By now, most creative professionals in the digital world have heard about Adobe’s latest iteration of the Creative Suite Franchise. CS5 was unveiled last week and is scheduled to ship within the next four weeks.
As with previous releases of the software, purchasing new copies or upgrading old ones comes at a relatively stiff price. Many design studios are currently evaluating the new version to see if and when it is most prudent to make the jump.
Of course, everyone wants to stay at the cutting edge of the latest in technology and software tools. But in today’s difficult economic times, many companies cannot afford to do that. It may not make financial sense for studios and especially individuals to purchase every major upgrade that Adobe releases.
It can be argued that the last version of Adobe CS, version 4, was not a significant enhancement over the one before, version 3. Yes, there some new and interesting features. But was it worth shelling out several hundred or thousand dollars to bring workstations up to CS4 when CS3 was more than adequate?
In our case, at Intrigue, we did something a little different. We upgraded our designers to CS4 and left the production workstations at CS3. For the most part, this has worked out well for us. Occasionally, there have been glitches – ie: not being able to open a file in CS3 when it was created in CS4. OK, not insurmountable.
Now that CS5 has been introduced to the world, the question is raised yet again. Do we want this new version, and if so, do we upgrade everyone in one fell swoop, or in stages?
As we did when CS4 was announced, we need to determine what CS5 will offer us in terms of increased productivity of time savings. There are two new features that caught my eye, although there are several nifty new things to explore.
First – it’s been a long time in coming, but the Mac version of Photoshop is now 64-bit. Provided that your Mac meets the system requirements and is 64 bit capable, this potentially offers a huge boost in processing speed for very large images. A very simplified explanation is that Photoshop can now address larger amounts of RAM than ever before, meaning you can open and manipulate large images much faster. By using RAM instead of the hard drive, it makes for quicker edits.
Second – there is a new “you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it!” feature for retouchers called “content aware”. Photoshop now has the ability to modify images based on an image’s content. I watched a couple of demo videos on this and, at first glance, it blew me away! It was almost too good to be true. They showed how you can remove objects from images in mere seconds by painting over them with a single stroke of the content aware tool and filling in the resulting background for you.
This – is – HUGE!
I can’t wait to hear the reviews of people who get their hands on CS5 first just to see if this feature is the real deal. If it is, this one feature alone could be worth the upgrade price for us. We process a TON of images every year that need something removed from a background. This would add up considerably in terms of time saved.
For now, we’re going to play a wait and see game to evaluate when it is most appropriate to upgrade to CS5. We also need to be mindful of our customers and vendors to see what their plans are regarding the new Creative Suite. Hopefully there will be few if any bugs on launch. If money were no object, I’m sure we’d take the plunge and get everyone up to CS5.
If and when I get the chance to work with CS5, I’ll update the post to give my unscientific evaluation
Stay tuned!
Check out the details straight from the source – for Creative Suite 5 Design Standard:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/designstandard/whatsnew/