Customer Reviews

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Lots of great updates in this release.

Bridge has gone from a product I never even opened in CS3 to a program I use even more than the Finder is CS4 (when searching Adobe files.) I have two major gripes still. Bridge's smart collections are painfully slow where smart folders in the finder are very fast. Also Bridge is unable to detect Photoshop files that are located in the iPhoto library. Bridge can find other formats from with in iPhoto library just not Photoshop. Unfortunately that is the format I primarily use.

Flash currently crashes for me whenever I make a symbol so I haven't been able to use it much at all. That being said that are making great steps to simplifying the interface. Action Script is still unnecessarily complicated.

Illustrator has multiple artboards like FreeHand did except it works a lot better. You can now also bring in most FreeHand files fully intact since both software contains pages now. The blob brush is great. As a long time FreeHand fan I like on they seem to be making Illustrator functions easier like FreeHand but with more powerful features.

I see two problems with Illustrator. One is that they put the rotating canvas feature in PhotoShop but left it out of where it was really needed which is in Illustrator. The other is that I find it much harder to do a simple eye dropper sample in Illustrator than FreeHand especially when applying a color's stroke to another objects fill or a fill to another objects stroke.

Fireworks is an ok upgrade but didn't build on pages feature from CS3 like was badly needed. Fireworks needs to work more like InDesign for the web but it's layout features are stuck in the 80s. No multiple master pages, no basing one one page on top of another. No linking images so that you can have quick access to altering the image like how you can option like images in InDesign. Their is a lot more that I am not thinking of at the moment.

Dreamweaver is really a developer tool it's not that geared towards designing like they say it is.

Acrobat seem like it would be useful way to interact with clients but do all my clients have to go out and buy a really expensive piece of software in order to do that? I don't see any of my clients doing that therefore I don't see how it could be of much use to me.

I like how photoshops editing features are on the side of the screen rather than cover up the image like in CS3, that's a nice touch.

Camera Raw is almost identical to CS3. I hope they keep releasing new features for it like they did through CS3's life time.

InDesign is great. The new preflighting really helps. Now they need to bring Indesign's features over to Fireworks so that I can use the same powerful features inside of a web layout program.

One of the best features of all is having support for the PowerMac G5 which is still a very very fast computer today. I see absolutely nothing I need to a new Intel computer and there is no way I would have upgraded if they dropped support for PowerPC. I am not going to upgrade my machine a year a half from now so here's hoping they still support it then in CS5. If they don't I will just stay with CS4 and outright skip the upgrade since CS4 works really well for me.

Overall a great update.

[...]

I have been a loyal and frequent customer of Adobe until now, becuase I always felt that they went the extra mile to produce a stable, well-thought out product. But with CS4 I'm afraid that they've joined the microsofts of the world with a series of issues, and I've only had the product for two days! After a very long and problem riddled install, I find that the new features are a pretty small improvement and will not change the way I do things. Pretty disappointing for the many hundreds of dollars the upgrade cost.

First, when I installed CS4 on my system the installer crashed. Over and over again! Looking carefully at the install feedback I realized that the crash was happening when acrobat installed. So I did another try without including acrobat. this finally worked, but in the process it removed the old acrobat from my system. When I tried to reinstall the old acrobat from CS3, the install took two hours and required me to go back and forth many times between CS3 and CS4 disks. In the end acrobat 8 installed but wouldn't take my serial number as valid. A very long call to tech support revealed only that my serial number is OK but the techs (many different ones) were completely unhelpful. I am left an outdated version of acrobat that will expire in 30 days!

Meanwhile, while the interfaces of the new versions of the other software seem somewhat improved, the feature changes are minimal in the parts of the software I use regularly--I'd have been better off sticking with my old version.

Overall I'm thoroughly disappointed with the whole experience and disillusioned about Adobe. Sadly, I suspect that this will be my last purchase of software from the company.

I have Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Unlike CS3 this new version (CS4) is not very stable. It constantly locks up. Not sure if its my 64-bit OS as I have not tried it on 32-bit version of the OS.

Bottom line if you run Vista 64-bit dont waist your money.

I've included a four star rating with this review for the sole reason that the hinges inside my DVD case for this product did not survive shipping. One would think that for software this expensive they could afford a durable DVD case. I actually tried contacting Adobe to see if they would replace the case and they said they would not yield any replacements unless the serial was illegible.

A helpful tidbit of information you may want to consider if the OpenGL features are important to you. The OpenGL features are not as widely compatible as the rest of the software. You may have issues if you are using XP x64 or a graphics card which somehow does not support your combination of OS plus OpenGL drivers. Search Adobe's website to see if your system is up to specs. It's a lot more important for this edition. If your graphics card is more than a couple of years old there is a decent chance that it will not fully support these features.

I purchased this product for a colleague in my department and she is thrilled with it. I only wish I had also ordered it for myself.

This Adobe suite had everything I needed, and when they announced the release of the newest version the prices dropped dramatically! I'm fine with CS4 for now and it will still cost me less overall when I upgrade to CS5.

Upgrading from Pagemaker, InDesign is a breese! I am still learning all of its capabilities for print, but am very happy with the product and delivery!

The new adobe cs4 design premium software package is pretty incredible. i haven't had the chance yet to use every program, but the programs i am familiar with are awesome. It was easy to install and I haven't had any problems with it. This was a serious upgrade for me because before this I was using Photoshop 7.0 and Illustrator 10. I'm looking forward to learning how to use some of the other adobe products that came with this package.

I'll make it short. I got this product at a discount of 44% off! But that's not all! I bought it but did not have the "prime" deal (at least I think) but I selected the 2 to 3 day delivery but we needed this product right away and I contacted them through amazons email deal and I got a phone call and the next day I got my product! So I wanted to give you guys 5 stars for a great discount and great customer service.