Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium

Adobe CS4 Design Premium bundles a great Flash update, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat 9 together. Designed specifically in mind for those serious about graphic design, CS4 Design Premium contains nearly every tool possible for editing digital images and layouts for print and the Web, as well as for crafting interactive animation and desktop applications. With CS4, it's easy to bring your best ideas to life in a powerful, flexible, intuitive, and tightly integrated creative environment.

If you don't need video editing, this is the better and cheaper choice over the Adobe Master Collection. InDesign can be used for print, Dreamweaver and Fireworks for dynamic Web design, Flash for animation, and Photoshop and Illustrator for pixel and vector graphics. You could use this software to create a campaign that repurposes the same images and layouts for formats as varied as magazines, posters, t-shirts, Web sites, online games, desktop applications, and mobile devices.

Plus, Adobe CS4 Design Premium has unified the interfaces of all the applications for a more seamless experience. Work-space adjustments to CS4 include panels that are more effective than its predecessor's, and handy pull-down menus with preset styles that enable you to shift among work space layouts quickly. This will help you move naturally and efficiently between production tasks.

The Creative Suite brings everything together and also includes Device Central, which helps you create and test multimedia content for mobile phones and other gizmos; Version Cue, for central management of files used by creative teams; and Bridge, an integrated file browser.

Adobe CS4 Design Premium: What We Liked

• The Creative Suite combines all the important design software into 1 box, which is all easy-to-use with a unified interface.
• Adobe's comprehensive, self-serve options include embedded and online look-ups, tutorials, and excellent videos.
• Adobe's custom installation lets you pick and choose which components to embrace or reject.
• Also, the company has expanded its help-yourself and peer support online.

Adobe CS4 Design Premium: What We Didn't Like

• There are many complaints about the Adobe installer and updater, as the software forces you to close all other applications and takes a long time installing.
• The Creative Suite seems expensive for the small studio or freelance designer, and the upgrade pricing is steep.

Adobe Support

Adobe provide a direct phone contact for customer service support. They also offer online support via email, help question database, user forum and alternate links.

About Adobe

The company's award-winning technologies and software have helped to redefine business, entertainment and personal communications by setting new standards in professionalism and creativity.

     

Birthed from a desire for cross-media capabilities in the professional arenas of print, web, interactive and mobile design, the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software represents the pinnacle of innovative cross-media collaboration in a unified creative environment. Creative Suite Design 4 enables you to create sharp images and graphics, precise layouts and rich interaction for virtually any media - print, web, video, audio, and mobile.

Design Premium includes 7 stand-alone programs in one, 3 more than the Standard edition:

• Adobe InDesign CS4
• Photoshop CS4 Extended
• Illustrator CS4
• Flash CS4 Professional
• Dreamweaver CS4
• Fireworks CS4
• Acrobat 9 Pro with additional tools and services.

Adobe Creative Suite Design 4 Design Premium Features:

Power

• New processing features make executing designs, transferring files between projects and the effectiveness of individual tools faster and more consistent.

Diversity

• Transfer - experienced users of Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign can quickly transfer projects to Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, or Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro for refinement and production.
• Output - produce high-quality output in print, Web or mobile.
• Export - dynamic documents can be created by exporting an InDesign layout as a XFL file, opening it in Flash, editing text and graphics, and adding interactive elements.

2D & 3D Animation

• New Tools - for designers who are interested in moving from 2D to 3D, a set of user-friendly tools help convert your projects to animation while reducing the learning curve.
• Object Based Animation - designing in Flash is now more straightforward and similar to working with static design elements and other Adobe creative applications.
• New 3D painting and compositing features make editing, enhancing and manipulating 3D images exciting and easy.
• Convert 2D images to common 3D shapes such as cubes, cylinders, or spheres and paint directly on 3D models with the image-editing tools in Photoshop.