Customer Reviews

Adobe Illustrator CS2 Upgrade [Old Version]

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

 

 

OK, sorry, I've been vectoring line art since 1990. My current machine is an AMD Athlon XP with the 333 FSB, 1 Gig ram & 80 Gig HD shared on network & a 40 Gig HD for software, OS is XPpro, it's 2 years old I think. I installed three cathode ray tubes, you know; big boxy monitors, the largest of which is a 21 inch monster right in my face all day. I read the reviews here and started "Quaking" in my boots! Oops I said to myself, and I looked up my previous day's purchases for the new Artist I just hired. Sure enough; I bought CS2 for the new machine. So I downloaded the 30 day trial for Illustrator CS2 Upyours, I mean Upgrade. Replacing my old Illustrator 8.01 These kids I've been interviewing made me think I should take a look outside MY CAVE! So I got it loaded up and sure enough; it takes longer to load than my old corrupted rusty buddy; Illustrator 8.01, about twice as long. ( so leave it running )

!!!!!!!!! BUT WOW !!!!!!!

I should have done this sooner, or should I have ?
As soon as It was running Illustrator CS2 AUTO UPDATED ITSELF.
It wanted it's Adobe Bridge fixed up. So I let it. This is just exactly what people have been complaining about.

******** THE BRIDGE IS FIXED *********

WAY SUPER COOL DUDE! I keep the Bridge open on the right monitor and I can drag art into Illustrator CS2 at lightning speed. The whole time I get to see super big previews of all the artwork I need to work with. Way better than XPpro's little thumbnails.

LIVE TRACE: Realy nice, I think this is what these companies are using to sell Vectored Line Art to Printers like me. It is very accurate and seems to acomodate all those nasty giant pixels that up till now, took a human brain to see past while vectoring. OK, it's not as good as a skilled craftsman such as (full of) myself, but for only about $160 or so, it's like a gift from ALMIGHTY GOD!

No crashes, no bugs, just pure inteligence from Adobe once again.
Don't you think of a little white mud hut in the dessert when you say ADOBE?

I really apreciate the Object Oriented work bar thing at the top, wait, let me go look at what it's called, Hmmmm, still don't know, well it changes according to what kind of object you've clicked on in your artwork. Also this new wonder of technology solves an old problem of global color change needed for color separation work. That top task bar object oriented do-hickey is similar but better than the one in Photoshop.

Transparent objects, looks like everything can be transparent, WOW, do you know what that means ??? I gotta go use it some more, it's just way to cool. OK, I'm back, EVEN FONTS can be transparent, .tiffs .jpgs, everything. THIS MEANS way less jumping back and forth from Photoshop to Illustrator.

But I do believe you have to be very capable with your hardware, operating system, and have at least a year; full time with Illustrator and Photoshop to fully appreciate the thought and creative potential that Adobe has opened up for us.

Nobody, and I mean NObody, could be more of an Illustrator novice & ignoramus than I. Several months ago I was given a licensed copy of Illustrator 9 that a departing coworker had used. Wanting a chance to design the departmental logo that otherwise would've gone to an agency, I raised my figurative hand and volunteered for duty. Having taught myself everything from MS-DOS to TurboCAD, to Photoshop Elements, not to mention Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (don't get me started on that latter program, argh), I figured I could tackle at least the basics of Illustrator 9. Loaded it on my laptop, took it home for a weekend....and just about lost my sanity -- and several fingernails -- trying to learn that confounding program. I managed to produce a few logos, one of which was chosen. But egads, what a big, stinky bear Illustrator 9 was to wrestle.

When I saw that CS2 had this Live Trace feature, I pleaded with my workplace Santa to get it for me, and WOW! What an overall improvement!!

Illustrator will still not be as intuitive to pick up as an MS Office product, but this comes darn close. With CS2, they've given us "hot tips" -- little clues about what some of the tools do, that pop up when you mouse over the tool. The intuitive menus are nice too. Also cool is that all the text & paragraph and fill & stroke features, which used to be huge boxes taking up valuable real estate on the screen, are now condensed up on a small horizontal toolbar, like in the Office products ... and when you mouse over them, the screen tips tell you how to expand them. Aaaahh! Finally some help for dunces like me.

