Adobe CS4 Web Premium
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While I have not worked with each program other than to check them out briefly I have noticed one major change to all of them, or rather did not notice and wondered about whether I was changing programs. They all have a similar user interface that also can be changed among several common styles so you have a variety of interface selections to choose from.
You can setup each program to work the best for you with the menus and additional toolbars or make them all similar for a familiar feel and look while working on the various programs and your projects. The interface is a nice feature so you can set the style you want to work with for each program and always have that style available to you.
One really nice feature that I stumbled upon while writing this was Live View, in Dreamweaver CS3 in order to see what the website looks like in a browser you would have to publish or put it to your server. Now Dreamweaver has a Live View function that shows your webpage as it would appear in Internet Explorer for a regular view to check the page.
Fireworks and Flash have also been updated and new features like tools and premade animations have been added but some of the main ones regarding the rest of the programs of the Web Premium suite are the integration. Fireworks is a smooth graphics program for web pages that seamlessly creates buttons and other web based objects then allows you to export them in HTML for working on in Dreamweaver.
You can create objects in Fireworks such as buttons and save them as these objects then use them in Dreamweaver to design your site. Creating these objects like buttons for menus is much easier and nicer looking than simple links for sentences and makes a website look much more professional.
Much of your work can be counterproductive when you have to keep going back and forth between programs and Adobe has figured out how to reduce or get rid of this as much as possible. While you cannot totally get rid of switching programs it is nice to be able to quickly edit something such as image size and save the original file without opening the other program.
Another new feature that I have run across is Content-Aware Scaling in Photoshop that allows you to resize an image and keep certain aspects of the image. You can highlight figures across a wide picture and scale the picture down in size and keep those figures on the picture without cropping them off.
A really good example of this I saw on the internet is a picture of four surfers walking on the beach in a wide shot which was sized down but kept all four people in the shot. I did check this feature out and it works pretty well but just not well in some circumstances like buildings, I think it will work great for outdoor pictures with people like the example I found.
Photoshop Extended that comes in the Web Premium package also has better workflow and integration with Lightroom 2 if you happen to own that as well as the new Photoshop. Many of the aspects and underlying technology of various programs from Adobe have been redesigned to make them more compatible with each other so that parts of projects will be easier to work with in various programs as a whole project.
While they have really worked hard over the years to give a lot of features that are nice and work well in their software they also worked hard at listening to people to see what they want. With programs like these that have been out for so long adding more and more features would get to be redundant so they have been working instead on workflow and what people really use and need.
Adobe CS4 Web Premium is designed not only as a web designer suite but one that has been integrated so that the designer has total control over his workflow and projects. From all I have been looking at while using these programs and reading on the internet the whole suite has been carefully thought out as a single project tool to create your website.
The suite does not come without its price, and I am not talking only about the monetary one which can be high, the suite also needs a decent video or graphics card for your computer. Many of the programs of course use your system graphics such as Flash but new features in Photoshop and others also use your computers graphics acceleration.
The system requirements do not say exactly what the minimum type is but any card that works for gaming will also work for Creative Suite 4. The suite uses Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0 and like gaming the better the graphics card, and everything else inside your computer, the better your time with Adobe programs will be.
I have a pretty decent gaming system that also works very well for Adobe programs and this is about as low end as I would go with these programs. I have an AMD dual core processor at 3.0 Hz with 4 GB memory and a good NVIDIA 8800 GT graphics card that works great with things like good close-ups in Photoshop.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium may not be a new software suite and the programs have been around but they have also been tested tried and true. Adobe has not only worked at getting all the bugs out of the various programs but have also integrated them to make them easier to use for your work.
Adobe CS4 may not be for everyone but many of the programs in the suites do have a lot going if you have need for a better workflow in your design creation. I will be working on more reviews soon and will start with an in depth review of both Photoshop Extended and Illustrator for my first of this series.