Is Adobe Creative Suit 3 Master Collection Worth It?

[ace52 0]

hihihihihihihhi

Edited November 16, 2007 by Robincheema (see edit history)

[Markymark2 0]

Well I have been dabbling in Photoshop for years and also a few years of Illustrator, I use Dreamweaver on a daily basis and sometimes (hopefully never any more) Flash.I was using them all on the CS2 release and thought that was a big step up untill I tried CS3. To start with Illustrator is a bit baffling and confusing becasue of the way the tools are arranged but once you get the hang of it theres no going back.Photoshop CS3 is not a great leap forward over CS2 I find but some of the things I have tried that are new (like the new improvments on the dodge) seem to work well.Dreamweaver CS3 is much much much better than ever before (I have used it for years) I love the new CSS handling stuff because I do a lot of work in CSS these days.Even the templates are pretty damm good I must say, the code is nice and clean if you want it or its full of help text for each part of a layout in a template.I use the Validator tool a lot inside Dreamweaver these days for checking code and that is a great improvment on the past.Infact I do pretty much everything these days on it - in the past I would have Notepad++ open, an FTP program, all doing the seperate jobs of building a site. These days I really use the "Manage Sites" part of Dreamweaver (yes I know its been around since version 6 or something) and fill all the info out and let Dreamweaver do everything.A Nice new feature also is being able to drag and drop from Photoshop and Illustrator right into the Dreamweaver window.Saves so much time locating the files needed, as soon as a graphic is ready for web, just drag it in! Spry - Hmm...not going to say much about this..I just hope its not the future! as some Adobe freaks will lead you to think, Also remember Cold Fusion is NOT the future also )It can do some nice things very fast but I kinda shudder at the way its going to be implemented - I was around when Flash first came out.. ;(Adobe Bridge - now for me this is the jewel in the CS3 crown, before I used to use Explorer on thumbnail view or something like Compupic or Acdsee to browse image folders and site folders - no more!! Bridge to the rescue!!Again I have to say yes I know it was in CS2 but I never really got round to messing with it but after Lightroom came out and I got into that and I heard Bridge had the same interface on CS3 I was curious.I dont know how I lived without Bridge before!! I do a lot of graphics and webpages and I have many cluttered up folders of all the crap and all the copies of the crap in different formats before I have to deliver a page or banner etc.I never get round to sorting out the "Client" folders before now, its been a job for a rainy Sunday afternoon that has not come now for 5 years;) Sometimes I try to sort it out..I burn a few dvds forget about it.Using Bridge I have been able to sort all the mess out because it can Thumbnail just about anything! so much easier than having about 4 different apps open trying to work out which is the "final" copy of something produced 3 years ago.Also like the other apps in the CS3 suite Bridge works seemlessly with the others, its the HUB of CS3 and the HUB of my studio now.Again its about drag and drop and kinda of (I know I kick ppl for saying it) Web2.0 and sooo much easier to get things done with.I think on a whole upgrading to CS3 has already saved me about 6-7 hours in "finding things" time, cutting and pasting huge files backwards and forwards, and less stress on my pc of having soo many more apps open all the time.The installer is Massive! that needs to be said, its littered my documents and settings Application data folders with about 4000 htm help files- noticed that doing a virus scan..added about ten mins on to it ;(But on a 2.5 gig machine with 1 gig of RAM it reacts very well indeed, doesnt feel as "Hoggy" as I thought it would be of my system resources, generally I have Bridge, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator open at the same time along with Firefox, Opera and Winamp and the PC seems to be running along fine.Its damm expensive dont get me wrong esp if you didnt go though the upgrade system like I did, if you buy it standalone its a big shock! but all in all its the BEST thing out there on the market by a long way! nothing will stand in CS3 way I think.Nothing is packaged and designed like this.Nothing intergrates different programs output seemlessly like this.There is no going back - CS3 is the future of Design

[Grafitti 0]

I didn't have to personally pay for the upgrade, it went on the company bill. But it's not the Master collection, just the Design Premium. I probably won't end up getting the master collection, but will have to make do with Premiere Pro 2.0Though if you're just dabbling in graphics I wouldn't say an upgrade is a good idea, because of the prohibitive cost. You should be able to find a CS or CS2 used version floating around on the net for much less than the price of the new one. But if your work is mostly revolving around these products, then the upgrade is a good idea. It takes time to get used to the new layouts of most of the programs, and the installer is so freaking slow you wonder if they just ripped it out of a pre-Pentium version, but once it's there and you've learned it, it's so much faster, and such useful features. Even in Photoshop, I love how now you can edit movies frame by frame. I never liked After Effects for the nitty-gritty work, and exporting frame by frame to Photoshop was a tedious process. Now you can just work on the clip in a filmstrip and realtime preview and edit. (only available in the Extended version -- if you're deciding on which to get, regular or extended, please get extended. Otherwise you'll regret it later).Getting Dreamweaver and Flash built in to the Adobe suite is also a major plus... things work so much more smoothly than before.Though it is rather hungry for memory. Working on large files, and having Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Firefox, KMPlayer, and others open at once on my 2.8 dual core with 1GB ram, I would spend 10 or 15 seconds twiddling my thumbs sometimes after applying a filter or something similar. After upgrading to 2GB (and 800Mhz vs. 533) I notice a marked difference. Speed reigns supreme!