Customer Reviews

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

Adobe has made a push in recent years to integrate all of their creative programs into an enormous suite of high powered tools that you can use in combination to create broad accessible content.
In one box you get some creative powertools: (among many others) Premiere, After Affects, Flash, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and of course, Photoshop. There are many other programs that I didn't necessarily have interest in, but they are handy to have in a pinch plus they will give me something to build more skill in.

This is a true professional suite of programs, and whats great about this is that there are enough similarities between the programs that you'll be able to understand the layouts between the programs with relative ease.

Two warnings: This is overkill, chances are you only really want a few of the programs (in my case Photoshop, Premiere, After Affects and Dreamweaver) but if you have three Adobe products on your "wishlist" then you might want to consider the whole shebangabang of the Master Collection since the other programs are then kind of a bonus and will give you something to work on.

The other warning (coming from someone who got this with the amazing academic/student discount) is that you better have a strong system to run Premiere, After Affects and the other video/Premiere related programs. I definitely need a memory upgrade(and ideally a new computer!) to accommodate that behemoth.

But finally, I would say, while four figures is a high price for software you are getting a tremendous package and if you are able to qualify for an academic discount you should jump on this. Adobe's price is around a fifth the price of the retail version. As a student who is trying to develop marketable skills this is a package that will make you a master.

I've been an Adobe (and Macromedia) user for a long time (since Illustrator 4, Photoshop 4, Dreamweaver 4, and when InDesign was called PageMaker), and I've never seen a more useless "upgrade" in a version of their products.
I did have some install issues like a lot of other people, but was able to fix them on my own (good thing, because their outsourced phone support is not what it used to be and a waste of time). My poor rating is because of the product itself. The "new" features are either bits and pieces of other products, or they are useless (such as the CSS Advisor which links to a site where everyone asks questions and no one answers, or the 3D effects in Photoshop, After Effects, and Flash without the inclusion of a 3D model creation program).
While you are able to customize the menus and palettes to a large degree, it is difficult and oft-times confusing for people who are used to where things used to be in the program. New users may be able to get used to it, but they are also cramped, non-intuitive, and, at times, simply don't work.
Creative Suite 3, released a mere 16 months before this version, was great. You do have to wonder: how much work went into this program after the company had massive layoffs yet released a new version a little over a year later?
I would recommend Creative Suite 3 for it's ease of use and general overall stability, but this CS4 gets a D- from me.
Hope this helps someone.

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.

I was leary at first of investing the cost required of the Master Collection, in any source but Adobe itself. The fact that I was purchasing from Amazon though provided some solace and ultimately proved worth it in the end. CS 4 MC is an amazing product, thanks to Amazon I didn't have to survive on ramen that week.

After waiting for some time I finally had to get amazon involved to get my money back. I never did get the oppertunity to use it.

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!

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!!!!! [...]

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.

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... !!!