When software vendors churn out new releases on a regular schedule, much like Adobe does with its Create Suite package of media production tools, skeptics are typically a bit suspicious: Is the brand-new version really new and necessary, or are we really just looking at a new version number with a bigger price tag on the box? In the case of Adobe’s new CS6 Master Collection, the version number is new, and the price tag is, well, you know.
Last year, Adobe stopped halfway between CS5 and CS6, releasing a “.5” version of Creative Suite. CS5.5’s improved GUI, feature set, and speed at rendering complex images. This year, CS6 continues improving its GUI, adds more genuinely useful features, and improves speed further, while also bestowing many of its apps the power of “liquid layout”—generating content on a wide variety of devices and screen sizes almost automatically. Yes, CS6 isn’t cheap, and yes, it can be complex. But if your livelihood depends
on your ability to create truly professional looking, leading edge digital and printed content, there is simply no substitute. Let’s have a closer look
You Get What You Pay For (But It’s Complicated)
There’s no getting around the $2,599 list price of CS6 Master Collection (henceforth “CS6” for this review), which nearly includes Adobe’s entire product catalog; most of our first cars were cheaper. For the price, though, you get a lot: Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat X Pro, Flash Professional Effects, plus about 10 minor (in comparison) apps such as Flash Builder, Audition, Encore, Prelude, Bridge, and Media Encoder. Bundling is definitely cheaper than buying individually. For example, the standalone version of Photoshop Extended costs nearly $999, while each app averages out to only $162 in the Master Collection. If you still can’t shell out almost 2,600 bones, there’s CS6 Production Premium ($1,899), which focuses on digital content creation and includes Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash Professional, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and nearly all the minor apps. For the same $1,899, web and print designers
can choose CS6 Design & Web Premium instead, which adds InDesign, Acrobat X Pro, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, but it ditches Premiere Pro, After Effects, and most of the minor apps. If you’re sure you’re only doing print media, then the full version of CS6 Design Standard will set you back $1,299 and comes with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and a couple minor apps. Of course, most graphics professionals are already using a version of Creative Suite, and Adobe’s tiered upgrade prices make things more reasonable CS5.5 users (whose product is just a year old at most) can upgrade to CS6 for just $525, while CS5 users will pay just over $1,049. CS4 users can upgrade their five year- old version for about $1,399. Students and educators (homeschool/primary/secondary schools, plus accredited universities and colleges, are eligible) can receive almost 70% off of MSRP, as the Student and Teacher Edition of CS6 costs $799.
Another option to reduce costs (other than enrolling in a community college course or registering your school-age child as the CS6 user in your household) is the newly expanded Adobe Creative Cloud service.
Unlike Google’s “cloud” offerings, Adobe’s Creative Cloud still has you download and install gigabytes’ worth of software to your hard drive, but you have a transient license dependent upon small payments. Pay your monthly fee, and the software works; stop paying, and it doesn’t. Plus, on a month-tomonth plan, you can start or stop payments anytime. This feels like the perfect setup for freelance artists who only need the software for paying gigs, but even constant users may find it to be more financially manageable. The service runs $74.99 a month for a month-to-month contract or $49.99 a month with an annual contract. However,
current owners of CS3 or newer products (even standalone versions), or those qualifying for the student or educator discount, can enroll for $29.99 a month with contract. Creative Cloud users get 20GB of included
cloud storage from Adobe, which includes automatic file syncing between computers and, optionally, other Adobe Creative Cloud users, plus the license lets you use the software on two of your own computers, even if one is a Mac and the other a PC. There’s also one potentially hidden cost: your OS. In Windows, most of the video related software requires the 64-bit version of Windows, as do some acceleration features in Photoshop. WinXP is still supported (subject to the 64-bit issue), but Vista is officially unsupported (it also
works, but hope you don’t have problems.) Mac users must have OS X 10.6 or 10.7. Both operating systems need a 64-bit CPU (which really shouldn’t be an issue for anyone at this point).
