Adobe announced its “biggest ever” product release on Tuesday. The Creative Suite 4 product family, a new series of media applications scheduled to ship in October, features tightly integrated workflow solutions designed to advance the creative process across print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production.
The entire product line includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium and the Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.
Photoshop, the most widely used Adobe product, will take advantage of new graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware in the CS4 edition ($699) to deliver a smoother pan and zoom experience, allowing users to easily edit images at even the highest magnifications. For an additional $300, Photoshop CS4 Extended give users the ability to manipulate 3D imagery, such as painting directly on 3D models and surfaces, merging 2-D files onto 3D images, and animating 3D objects.
InDesign, Adobe’s page layout program, also comes in for some interesting upgrades, including a feature that highlights potential production problems in real-time from within the layout and directs users to the problem area to resolve the issue. Other new features make it easier to create and manage long documents such as manuals and textbooks, including a Conditional Text feature that lets users quickly produce multiple versions of a document for different uses such as multi-lingual documents or Teacher/Student materials.
Below we reproduce Adobe’s comparison chart to help give you an idea of the range of options available in the new applications and their bundles, but be sure to visit the Adobe website for detailed information and several arresting demos of the kinds of work supported by these products.
Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie’s photos on Flickr.
