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Rating: 
Summary: i used to like adobe...
Review: ...then i needed to contact their technical support because illustrator crashes when you try to label layers. they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible. no email support. instead you have to ring an area code 206 number and wait until some overworked undertrained person tells you to reinstall the product or the operating system... very helpful. just like their software.i'll look elsewhere the next time i look for an illustration package or a graphics editor. and i won't even bother discussing their inept page layout program.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't forget to factor in manuals to the final price.
Review: I grew up on Adobe products. They used to include great manuals and tutorials. Now I have paid more and received less. I am trying to learn how to use GoLive but the online manual doesn't make a whole lot of sense. How come a printed manual isn't included? Oh, I have to pay more for it? How come I seem to be paying for printing costs then? Customer support? To get real help I'll have to pay for it. I used Adobe Premiere for Mac but that product got abandoned. I will not buy another Adobe product until they either give more or charge less. If you are getting started with web design I would suggest going somewhere else. That being said... Illustrator and Photoshop are both still great products and the upgrades were easy for me to understand (probably because the last versions I had included a printed manual and tutorials). Let's face it, if it wasn't for OS X, I would have just stuck to the older versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and PageMaker and bought Dreamweaver instead. Photoshop CS - Classroom in a Book = $45. Illustrator CS - Classroom in a Book = $31.50. GoLive CS - Classroom in a Book = $45. InDesign - Classroom in a Book = $45. Acrobat Pro - Classroom in a Book = $45. $211.50 in manuals right there. Its a good product but it keeps on costing you in time and money.
Rating: 
Summary: glad I got it
Review: I just bought it off of AMazon a week ago (which is the lowest price for the full version I have been able to find so far) and IM glad I did. For new people to the software, you may wanna stay with your older version for a bit and just get used to it before shelling out the money, but if your serious about design and making your workflow work to the max for you, this new collection is a must. Tight integration and the help of the version Cue additional file managment software will help even the messiest designer keep thier files inline. If design is what you want to do, then theres no better package to get. Ive been using Photoshop for years and Illustrator and Indesign for a while now and this is defenitly an inovation in design.
I gave it 4 stars due to small problems I had installing the whole suite at once. I have never had the problem with anything else and it was frustrating. But after that its smooth saling.
Rating: 
Summary: CS is wonderful!
Review: I love the new Adobe CS. It doesn't have a printed manual, but I like the fact that I can click on the help button and search for the answer I need.
I much prefer InDesign over Quark. It is easier to use, and you can set the shortcuts to be the same as Quark if you are having trouble switching over.
I had used other html programs before, and I jumped into GoLive with a limited learning curve. Any questions I had were easily answered by searching the help.
I highly recommend this group of programs!
Rating:
Summary: Don't forget to factor in manuals to the final price.
Review: No software is perfect, but Adobe comes as close to well designed, intuitive, user-friendly software as I have ever seen. Photoshop and Illustrator have always been the industry standards, and here they are both improved - particularly the digital photographer will be happy with the new photo filters in Photoshop CS, and the much improved file browser and the new filter gallery are also excellent additions. As far as publishing programs are concerned, InDesign is a greatly more intuitive program than Quark at a fraction of its cost, and because its pallets function much the same as in Photoshop and Illustrator, it is an easily acquired program if you are familiar with Adobe software. I use these programs on a Mac OS X platform and for me they are very stable. I have had none of the crashing problems or tech support difficulties that another reviewer of the Adobe Creative Suite has had. For anyone using many design programs at once, enough RAM is always a requirement for smooth operation. But if you have enough RAM and a Mac platform, you should have no significant problems at all. PCs crash more by their nature because their operating system is not as stable as a Mac's, but still Adobe products are not only more intuitive than Microsoft's (for example), they also will crash far less on a PC than most other types of software (like Microsoft's). Photoshop and Illustrator have always defined the state of the art for photo editing and raster graphic software respectively, and here Adobe is carrying on the tradition. InDesign looks as though it is fast replacing Quark in the publishing industry as well, so if you are a creative professional you will be more than happy in the end to own the Adobe Creative Suite. What else would you use?
Rating:
Summary: Excellent design software
Review: No software is perfect, but Adobe comes as close to well designed, intuitive, user-friendly software as I have ever seen. Photoshop and Illustrator have always been the industry standards, and here they are both improved - particularly the digital photographer will be happy with the new photo filters in Photoshop CS, and the much improved file browser and the new filter gallery are also excellent additions. As far as publishing programs are concerned, InDesign is a greatly more intuitive program than Quark at a fraction of its cost, and because its pallets function much the same as in Photoshop and Illustrator, it is an easily acquired program if you are familiar with Adobe software. I use these programs on a Mac OS X platform and for me they are very stable. I have had none of the crashing problems or tech support difficulties that another reviewer of the Adobe Creative Suite has had. For anyone using many design programs at once, enough RAM is always a requirement for smooth operation. But if you have enough RAM and a Mac platform, you should have no significant problems at all. PCs crash more by their nature because their operating system is not as stable as a Mac's, but still Adobe products are not only more intuitive than Microsoft's (for example), they also will crash far less on a PC than most other types of software (like Microsoft's). Photoshop and Illustrator have always defined the state of the art for photo editing and raster graphic software respectively, and here Adobe is carrying on the tradition. InDesign looks as though it is fast replacing Quark in the publishing industry as well, so if you are a creative professional you will be more than happy in the end to own the Adobe Creative Suite. What else would you use?
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