Live Trace and Live Paint are unbelieveably cool. The very first thing I did after loading CS2 was to grab a .jpg photo of a soccer ball off Google Images, and within 20 minutes, without consulting any book or online Help, I'd converted it into a simple graphic image painted into the 2 colors I wanted.

But as for a great guidebook, the reviewer who suggested Illustrator Visual Quickstart guide by Elaine Weinmann was dead-on. I've bought several other "highly rated" books to try to help me through the quagmire of Adobe products, so I've seen them all. The Visual Quickstart book doesn't have any of that insufferable "wanna-be-a-comic-novel-author" writing, and focuses just on the basics. And it's very literal, with step-by-step instructions. Still there's no substitute for the utterly excruciating process of learning Illustrator through experience. But the Weinmann book's better than any I've seen yet.

The only reason I haven't given this product a 5 is because it still doesn't have the intuitiveness that it needs. In that way it's still "snobby" -- aimed at pros, not folks like me who need to do occasional stuff but not for a living. But this is a far, far, far cry better than Illustrator 9. Absolutely worth the money, just for Live Trace and Live Paint alone.

I was waiting for CS2 after using the CS. There are too many problems in CS. And I am very happy with CS2 now. The software is a lot easier to use, less problems. I have been using illustrator since illustrator 4. CS2 is definitly better than ever!!

This product arrived in a short time and was able to use right out of the box.

Illustrator CS2 is an application loaded with features, but it is too slow that after I execute a command I wait almost 30 seconds before anything happens. Oftentimes I click again because there is no hour glass or timeline to indicate it is doing anything and that usually ends in Illustrator not responding and hanging up. I'm use to Photoshop being so fast compared to Illustrator that I get impatient.

If I had $1 for every time a CS2 app crashed and made expend real hours to redo work, I'd have about $10. And that's enough for me to say, BEWARE of this set of applications! Adobe has allowed them to get too bloated, too slow, and the results are that all the programs (but principally GoLive, InDesign and Illustrator, in that order) are crashy and will quite suddenly, forcing you to expend the precious hours of your life redoing work you just finished. I cannot stress how disappointed I am in Adobe, and how distraught I am that we as a nation have allowed the only two competing companies to join, thus guaranteeing that there will be less quality and innovation in the future. In any event, do not buy the CS2 apps, Adobe does not deserve your support!

This new version of Illustrator is great, glad I upgraded! The Live Trace feature is cool!

Came quickly, was factory sealed, loaded-up as it should.

Thanks:

Dale Tollefson

Yeah, I know it's the industry standard, and it's powerful, and all that stuff. But, MY GOD, what a freaking PAIN to use. It's just plain tedious to draw anything from scratch. While the interface in CS2 is an improvement, doing relatively simple drawings with primitive shapes and freehand curves still requires much more effort than it reasonably should. Frankly, I could draw better stuff faster with 1990's-era Macintosh drawing programs. The drawing issues are compounded by the fact that -- in true Adobe spirit -- this program is incredibly bloated and slow. It's slow doing EVERYTHING... I've never seen a program so slow starting up. And every time you save a file (even a tiny drawing with 10 shapes) you get a "saving file" progress bar for a few seconds. It's also incredibly slow to shut down... frequently taking about 30 seconds. I'm running it on a Pentium M laptop, and I know this is not a "graphics professional" machine, but COME ON! Let's get the lead out! I just get the sense that Adobe pays no attention whatsoever to efficiency or speed. That bugs me a lot.

Not bad, however, in Version 10, was able to use CNTRL + to zoom in. Used the + on the number pad -- now this function doesn't work, and the only + that works is that in the top row of the keyboard. The zoom out "-" in the number pad still works, but not the plus. I say that's not good.

Why ruin things with an upgrade.