needs to work more like InDesign for the web but it's layout features are stuck in the 80s. No multiple master pages, no basing one one page on top of another. No linking images so that you can have quick access to altering the image like how you can option like images in InDesign. Their is a lot more that I am not thinking of at the moment.

Dreamweaver is really a developer tool it's not that geared towards designing like they say it is.

Acrobat seem like it would be useful way to interact with clients but do all my clients have to go out and buy a really expensive piece of software in order to do that? I don't see any of my clients doing that therefore I don't see how it could be of much use to me.

I like how photoshops editing features are on the side of the screen rather than cover up the image like in CS3, that's a nice touch.

Camera Raw is almost identical to CS3. I hope they keep releasing new features for it like they did through CS3's life time.

InDesign is great. The new preflighting really helps. Now they need to bring Indesign's features over to Fireworks so that I can use the same powerful features inside of a web layout program.

One of the best features of all is having support for the PowerMac G5 which is still a very very fast computer today. I see absolutely nothing I need to a new Intel computer and there is no way I would have upgraded if they dropped support for PowerPC. I am not going to upgrade my machine a year a half from now so here's hoping they still support it then in CS5. If they don't I will just stay with CS4 and outright skip the upgrade since CS4 works really well for me.

Overall a great update.

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The de facto standard

If you're a web or UX designer, then you probably spend your life using the Adobe Creative Suite applications. Good or bad is really besides the point - these are the applications the pros use.

I waited a while before upgrading from CS3 to CS4, and now that I've made the switch, I regret not moving earlier. There are a ton of valuable new features in CS4, and even many of my old-time favorites have been revamped and made easier to use. Just a few examples:

The online Kuler service has a lot of potential for sharing content and tips, especially for newcomers.

The new "depth of field" tool is sort of like high dynamic range (HDR), but for focus instead of exposure. You stitch together a sequence of images focused on different things, and you end up with a composite with almost infinite depth of field.

And although I'm always hesitant to upgrade out of fear that performance will degrade, I find CS4 to be marginally faster than CS3. Plus, because of the redesigned interface, you spend less time sifting through menus, so overall it's easier to be more productive in CS4 than prior versions.

I could go on and on...if you're a design pro, this is definitely worth the cost (new or upgrade).

Of course, nothing's perfect and to be clear, these are still big, complex and hard to use applications that will take a big investment in time if you want to get the maximum out of them. Integration between components of the suite is cumbersome at best, and Adobe tech support is both frustrating and expensive.

Still, in the right hands, these tools work miracles, as every serious design pro knows.

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Better for pro users

I bought it than I noticed i don't need all of those features. It was cheaper for me to buy the standard version, which is more than enough.

Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, and mobile design
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium is the ultimate toolkit for crafting precise page layouts, achieving typographic finesse, creating stunning digital images and vector graphics, developing eye-catching web pages and rich interactive experiences, and producing them all with utmost fidelity within a single, unified creative environment.

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