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Adobe Creative Suite 3 Unveiled: Something for Everyone

News and Analysis by Ric Getter

April 2007

Adobe called it their biggest rollout ever and, with thirteen products and a reported 80 million lines of code, there is bound to be very little argument. For the creative community, it definitely was the most anxiously awaited announcement of a fairly ho-hum year. At the launch event, Adobe showed off the hottest new features of their hottest new products. However, the biggest news was probably the revelation of how the Macromedia product line would be formally absorbed into the Adobe fold. As was the case with Creative Suite 2, AdobeÕs focus is not only to expand the capabilities of its key products, but to draw them together with broader avenues of integration. With Creative Suite 3, one of the biggest challenges facing Adobe was the fact that, until about fifteen months ago, several of those products and technologies belonged to their fiercest competitor.

With CS3, the product lineup grew from two versions (Standard and Professional) to six (we won't use up your time and bandwidth by listing them all here). Unlike the recent OS announcement by that very big company in Redmond, the expanded purchase options should prove to offer more convenience than utter confusion. Adobe's armory of applications has expanded to a point where it covers three broad markets (with a good deal of overlap): print production, electronic distribution and video/multimedia. This is reflected in the trio's breakdown into Design, Web and (video) Production bundles. With the exception of the Production suite, which will only be available at the Premium level, the primary difference between Premium and Standard is the inclusion of Photoshop (whether it is the standard 2D version, the Extended version or, in the case of the web group, if it's present or absent.) The Master Collection (which we've dubbed the Òcorner officeÓ version) includes all the applications and a VIP price tag. Whatever direction you take, the cost of entry is not trivial, but buying by the Suite is significantly less expensive than acquiring the programs one at a time. Depending on what you already have (including Studio 8) and what you want, the upgrade paths are many and varied.

Left Unsaid
Some of the most important news from the CS3 launch came from what was not said, rather than what was. GoLive, ImageReady and FlashPaper (Macromedia's foray into proprietary portable document formats), were not mentioned and can be assumed to be victims of the merger's chopping block. This will certainly be a disappointment to some, but not really a shock to anyone. And as expected, Mac users longing to adopt Adobe's audio and video apps (Premiere Pro, Soundbooth and Encore) will need an Intel under the hood. But these decisions make a good deal of sense. After Effects CS3, the industry staple, will still run on your G4 or G5. Can these video products pull market share from Apple's Final Cut suite? It's hard to say. Our brief glimpse of Soundbooth revealed an approach unique to sound editing applications and Premiere Pro is positioned to exploit Creative Suite's far-reaching integration and offer some features that the competition does not.

But what may become one of the major landmarks of the Creative Suite Production package received only a brief and almost parenthetical mention in the launch event. The Flash Video Encoder was a very cool feature of Studio 8, but not many of us could see the impact it would have. Flash has become to online video what Adobe's PDF is to electronic documents. It's easy, it's fast and it's everywhere. Encore CS3, Adobe's DVD design application, will have the ability to export to Flash with all the interactivity intact. The education, training and online marketing potential for this capability is staggering. It may not put any talented ActionScript developers out of work, but it will open up the world of interactive video to a much wider audience.

Extended Appeal
Another feature in the potentially jaw-dropping category are the 3-D capabilities and dramatically enhanced Vanishing Point effect in Photoshop CS 3 Extended. In brief, you can now add 3-D effects in Photoshop and export the document to After Effects, which will then be able to work with it in all it's three-dimensional glory. The demo was really impressive (for those of us who hung in after an A/V equipment glitch scuttled the launch presentation for nearly thirty minutes), and it will be most interesting to see how it works in the real world. The Extended version also includes a collection of tools designed to extend its appeal to the scientific, medical and engineering markets, including hooks to a number of the popular applications unique to these fields.

As we mentioned, on the web development side, Adobe is bringing together the combination of applications that the majority of the market had already settled into: depending on Illustrator and Photoshop for high-end graphics, Fireworks for basic graphics, navigation, slicing and pre-web tweaking and Dreamweaver to bring it all together. Now that it is all under the Adobe mantle with interoperability via Smart Objects, Version Cue and Bridge, developers will be able to do their work faster with a lot less fence hopping.

Beyond all the products enhancements and features revealed at the CS 3 launch, the one thing that made the strongest and possibly most important impression was Adobe's attitude. They retained all the enthusiasm and drive of a company that's battling for market share. They know what their customers need and they deliver that and far more. With each new version, their products not only richer, but also faster. They are not only a market leader, but remain one of the market's leading innovators. When Adobe required Macromedia, many of us were concerned that the sudden lack of competition in the electronic design marketplace would lead to a creative lull in product development. Instead, it appears that the energies of two great companies have combined to bring us even more dramatic advancements.