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Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection
Wednesday, 17. February 2010. 12:00
- Design across media using a comprehensive, integrated creative environment; Work deeply in one discipline, such as print, web, video, or audio, and then move your skills and content to another medium efficiently
- Create eye-catching vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator CS4, produce powerful images in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended, and lay out visually rich documents for print and digital delivery in InDesign; showcase design work in dynamic PDF Portfolios
- Prototype and create leading-edge digital experiences, including interactive websites, applications, user interfaces, presentations, and mobile device content, using Adobe Fireworks CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, Flash, and many other tools in Master Collection
- Work with a highly efficient pre- and post-production toolset to do video and audio editing, still and motion graphics, visual effects, and interactive media design, and then deliver for film, broadcast, and DVD as well as Blu-ray Disc and mobile authoring
- Use the indispensable tools in Photoshop Extended more efficiently: Pan and zoom on images smoothly, rotate canvas to any angle, and resize images without distortion using new Content-Aware Scaling; paint, composite, and animate 3D models
Product Description
CS4 MASTER COLLECTION 4 WIN CROM1UAmazon.com Product Description
Create visually rich content for virtually any media–print, web, interactive, video, audio, and mobile–using the tightly integrated tools and services in Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection software. From producing printed pages to distributing engaging content online, on film, on air, and on device, you get the ultimate design environment to keep pace with your imagination. … More >>
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection
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February 17th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I read a number of negative reviews of this product, so I was a little hesitant to order it, especially considering its price.
I’ve had it for about 3 weeks, now, and am very happy. It’s an amazing value for what you get.
I’m going to be learning my way into all of this incredible software for quite a while.
Support and tutorials are very good, as provided. You may need to purchase some tutorial books, tho. The QUE books are pretty good these days.
Have fun creating… !!!
Rating: 5 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
This is a direct quote from the Adobe staff on CS 4. AMAZON should pull this product until the “new” version is released because knowingly selling it in its present condition is a FRAUD ON THE CONSUMER!
In our next version, the design of the license expiry workflow has been altered to effectively tackle all the issues in CS4 handling of license expiry.
In our next version, when the product is launched the check for license expiry is performed. If the serial number associated with the license has expired, the user would not be displayed a hard-stop alert as was done in CS4. Instead, the module responsible for licensing of the product would bring up a user interface. This license expiry user interface screen would
Inform the user that the license in use has expired with an error message.
Additionally, it would provide an option to the user to enter a new serial number to renew his expired license.
This is like a ‘bonus launch’ of the product as the product is giving a bonus opportunity to the user to renew his expired license by entering a new serial number. This eliminates the need for previously used workarounds, to bring up the user interface (serialization screen) for entering an alternative serial number in case of license expiry.
BOTTOM LINE: BUY THIS PRODUCT NOW AND GET SCREWED!
Rating: 1 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Photoshop seemed to work, for a little while, AE is completely busted. AE crashed the first three times I used it, can’t believe they released this pile of CRAP!! Then the entire registration died and can’t be fixed!!!!! [...]
Rating: 1 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Do not buy any ADOBE product. After paying thousands of dollars for this product and using it for four months, one day all packages came up with an error message that my “license has expired”. I bought this. I found that ADOBE, who offers no phone support at all, had a post on their support website that this known problem could be fixed through one of four very involved procedures. I tried all four of them. It took me most of a day and none worked. I logged a case with the email support who wrote back 3 weeks later asking “have you tried the procedures on our website?”. Obviously they never even bothered to read my case. I had stated quite clearly that I had tried all of them. I then tried un-installing and re-installing the software. The re-install failed. No explanation given.
Great software. No support at all. Criminal business practices. Do not buy from these people.
Rating: 1 / 5
February 17th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Overall, a great product. Im not one for reviewing things so bear with me. In the title I say CS4 is adequate. I say that because really, I think its a good tool, but because I dont have anything to compare it to I cant really say if its better than anything else.
OK. Firstly. I live in both the US and the UK. I purchased this product from Amazon in the US for about £800 cheaper than I could in the UK. Whats up with that?
Installation took hours, not a big problem, but when your used to MX studio which I have been using for 6 years and which loads in 5 minutes, you notice it.
I work on a HP laptop and it has a credentials manager. Although I didn’t know at first, this caused Dreamweaver CS4 to repeatedly crash during FTP operations including testing a new connection, very frustrating when you have what is some very expensive new kit.
There was also a problem with editing images from Dreamweaver with Fireworks as when Fireworks was launched it crashed as you could only open it in administrator mode. This appears rectified now since I have disabled the credentials manager (a HP thing).
