CS3 is the best release yet of the venerable Adobe Creative Suite of applications. Nearly a year after Quark shipped Universal binary Xpress 7, Creative Suite is now Universal binary too, and the speedup and stability gains on both Intel and G4 Macs are impressive. This is especially
praiseworthy in that the relentless trend for all software is to be slower than its predecessor, with companies relying on improved hardware to take up the bloatware slack. Hats off to Adobe for reversing this dreadful trend!
The most dramatic news for Creative Suite is the entry of Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Contribute and Flash, welcome replacements for clunky GoLive and Adobe's weak 'Flash Killer', Live Motion, which ended up slain by Flash. Given the small time that has elapsed since Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe has done a superb job of integrating the applications, although there is still work to do.
Mostly, though, CS3 is not about a few big things, but a lot of little ones. They say that God is in the details; whatever one thinks of that, it's indisputable that the small enhancements in CS3 irresistibly add up to a must-have release.
Illustrator
One example of the kind of thing Adobe is paying attention to this time around is having a control point enlarge when the selection tool hovers over it. So simple, yet it makes one of your most common actions more graceful. Another interface feature, common to most of the Suite, is the replacement of palettes by panels which occupy less screen space, so you don't need two screens when working with them. Live Color lets you easily select harmonious colors and try out different color schemes, saving time for experienced graphic artists and providing useful guidance for beginners. The new eraser tool and enhanced Control panel make everyday tasks more efficient.
The bad news is that you still can't create multi-page documents. This is especially painful for users of Freehand, since Adobe has U-turned on its promise to support and develop Freehand. Illustrator can import Freehand files, but the import is not full-featured.
Photoshop
Of all CS2 apps, Photoshop suffered the most from being run on Intel Macs. As with Illustrator, Photoshop CS3 offers noticeably faster performance both on Intel and G4 Macs.
A killer feature is the new method of conversion from color to black and white, which lets you apply, virtually, the various color filters that black and white photographers are accustomed to using. But it goes infinitely further than that: one of many new tricks is that you can click on
a tone in the image itself to selectively brighten or darken it.
Photoshop now comes in two flavors, standard and extended. Extended has new capabilities, including 3D support, that are targeted towards architects, engineers, the medical profession, and the like. Extended has one killer feature we suspect will make many standard users drool: an image alignment technique that lets you average multiple images to remove artifacts such as digital noise or even people from architectural or landscape shots, for example.
Hundreds of other enhancements, far too many to mention in this overview, make this the best version of Photoshop yet. But OpenType doesn't work in Photoshop the way it does in either Illustrator or InDesign, even though Adobe's entire type library is now only available in OpenType.
InDesign
InDesign's overhaul is primarily a response to Quark 7. It now has transparency almost comparable to Quark's, though it can't give different transparency levels to different letters in a line of type as Quark can (and as LightningDraw GX pioneered as early as 1996), or to a single color in a gradient. And although InDesign doesn't have Quark's path-breaking composition zone collaboration features, the ability to nest documents inside other documents is a step towards parity.
Regrettably, in the fine typography department, the original raison d'etre for InDesign, nothing has improved: Paragraph composition is still slow and inflexible. Optical alignment is still unusable. You can always tell when someone has (unwisely) turned it on: you'll see bits of
dust hanging out of the margins that are actually supposed to be quotation marks. Worst of all is the 'optical kerning' feature which for almost all fonts makes spacing worse, not better. Paradoxically, Adobe's still-sold but now unsupported PageMaker 7 will often produce better looking pages, as does QuarkXpress 7. This is frustrating to report, because InDesign started out with all the right fine typography ideas. Unfortunately, it implemented them badly in version 1, and then never followed through on improving them in succeeding versions. Adobe says customer demand to improve these features is not great, but we don't think that is a good reason to keep inferior features and algorithms in any program, least of all Adobe's typography flagship.
There are other painful issues around type in all the CS apps. OpenType support, over 10 years after the format was announced, is still neither comprehensive nor consistent across applications: You still won't find a character palette in Photoshop, for example, and what about Dreamweaver? Designers who have spent small fortunes on Adobe's popular Multiple Master fonts have also been left out in the cold. The MM capabilities that previous versions of InDesign and Illustrator sported were rudimentary, but they were better than what we have now, which is next to nothing. If you had to design a street map, you'd be better served by
Illustrator 8!
An ethical graphic designer spends tens of thousands of dollars on fonts, far more money than he or she spends on any other software -- or hardware. Much of that type comes from Adobe. Adobe should better support its newer type technologies, such as OpenType, and its older type technologies, such as Multiple Master. Otherwise it is trampling on the biggest investment its users make. Microsoft, the co-developer of OpenType, is even more reprehensible in this respect. At the very least, MS Word should be supporting OpenType to the extent InDesign and Quark do.
But Adobe has made many other important improvements. Table styles make sophisticated table composition easier, and there are numerous long-document enhancements that have been all too long coming to InDesign and Quark. Running headers and footers, and text variables are a good start. But when will we have multiple-level automatic footnotes? (XyWrite, the DOS word processor still used by a few pros, effectively implemented the concept nearly 20 years ago.) And the variable text feature has an unacceptable gotcha -- it won't wrap, but will overset -- a fatal deficiency which must soon be addressed. This illustrates a problem
InDesign has had throughout its development: a cool feature is thrown in, and looks persuasive in feature comparison charts and first look reviews, but it's so poorly implemented that it's almost useless when it actually comes down to trying it, and then it's never fixed in the succeeding years. Although there are many of these dark holes still, this is an encouraging release in that many small things have been attended to. Let's hope for a substantial dot release that addresses more of these dark holes.
Criticisms aside, InDesign CS3 is an extraordinarily capable and mature program that will get huge, complex jobs done well -- as long as you turn off the advanced typography features.
Summary
There are many things to complain about in CS3, especially in the embarrassingly inept way it handles type. Type is the foundation upon which the entire publishing industry rests! But in other respects it is a superb release which belongs in every graphic professional's toolset. We
suspect that most designers will do 80 percent of their work in Quark 7, because it is faster, much more intuitive, and integrates print, photo effects, Web design and animation better. But for the other 20 percent, where the deepest features of Illustrator and Photoshop are called into play, there is nothing to compare to Creative Suite, and Adobe has inspired confidence with the great competence of this release.
