Adobe launches Creative Suite 5

 

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Posted on 12 Apr 2010 at 11:55

Adobe has launched Creative Suite 5, including brand new versions of Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver and all the other applications that make up the suite.
The company claims that it's a "breakthrough release" which will improve the workflows of creative professionals. From what we've seen of the new suite, that's certainly true. The applications are now more integrated than ever, and it's easier to get your content onto the most popular devices and platforms.

As ever, there will be five different packages to choose from with the Master Collection containing all 15 applications and costing a whopping £2,300 excluding VAT. Subsets of these are available in the other packages: Design Premium (£1,500), Web Premium (£1,430), Production Premium (£1,500) and Design Standard (£1,030). Following customer feedback, Web Standard has been dropped.

There are more than 250 new features overall, mainly devoted to the transition to digital publishing with new interactive documents and enhanced electronic reader device support. Image creation and editing get a boost in Photoshop CS5 with Refine Edge, which offers better edge detecting, allowing you to mask objects quicker. The updated Camera RAW has noticeably better noise reduction, while Photoshop itself has better lens correction options.

A more impressive feature is Content-Aware Fill. This lets you remove an element from an image automatically replace the missing pixels. For example, in the demonstration, Adobe showed Expert Reviews how a person could be selected removed from a photo, and Photoshop could intelligently replace the pixels with bricks in the wall they were standing in front of. The results were more than good enough to use, and wouldn't take long to improve with some quick manual tweaking.

Performance

There has been much criticism over Creative Suite's performance, and that it requires the fastest processors and as much RAM as possible to run quickly. Adobe claims it has worked hard to dramatically improve performance in CS5. To this end, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects are now native 64-bit applications on both Mac and Windows.
Plus, the new Mercury Playback Engine uses Nvidia GPU power to open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD sequences in real time and play back complex projects without rendering. The time-saving Roto Brush tool in After Effects helps users isolate moving foreground elements in a fraction of the normal time.