Photoshop Extended
Most products with a multidecade history get slower as they add features. Photoshop has actually become faster, and nothing breathes new life into software like speed. The Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, which previously was only used to accelerate video, now accelerates all sorts of tools and filters into real-time events by taking advantage of your GPU. With even something as mild as an NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT, the Liquify tool provides real-time smearing, and the dozens of artistic filters (and their sliders) render images as quickly as we could think up combinations. This invites artistic experimentation like never before and obviously boosts productivity. The same technology is used for Photoshop’s new video-editing abilities, giving it a similar feel to After Effects, but with Fades being the only available transitions.
Adobe increased its number of “magical” tools, including the Content-Aware tools. With nearly no skill, we selected items (like people, trees, light poles, etc.) and moved them from one area of a photo to another, and Photoshop automatically “filled in” the background where the item was and blended with the item’s new location. Autocorrection (for example, brightness and contrast) are also content-aware, resulting in fixes you’re much more likely to approve of.
Other new items include new vectorbased drawing tools (lines, text, and other shapes), wide-angle lens correction tools, a new Blur gallery (including nearly automatic tilt-shifting), and much more intuitive tools to shift 2D images into 3D.
Illustrator
Illustrator is the de facto standard of graphic artists for two reasons. First, it’s received continuous improvement over its 25-year life, receiving feature and stability improvements that make it truly professional-grade. Second, many of its competitors have either bowed out or been assimilated into the Adobe collective. (FreeHand is an example of the latter.) This Illustrator version only has one killer feature:
a new Trace Tool. A Trace Tool converts a bitmap, such as a photo or a scan of hand-drawn art) to vector (that is, line-based) art. It’s a huge improvement over the old converter, Live Trace. The new tool has many preset options (like High Fidelity Photo, Line Art, Shades Of Gray) that look terrific yet are easy to manipulate later. This is a huge time saver.Otherwise, Illustrator is much faster, thanks again to the Mercury Graphics Engine. It’s natively a 64-bit app now, too, so it handles huge files wonderfully. Illustrator has moved to a darker GUI, like Photoshop, but you can revert it if you prefer the old look. In addition to these specifics, Illustrator received a lot of tweaks to speed up overall workflow. (Naming layers quickly no longer pops up a rename dialog box, for example.)
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| Graphic designers will be drooling all over illustrator CS6's new and improved Traced Tool. |
Dreamweaver
As recently as two years ago, working with HTML was largely easier than it is now. The Browser Wars were largely over, and everyone was still using PCs to consume content. Today, Gecko, WebKit, and Trident browser engines are fairly evenly split, and people view the web on different devices: large desktop/
laptop screens, medium-sized tablet screens, and small smartphone screens—the latter two in either portrait or landscape. Assuming you want to create content that flows well across everything, Dreamweaver’s new Fluid Grid Layout is a webmaster’s dream come true. Start by assigning your HTML content to grid blocks (designated by DIV tags) and drag and drop the blocks around the desktop/tablet/smartphone screen layouts Dreamweaver supplies. That’s when the magic happens. Images automatically resize, text reflows, and sections reorganize based on the browser window or device size. Other improvements are much appreciated, though perhaps not monumental. The preview window updates instantly as you edit CSS code in corresponding dialogs. The FTP uploader knows more protocols and is multithreaded. Managing web fonts is considerably easier.
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| We are living in a mobile world, a fact that Adobe is Keenly of. Dreamweaver CS6 is help to web designers effortlessly create content across a multitude of devices. |
Flash Professional
If you remember Adobe’s 2011 announcement of suspending development on the Android browser Flash plug-in and focusing on HTML5 development tools, then you may be wondering why there’s a new version
of Flash in CS6 at all. The answer, of course, is that Flash is used for far more than just making animations, videos, and menus inside web pages. Thanks to Adobe AIR, Flash acts as a development tool for Android and iOS applications. And thanks to a series of new exporting tools, Flash Professional can ease the creation HTML5 components and games. Using Flash Professional to make sprites (small, animated bitmaps, typically used for in-game “characters”) is now almost simple. Create a repeating animation as a Movie Clip, choose the Sprite Sheet tool, and specify what scripting language to use (such as Cocos2D for iOS games or
EaselJS for HTML5 games), and let it rip. Out pops a single PNG file containing all the sprite’s cells, as well as the scripting file needed to make it animate. There are now also tools for debugging with and simulating mobile devices when generating mobile content (including accelerometer and touch simulations). So, for those still generating “basic” Flash web content, the latest version of Flash alone isn’t worth the upgrade. For everyone else, the changes are welcome.