Personally, I have never liked CSS and used it sparingly. However, your forced to use it in Dreamweaver CS4. You cant just select some text and set a font/size property, grrrrrrrrrr. I can sort of live with that as CSS seems so important these days. However, I generally only create small sites of about 10 pages and feel more comfortable managing fonts directly. You can only do it by editing the code directly. Combined with the fact that you cant use the toolbar to insert a background image, gggrrrrrr, Dreamweaver doesn’t shorten my workflow, it makes it more difficult. Im not attacking Dreamweaver as I intend to adapt, and having had CS 4 for only a few weeks its too early to attack it, plus I am sort of happy with it in a fashion.
However, this is the full kit. And theres all the other products. OK. Im still learning, but what I was most looking forward to was InDesign because I had read that it was a great tool for prototype designing web sites. NOT. I dont understand what you can do in InDesign that you cant do in Fireworks, but thats just me. If you think you can create a web design in InDesign and export it was a CSS site your wrong. So for me its pretty useless.
OK, anything positive? Loads, but i’ve yet to eally get to grips with most stuff.
Photoshop, which for me has only been useful for adjusting shadow and using the healing brush now offers an easy to use curves function. If your a Photoshop part timer like me you’ll have played with the curves features before and wound up with psychodelic photos a million miles from what you wanted, but now the curves feature has a mouse that you can select and can then use to grab a colour in your photo and brighten or darken the image. I do alot of studio photography of objects like metal things that are shny chrome, but if you then photo a black object, say the same object but instead of being silver, its black, a digital camera will go mad and the backdrop will be a totally diferent brightness. However, I (accidentlly) discovered that using the new curves feature I can easily correct this effect so that when shown as a collection of images in a table for example, the backgrounds look more uniform. Nice, but worth the extra $$$$?? I dont know.
Keen on the video stuff. In the past I have been confined to editing video in quicktime so this is functionality that will send me to the moon. Allows for nice video joins as standard and includes an external feature, Device Central?, for converting video for other applications such as Flash. Basically I brought the Master Collection because I want to use this video software. Generally I take video on a digital camera and impotr it into flash for 2-3 second flash animations in the top of websites, for example, a guy welding. I was doing ok with Quicktime and Flash MX, but now I hope to be able to take my service portfolio to the next level. What I was really hoping for was to generate easy to download video, streaming? as most of my stuff feels quite bulky, but im yet to get into all of that as of yet.
In conclusion, as im getting bored, id say that for me, buying the Master Collection was mainly to take a step up from Studio MX which I brought in 2003? Price wise, I got a good deal buying in the US but even so, as a web designer with hundreds of clients its not a devestating expense and hopefully it will put me in a good position for the next 5 years. However, to be honest, it hasn’t ‘revolutionised’ anything I do. In fact, changing platform from what i’ve been used to day in day out for the last 5 years has been very time consuming. Any there is nothing in Dreamweaver, my main tool, that is noticably different. If anything Dreamweaver is less intuitive to use. I am now so much more reliant on external resources, for example, create a spry element and it creates a folder with about 4 files that you have to upload as dependent files. I now have style sheets to wory about. A small issue that im sure i’ll figure out… eventually… is that with style sheetsif I have a word followed by the BR html tag and then a paragraph, as I have been doing for years, when I convert it to CSS the paragraph will not justify. I have tried a few things, div, span etc but not comprehensivly, and I still cant replicate the format that I use in many of my existing sites. This is just a little thing, and like I say, maybe i’ll figure it out, but things like that just loose time.
Anyway, I have given CS4 5 stars just because it looks soooo nice. I think once I learn it i’ll be ok, but I do feel like a kid that got his Xmas present that he had been waiting all year for and found that it was too complicated to play with. Like I say, InDesign just doesn’t do what I thought it would. CS is not intuitive. I was hoping for more common sense. I did think that Adobe might have damaged what was a good product, Macromedia. Forexample, most software in the world, you do crtl z to go back. But not in Photoshop… I discovered that with Photoshop in 2006. I thought that was stupid. Well, maybe its Adobe thats stupid and now they have infected Dreamweaver with similarly stupid logic.
Please dont take this all the wrong way. Essentially the software has tons of functionality, and im still exploring it with excitment. Just last night I went to bed with my bed laptop and googles Whats New In Dreamweaver CS4 to find out new stuff, and it was this moring I got the e-mail from Amazon asking for my review. I think the most exciting thing is that I have a nice big toolkit for doing what I do. And it all works pretty well, so dont hesitate to buy it, just be prepared for a few stumbling blocks and the pain of a new learning curve, which you’ll soon get over, maybe sooner than I did, lol.
I’ll leave it there as I have a tendency to waffle on and on. 5 out of 5.
Rating: 5 / 5