Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium is the website design and development software suite that has everything you need to design your own website and take it to the limits of the internet and your imagination.
Ease of Use, Performance: 24/25
Look & Feel: 24/25
Features 23/25
How much I enjoy 24/25
Total: 95/100
Adobe has come out with its most recent version of software suites with Creative Suite 4 that updates some of the content of each suite. Including upgrades and fixes there is a general workflow improvement in not only the software programs but interaction between the programs that is the biggest fix to the newest edition.
I received the Adobe Web Premium Creative Suite and will be highlighting the major improvements here and will be going into depth on each section in latter reviews. Like I said the main improvements to this suite are interaction and workflow but there is some individual improvement worthy of note as well.
I have been using Adobe products for several years and was introduced to the Creative Suite 3 Photoshop and Dreamweaver programs not long ago and found them extremely easy to use in website design. I created my own website never having used or worked with web design or HTML other than an extremely basic idea of what it was.
Now I have my own website up and running but it is not all that complex a one, a simple design with very basic format using an easy template without much in the way of extras. I will be adding to the site as I go into each program that is part of the Web Premium suite so I can check out the functionality and get familiar with the use of each program.
For now let me say that the program is easy to install and pretty much takes care of all the installation and updates with very little problem. I only had to tell the program that I wanted it to install to the default C: drive creating its own folder and away it went.
There was the customary EULA agreements and I had already uninstalled my previous Photoshop and Dreamweaver so there would be no conflicts. The installation went fine and there was some updates available so the process did take a little time but not too long.
The Photoshop and Dreamweaver Icons and opening screens are a bit different but nothing that would be a problem, each program has been freshened up but also made to look similar as well. All the Adobe programs are easy to find on the Start menu and some of them installed to the top of the program list under Adobe as well as under it in the folder list.
Adobe Web Premium comes with Photoshop and Dreamweaver which I have been using but also Flash, Illustrator, Fireworks, Acrobat, Soundbooth and Contribute. Creative Suite 4 also comes with some handy all around management programs like Device Central, Version Cue and Bridge.
There are a host of other programs that also install when you perform a default installation that have uses with the suite like connecting to a server or designing PDF forms. The additions are Adobe Distiller 9, Drive CS4, Extend Script Toolkit, Extension Manager, LiveCycle Designer ES, Media Encoder and Pixel Bender ToolKit.
Once your installation is complete and you have updated using the Adobe updater where do you begin, well you can start with the familiar and go from there. I use Photoshop and Dreamweaver regularly in my site design and product shots and can tell you they have not changed in any significant ways.
But they have been made a bit easier to use if you want and many new enhancements are in all the separate programs but you can also move from program to program with your designs. Web Premium now has a feature that allows updating parts of your design without having to open them that comes in real handy with multi program resources.
What these new features really mean is better work flow for everyone on a project or for a single project for one person, as an example I can work with one webpage. I use pictures on my website and edit them in Photoshop, before the CS4 Web Premium I would have to open Photoshop if I forgot to resize the image for use on my webpage in Dreamweaver.
It works like this, I publish larger pictures, 1024x800 pixels or so, on Associated Content and also publish to my website with pictures that are sized down to 300 pixels across the horizontal edge so they fit on the page. If I want a bigger picture I simply link to the picture with the larger one but the main thing here is I size all my pictures down to 300 pixels wide in Photoshop or Lightroom 2.
I then copy images to a separate folder and move them to my working file for my website but if I forget to resize them or if I want to change them in other ways I can right in Dreamweaver CS4. When I want to change the original image and save it I can simply click on the two gears icon for Edit Image Settings and a popup windows comes open that will edit the image without opening Photoshop which usually takes a minute or so to open, edit and close.
Now I can quickly make simple changes without going from one program to the next to keep my work flowing when using Dreamweaver and it saves the original file with the changes where it is at. This also works from inside other programs like Fireworks using Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash files without having to go back to those programs.
According to Adobe the files are imported with layers, vector paths and other data so you can work on them inside other programs without the time consuming need to open those programs. I have not tried this out with all the programs as I have yet to really work with some of them such as Flash and Fireworks but will be using them when I get to each separate review.