RECOMMENDED

VERDICT New gradient handling, vector painting, rich formatting and – at last – support for multiple pages/artboards.

Adobe Photoshop / Extended CS4 review

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT An excellent release that reworks Photoshop’s core colour correction capabilities making them even more productive and powerful.

Adobe Photoshop is universally recognized as the most powerful photo-editor available, but Adobe isn’t resting on its laurels. With Photoshop CS4, Adobe is determined to make the best even better.

VERDICT The new interface and PDF and AIR export see Fireworks CS4 fully integrated into the Creative Suite.

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT InDesign CS4 boosts productivity, adds advanced long document functionality and enables screen-based publishing via Flash.

InDesign is the central application in Adobe’s publishing vision taking text and images and combining them as multiple page publications ready for output on paper. And now on screen.

VERDICT More power for 3D users, but little for anyone else.

Photoshop Extended was the surprise introduction and, in many ways, star of the CS3 premium suites with its eye-popping introduction of 3D and video layers and a worthy new role in scientific image analysis. It’s a hard act to follow so how has Adobe extended Photoshop Extended?

RECOMMENDED

VERDICT Adobe builds on its print strengths to take its rich design mission online.

It’s easy to forget these days, but Adobe began life developing software and fonts for imagesetting machines. Things have moved on considerably, but Adobe’s core focus and strength remains in publishing.

VERDICT A period of transition as Adobe gets to grips with its Macromedia inheritance and the changing nature of the web.

Adobe’s background is in print design and its web efforts such as GoLive and ImageReady were less than impressive. It seemed something of a miracle then when Macromedia agreed to be taken over, allowing Adobe to add the market-leading web apps to its market-leading print portfolio.

VERDICT A modern makeover and new Flash authoring capabilities put a real spring in the step of the old timer.
QuarkXPress is one of the few truly revolutionary applications. Twenty years ago Quark took the simple hands-on approach to DTP pioneered by PageMaker, grafted on some high-end control, and reinvented the publishing industry. For over a decade QuarkXPress ruled the world of commercial print design but then threw it away and allowed Adobe InDesign to seize its publishing crown. Winning it back will demand something special – which is exactly what Quark is promising for this new release. The slogan for QuarkXPress 8 is: “Revolutionizing Publishing. Again.”

VERDICT With its incorporation of Flash-based media handling and new integration with Acrobat.com, the Acrobat platform fully embraces the internet age – at last.
Adobe Acrobat made its public debut back in 1991 and the PDF (Portable Document Format) it introduced was intended to become the universal format for design-rich, cross-platform electronic communication. The launch of the World Wide Web in the same year forced Adobe to radically revise its plans, but the Acrobat platform survived and eventually prospered by making itself indispensable to a whole host of workflows: documentation distribution, forms handling, secure exchange, searchable archiving, document review, commercial print and so on.

VERDICT Plenty of design-rich development power for producing desktop EXEs - but the new browser-hosted Silverlight applications promise more than they currently deliver.
Everyone’s computing experience depends on the richness of the applications that they use both on the desktop and on the web. However there’s always been a factor holding that richness in check: a fundamental and frustrating chasm between the designer working on application presentation and the developer working on application logic. Just over a year ago Microsoft unveiled its ground-up solution to the problem and now, with Expression Studio 2, it is building on those foundations.