InDesign
InDesign was originally Adobe’s pro-level replacement for PageMaker (the seminal desktop publishing program), but as the world started moving away from purely printed page layouts, Adobe started shiftingInDesign’s abilities to include digital content. The CS5 and 5.5 versions in particular were dramatic shifts, to the point that it’s tough to see if anything changed with CS6. Much like Dreamweaver, InDesign now has Liquid Layouts, and they work in concert with Alternate Layouts. If you have a Lettersized portrait layout designed and looking good, you can copy it to an alternate layout, such as iPad portrait or landscape, and the elements automatically reorganize themselves to the new aspect ratio. By itself, this saves time in getting a design off the ground (it still needs an expert hand to look great, in our experience), but by setting some Liquid Layout rules, blocks of content reorganizethemselves attractively and intelligently. Again, more design is necessary to achieve perfection, but it’s still a huge time saver. The Content Collector is the other big
new thing. It acts as a “super Clipboard panel,” allowing for fast (and if desired, linked) content between InDesign layouts.
After Effects
If your videos contain any sort of rendered graphics, After Effects is the tool you want. The new version’s speed is nothing less than stunning, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, it too uses the Mercury Graphics Engine to speed up basic redraws, but the Cache to RAM system is completely rewritten and works in the background.
After Effects users will immediately grasp the importance of this, but for those not in the know, after laying down different video tracks and effects over them in the timeline, After Effects “reviews” the layers (which can take a while, depending on the complexity) and caches the effects in RAM, drawing the famous “green line” over those areas in the timeline you can then finally view and inspect at real-time speeds. Now, After Effects can cache a second clip or file in the background while you work on the first (so it will be immediately ready to work on after you’re done with the first). Also, when you make changes that used to require After Effects to recache the whole clip, it can now calculate what cache it can keep and instead just recache changed layers and items.
The results are simply this: There’s a lot less waiting and pacing around the office, and testing out different effects is orders ofmagnitude faster than before.
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| After Effects' Global Performance Cache will have you spending less time waiting on your hardware and more time polishing you masterpiece |
Premiere Pro
With its classic non-linear video editor, Adobe keeps nipping at the heels of Avid and Apple. Some of the upgrades are exclusively geared toward professionals. Do you really have a $43,000 RED camera whose native format you’ve been unable to use until now? We don’t, but that’s OK. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that CS6 is geared for people whose livelihoods depend on software with every feature under the sun.
Other updates are right up our alley, such as the Rolling Shutter Repair effect (also in After Effects). You know the video you’ve taken with your phone (or other CMOS camera) that makes straight lines look curved? Let Premiere Pro nibble at it for a few minutes, and the distortion goes away. We also like the new layout of the Source Monitor and Program Monitor screens during editing, side-by-side and as large as possible, going full-screen with just a keystroke.
A Roundup Of The Rest
The full Master Collection also comes with many tools that can only be considered minor compared to apps like Photoshop:
Fireworks: The former Macromedia bitmap editor lives on as a website and mobile application mockup design tool.
Audtion: Adobe’s Soundbooth replacement has real-time clip stretching and a wider array of sound filters.
SpeedGrade: This video color correcting/altering app has a new UI and the GPU-accelerated Lumertri Deep Color Engine.
Encore: Abode’s disc authoring software natively supports 24p frame rates and 4K and 5K mastering.
Media Encoder: This media transcoder converts formats to different media devices and PC formats.
Prelude: Prelude streamlines production duties, offering benefits like customizable markers, transcoding upon ingest, keyboard-driven logging, and more.
