An Overview of the Adobe Creative Suite 2

Even if belated, here is an overview of the most powerful publishing package I have ever come across

Adobe Creative Suite 2—it’s like the Christmas present I always wanted when I was a kid but that I would never find under the tree, the water in the hot desert the… publishing package that I have always only dreamed of… until Adobe released it.

From packaging to guides, from training to its actual use, from the Adobe applications’ interface to their product, Adobe Creative Suite 2 is the most professional, feature packed and useful tool a graphic designer could have. Smooth and quick workflow, time saving application integration, publishing tools designed with the user in mind are all synonymous with Adobe Creative Suite 2. It is very difficult to do justice to such a package with a simple software review, but I’ll do my best to portray its capabilities.

What’s in the Box

Adobe Creative Suite 2 comes in a box with a Design Guide, a Total Training CD with 60 minutes of professional training, a design guide which brilliantly illustrates workflows within the Creative Suite, install CDs and 2 CDs of extra goodies and resources. With installation of the Premium version you’ll have Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, InDesign CS2, GoLive CS2, Acrobat 7 Professional, Version Cue CS2, Adobe Bridge and access to Adobe Stock Photos. The Standard version does not include GoLive CS2 or Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0.

Thanks to all of these applications, Adobe Creative Suite 2 supplies one common platform for print, web and mobile publishing in one package, providing a solution to designers in a ever-developing world where Creatives have to wear different hats and go beyond a single area of specialization. With the improved integration of the CS2 applications, the designer has total control over his or her work and is not a slave to cumbersome workarounds. Using files amongst the CS2 programs is easy and fast.

The Bridge of Integration

Integration between Creative Suite applications is greatly enhanced thanks to Adobe Bridge. Some people find it slow, but I have had absolutely no problems with it. It is true though thought that running Adobe Bridge is heavy on RAM. With Adobe Bridge you can browse and view files with adjustable previews or slideshows, drag and drop files into Creative Suite applications, access Adobe Stock Photos and Version Cue, process several RAW format files at once and assign ranks to your favourite images.

With Adobe Bridge you can browse your computer, keep track of RSS feeds and access Adobe Stock Photos (enlarged version)

All of these features make Adobe Bridge far more valuable than a file browser; they make it probably the central point of integration of the entire Creative Suite together with Version Cue. Let’s have a look at a typical designer’s workflow without Adobe Bridge.

You have your sketches and so on, you know what you are going to design. You then create your InDesign document, adjust your page settings, margins, grids and so on and do your design. If you need a picture you have to exit InDesign momentarily, look through your CDs or several stock photo sites, find an image you like, download it, sometimes even purchase it before you have committed to using that image in the final design, go back to InDesign and place it.

You then have also a bunch of photos that were supplied to you in RAW format so you can make all the changes you want, but you are not yet sure about which one you are going to use. You need to show properly optimized photos to your client when you will show him or her the proofs. Go ahead, open them one by one in Photoshop and make the changes. It’s a pity because they all have very similar colours and lighting, so it would have been nice to just make the changes once for all of them. Let’s say you take 5 minutes to edit one and about 3 minutes to edit the rest, and with 10 photos you have spent just a bit over half hour.

Once you have edited your RAW images it’s time to import one of them into InDesign, so you have to fetch it from the Place command, maybe open a couple of files because they are all similar and you can’t see very well the differences in small previews, then place the image of your choice into InDesign. Oh wait a minute, was it that the image you wanted to place, or was there another one you preferred while you were editing them? I remember, I thought you said you liked the other one because no one was pulling faces. But which one is the other one? Let’s go back open them all again.

You carry on with your design and save a few versions, but suddenly you decide that the version with the green title and the table of contents without dot leaders was best. Now which version was it again? Version 5? Version 6? Hey, don’t ask me, I was next door preparing you a coffee, you know you needed it as this is a long project, and don’t blame me if the coffee is cold now. Oh and your client is really undecided between which cover to use, but the rest of your magazine is fine the way it is. Yeah, just save two files, one for each cover, or make two PDFs of the cover.

I am probably the only who manages to get gray hair in her twenties, but I am sure many of you can relate to these day to day situations, and there are probably others which I can’t think of right now but that can be very tedious.

Let’s have a look at the same day to day workflow with the addition of Adobe Bridge.

You have your sketches and so on, you have created your InDesign file and are doing your design. You need photos and you can look at your CDs or simply access Adobe Stock Photos directly from Adobe Bridge. Adobe Stock Photos will find images from several stock photography sites, so you can reach a bigger number of photos in one place. If you make several searches, you can save your previous ones and get back to them without having to wait for the photos to download again. You can then download the image you want and you can place it in your design. If that is the image you will commit to at the end of the design project, you can then purchase a high resolution version, but not before then.

Adobe Stock Photos can be accessed with Adobe Bridge (enlarged version)

It’s RAW photos time. Here they are, all very similar, just open them with Adobe Bridge edit one of them and see how the changes affect all of them at once. It took you 5 minutes for the first one… and then that’s it. The one where people don’t squint, why, just rate it 5 stars so you know in future that it’s the one you want to use. Now just drag it inside InDesign to place it.

You can edit several pictures at once (enlarged version)

The design with the different cover and the table of contents without dot leaders? Will you tell me why you send me away to prepare your coffee and then expect me to know what you do with your files? Just access the Version Cue environment from Adobe Bridge and have a look at the description of the several versions you saved. There it is, it’s version 3. Your face lightens up, you pull up your third version of the file in InDesign pick up your coffee mug… what? It’s too hot? Listen mate, it isn’t my fault if you used to take half hour to edit 10 camera RAW files before…

Yes the client wants to see two versions of the cover. Get into Version Cue with Adobe Bridge once again and set up alternate pictures. You can then just swap the pictures within InDesign from the Links palette in a flash. Print the cover once, print it twice and that’s it. Now this is a streamlined workflow.

