Adobe Studio CS v2 - When?

Back in January there was some buzz about Adobe fixing to announce the second version of their Creative Suite. This was on the heels of the launch of Adobe Acrobat 7. The new version of Acrobat would provide some of the underlying foundation in upgrades of Illustrator, InDesign and even Photoshop.

Now here we are nearing April, and there's still no announcement or even any kind of buzz. NAPP's Photoshop World convention in Las Vegas was held recently. I would have expected some word about the next version of Photoshop there, or at a couple of other computer-industry related conventions held earlier.

Anyway, I just felt like posting here to see if anyone has heard anything new --or even received some "reserve your upgrade" mailers from Adobe. I usually get those, but it has been a couple years since I have updated any of my Adobe apps. So I don't know if they've dropped me off the list or something.

 

I'm going to be ordering the CS2 Premium upgrade sometime next week. I'm waiting until then to pass the closing date on my next credit card statement -that way I can pay off that $739 balance in July.

The Live Trace feature looks promising for some purposes. However I don't have my hopes set on it doing "finished quality" auto-traced reproductions of logos and other scanned artwork. I've never seen any auto-tracing tool come close to delivering what I consider satisfactory results in that manner. Such tools are good for creating fast and intentionally rough or stressed designs.

There's lots of other features in PhotoshopCS2, IllustratorCS2, InDesignCS2, Acrobat Pro 7 and GoLiveCS2 that make the package overall to be a worthwhile upgrade.

 

I have two reasons. I've made up my mind that I'm going to buy the Premium upgrade anyway. Second, I don't want to risk gumming up my notebook with extra registry trash from having a demo version of CS2 and then installing a new version over the top of it. As it stands, I'll clean off my Illustrator, PageMaker, GoLive and Acrobat installations -leaving only Photoshop 6 for the activation process.

 

I received my copy of the Adobe CS2 Premium upgrade today and installed it (all 3.5GB of it from 4 installer CDs) on my Dell Inspiron 6000d notebook. It's still a bit early to make a complete judgment, but overall things look pretty good. As a registration bonus, I downloaded the Garamond Premiere Pro font package (7 megs zipped!). There are some other bonuses, but I thought the fonts were the best of the bunch.

Photoshop has some pretty cool new features (image warping, cloning in perspective, lens distortion correction filter and lots more). The new Illustrator has those Live Trace features. With some image tweaking in Photoshop you can get some decent quick results. But as I suspected, it does take manual path editing to get precise results. Legacy file support and import from other apps is a big deal to me. I was pleased to see this new version of Illustrator do a great job with opening CorelDRAW files, even keeping all the layers and other settings intact.

The applications seem to work as fast as the older Adobe apps I had previously installed. The only thing that is noticeably slower is the application launch time. I guess that is to be expected. AI CS2 has a 600MB footprint on disc by itself.

 

Constant application updates are nothing new. Adobe publicly stated they were on a 18 month upgrade cycle. I think they've kept to that, at least when it comes to Photoshop and Illustrator. I've seen updates to other applications (such as GoLive) happen more frequently.

Photoshop was the only Adobe app I upgraded faithfully, but even with that one I started skipping versions years ago. Some of my other Adobe licenses had more age. My copy of GoLive 6 was my most recent upgrade. With that stated, this CS2 suite was a somewhat badly needed update.

Next cycle around, I'll see what Adobe does to the Macromedia StudioMX suite. I bought the first MX suite upgrade but passed on MX2004. If Adobe can field a good video editing and DVD creation suite I'll have a few more apps to upgrade/buy.

Users of the CS suite may be able to get by just fine by skipping the CS2 upgrade. However, I do think the live paint and live trace tools added to Illustrator and some of the new functions added into Photoshop are pretty significant. The color management workflow is also very different, bypassing the one resident in Windows. The combination of this and use of OpenType may finally allow Windows and Mac users to create files that have something much closer to seamless cross-platform compatibility.

The Bridge file and search browser is pretty interesting. I was also surprised about how much "metadata" was resident in some JPEGs, such as listings of what kind of digital camera took the photo, how many CCDs it had (like one in my little Kodak camera or three in my Panasonic video camera).

PDF creation is very robust -probably as good as it can get in terms of this package. Acrobat 7 has all these annotation features where you can send a customer a PDF and have them write notes into the PDF and then send it back to you. There's also more security options to protect the content within -although I probably won't send vector paths of original art to non-repeat clients. I think there's still ways how one can parse out vector paths from even protected PDF files.