Customer Reviews

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Standard Upgrade [Mac] [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

I love CS4. What I hate is that you have to read the whole listing to see that THIS IS ONLY AN UPGRADE FROM CS3 TO CS4, not any other versions. So I spent hours preparing for this transition, hours upon hours, and when I called Adobe support they said "Oh, yeah, this is a really common problem. There's really no way to tell the CS3-CS4 from the CS2-CS4 upgrades, and they cost the same price. We could help you, but you didn't buy it from us..." Aargh! So I'm returning it, Amazon won't make any money, I have to explain to my office that they're stuck on CS2 for a while, and there's just no way my boss will believe this isn't something completely negligent on my part.

Considering Adobe has worked their way into being the industry standard, it's a good thing that these apps are very useful for my design and illustration business. I mainly use Illustrator and Photoshop. I was one of the last hold-outs with the competitor of Illustrator - Macromedia Freehand. I found Freehand to be much faster, "lighter" and less bloated. When Adobe bought Macromedia I knew it was over for Freehand. I tried for years to make the switch but found Illustrator lacking in the tools I used for my illustration work. CS4 was the version I was finally able to use to make the conversion. They even offer an option called "Like Freehand" that mimics the old Freehand interface. I find the new "Blob Tool" very useful and I like the improved gradient tools.

However, I have found Adobe's customer service to be abhorrent. I have been using Adobe products since the early 1990's. I have not had to use their customer service in years, but when I recently had a problem, it was probably one of the worst customer service experiences I have ever had. I have read where they are working on this. I hope so, because for what they charge for their products, customer service should be excellent.

Overall, considering there is very little competition, Adobe CS4 contains very good (although somewhat "bloated") applications. Just hope you never have to call customer service.

I am glad that I upgraded - there are several great new features in CS4 like when you're placing an image in InDesign, it shows in the list if you've color coded a folder which CS3 did not do. Illustrator it's cool to add more pages/artboards though it takes a bit of time to figure it out. Not sure I really noticed any big difference in Photoshop but maybe I need to play more.