With Version Cue, you can set up alternate images and swap them if you are not happy with the one you are using (enlarged version)

A Highlight on Features

Integration amongst the applications of Creative Suite 2 isn’t only possible because of Adobe Bridge or Version Cue: Enhancements within the applications themselves result in a better integration amongst them.

One of these enhancements is the concept of “smart objects” which has been introduced in Photoshop and GoLive. The concept of smart objects is similar to the linking function in layout applications: Whenever the original image is modified also the linked copy is updated. But that is not all smart objects do.

In Photoshop CS2 the smart object feature is especially useful when vector graphics are imported. With prior versions, once you imported a vector graphic in Photoshop and committed to a size, the graphic would be rasterized and any resizing would cause quality loss. With smart objects a vector graphic imported into Photoshop remains vector and can be resized at will with no problems at all. This will save having to re-import the image in case you are not happy with its size.

Scaling vector graphics in Photoshop no longer compromises image quality with Smart Objects

In GoLive CS2 smart objects are even better time savers. No need to save your original high res PSD, PDF, AI files, or whatever into a suitable web format. You just drag your high res pictures into GoLive and they will be automatically converted to RGB and flattened if need be. Most of the time you only need to decide in which format to save them which is done on importing. Despite that, when the original high res images are modified, the GoLive optimized versions will automatically update too.

The new MS Word import dialog gives you much more control over Word style sheets (enlarged version)

Again in the name of integration, text and styles sheets imported from a word processing application to InDesign and then to GoLive can be easily modified. When you import a Word document to InDesign, you can import all the Word styles or even change Word styles to match InDesign’s in a couple of clicks and vice versa. This makes formatting fast and painless, especially considering the risks that designers come across when importing colours from Word, as they usually are in RGB mode, which doesn’t go well with offset printing. When packaging files or single pages to GoLive you can further customize the existing InDesign styles so they are usable for web—an example is changing uncommon fonts to ones that are usually on people’s computers.

Yet that’s not all. If you feel that the Creative Suite applications weren’t socializing enough with each other yet, you will be happy to know that InDesign CS2 not only can import PSD files and support transparency, but it can also toggle layers on and off both in PSD and PDF. This saves designers the need to switch back and forth between Photoshop (or Illustrator) and InDesign and it creates a nice interaction between the two.

You can toggle layers of PSD and PDF files with InDesign (enlarged version)

Notes About Enhancements

Enough about integration, although what I covered isn’t all there is to know. But as I said before, covering such a powerful publishing package in one review is almost impossible. Aside from integration features, Creative Suite applications have been enhanced also as stand alone products. Here is a quick rundown of some of the new features, the enhancements already covered prior to this point will not be mentioned here.

InDesign CS2

• Object Styles: Like paragraph and character styles, object styles allow you to store formatting in style sheets that can then be applied unirformly to several objects at once, speeding up the design process. Any change made to the styles will affect each element in the InDesign document with that object style.
• InDesign preflight option now includes the ability to check downloaded images from Adobe Stock Photos which were not purchased and lets you buy them from within InDesign itself.
• You can create snippets, i.e. copies of single elements in a page such as images, text, anything you want, that can then be used elsewhere in the same or in other documents.
• Multipage PDF files can be imported in separate frames without having to import the PDF in each frame every time. You just import the PDF, tell InDesign that you want to import all pages, and then you click on the first frame to place the first page, thhttp://designorati.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=500en on the second frame to place the second page and so on.
• It can now package single pages for GoLive, instead of having to package entire documents regardless of what you need.

Photoshop CS2

• Added Vanishing Point: A great tool that lets you create images in perspective, almost like in a 3D environment.
• The way layers are controlled in Photoshop CS2 is much more straight forward. When moving or scaling multiple layers at once, there is no need to link them, they can just be selected together using the Shift button and then they can be scaled or moved at once.
• Added avery much improved sharpening method called Smart Sharpen.

Illustrator CS2

• Added workspaces, so you can customize your Illustrator workspace and save several of them which you can use at your convenience.
• Added Control palette similar to the one of InDesign
• A new Live Trace feature allows you to trace raster images and generate vector art based on those on the fly. Using the New Live Trace Feature in Illustrator CS2 by Sara Froehlich is a great tutorial to read to learn its use.
• This is a feature that lets you paint vector objects in a similar way to which you would paint them in Photoshop. Here’s a visual explanation from Total Training that will explain it better than simple words (requires QuickTime).

Acrobat 7 Professional

• Much more thorough preflight options which don’t only check what is wrong with your PDF, but they also give you the possibility to fix some of the problems. For example you can you convert RGB elements into CMYK or convert spot colours to process without having to go back to InDesign
• You can enable commenting on PDFs so that people who only own Acrobat Reader, such as clients for example, can make their comments on your design.
• PDFs can be e-mailed or upload to a server directly from Acrobat 7 Professional.

Thanks to Apple QuickTime technology, GoLive can be used to develop mobile content (enlarged version)

GoLive CS2

• Can be used to create mobile content, which can even be previewed as it would be seen on mobile devices.
• Lets you decide whether to translate your WYSISYG layout in tabular coding or CSS

System Requirements and Where to Get It

The Adobe Creative Suite 2 can be purchased as a package or its applications can be bought as stand alone products. Upgrades from previous versions are also available. With the merge of Adobe and Macromedia, the Adobe Creative Suite 2 can also be purchased as a part of two bundles: The Adobe Design Bundle (includes Flash 8 professional) and the Adobe Web Bundle (includes Studio 8).

You can find the system requirements for both Premium and Standard Editions here.