Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium Upgrade Mac
Adobe Design Premium CS4 Upgrade Mac. Upgrade from CS3 version. CS4 boxed products do NOT include full printed user guides. These Doc Sets are orderable thru the License Desk or thru adobe.com.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars A Worthy Upgrade
For a scant $593 (after Adobe’s $200 instant rebate), I was able to upgrade CS3 versions of Photoshop and Illustrator (which would have run me $400 just for those) AND get Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, etc. It feels like Christmas.
This is the tightest UI integration than I’ve seen since Adobe purchased Macromedia.
Overall, I got a lot of useful apps for a decent price,and while I may not use them all, the ones I have mentioned, I certainly will.
The only fly in this ointment is the bloatware feel and the non-Mac-like install process. On two DVDs, the full install takes a HUGE amount of space (1.2GB for Adobe Acrobat alone!).
It’s best to pick and choose which apps you will actually use rather than accept the defaults.
BTW, Adobe Bridge has become a new must-use app when Photoshopping! Keep it in your install selection.
2 Stars Poor job, Adobe!
Very disappointing. The interface is so messed up. For instance, I’m working in Flash CS4, and there are no less than THREE types of scroll bars in ONE window. It’s just insane. They seem to have added a bunch of features, as usual, but not bothered to fix many of the bugs from the past. They also seem to be rewriting these dinosaurs slowly in Air rather than the native GUI of the OS, which means they work all strange, more Windows-like than Mac, and the interface is terribly broken.
For a piece of software I spend my whole day doing design work in, it’s agony. Shame on you, Adobe!
4 Stars CS4 smooths out a lot of the rough edges of CS3
Lots of great updates in this release.
Bridge has gone from a product I never even opened in CS3 to a program I use even more than the Finder is CS4 (when searching Adobe files.) I have two major gripes still. Bridge’s smart collections are painfully slow where smart folders in the finder are very fast. Also Bridge is unable to detect Photoshop files that are located in the iPhoto library. Bridge can find other formats from with in iPhoto library just not Photoshop. Unfortunately that is the format I primarily use.
Flash currently crashes for me whenever I make a symbol so I haven’t been able to use it much at all. That being said that are making great steps to simplifying the interface. Action Script is still unnecessarily complicated.
Illustrator has multiple artboards like FreeHand did except it works a lot better. You can now also bring in most FreeHand files fully intact since both software contains pages now. The blob brush is great. As a long time FreeHand fan I like on they seem to be making Illustrator functions easier like FreeHand but with more powerful features.
I see two problems with Illustrator. One is that they put the rotating canvas feature in PhotoShop but left it out of where it was really needed which is in Illustrator. The other is that I find it much harder to do a simple eye dropper sample in Illustrator than FreeHand especially when applying a color’s stroke to another objects fill or a fill to another objects stroke.
Fireworks is an ok upgrade but didn’t build on pages feature from CS3 like was badly needed. Fireworks needs to work more like InDesign for the web but it’s layout features are stuck in the 80s. No multiple master pages, no basing one one page on top of another. No linking images so that you can have quick access to altering the image like how you can option like images in InDesign. Their is a lot more that I am not thinking of at the moment.
Dreamweaver is really a developer tool it’s not that geared towards designing like they say it is.
Acrobat seem like it would be useful way to interact with clients but do all my clients have to go out and buy a really expensive piece of software in order to do that? I don’t see any of my clients doing that therefore I don’t see how it could be of much use to me.
I like how photoshops editing features are on the side of the screen rather than cover up the image like in CS3, that’s a nice touch.
Camera Raw is almost identical to CS3. I hope they keep releasing new features for it like they did through CS3’s life time.
InDesign is great. The new preflighting really helps. Now they need to bring Indesign’s features over to Fireworks so that I can use the same powerful features inside of a web layout program.
One of the best features of all is having support for the PowerMac G5 which is still a very very fast computer today. I see absolutely nothing I need to a new Intel computer and there is no way I would have upgraded if they dropped support for PowerPC. I am not going to upgrade my machine a year a half from now so here’s hoping they still support it then in CS5. If they don’t I will just stay with CS4 and outright skip the upgrade since CS4 works really well for me.
Overall a great update.
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4 Stars CS2 owners beware: This version only updates from CS3
CS4 has some great improvements from earlier versions of these apps. My biggest disappointment was that when the product was delivered I discovered that there are TWO versions of the upgrade: one that upgrades from CS3 and one that upgrades from CS2 or earlier or from the old Macromedia Studio products. I have CS2 and it refused to offer me a way to upgrade, giving me only the choice of filling in a CS3 serial number. After a huge amount of time on the phone with Adobe Customer Service, I finally got them to take back the version I ordered from Amazon.com and replace it with the correct updater for my situation.
The apps are terrific and all run natively on Apple’s Intel processor machines. There will be a bit of a learning curve, figuring out where some of the familiar controls are (Adobe seems to delight in hiding some features that were in plain sight before). Over all, it’s a great upgrade.
GoLive has been replaced by Dreamweaver, and I deeply regret its loss. Dreamweaver may be an excellent program, but I’ve been using GoLive for over 14 years. Now I’m forced to learn Dreamweaver, and I don’t like the interface nearly as well. It still feels like a clunky Macromedia product. Hopefully Adobe will integrate its interface and make it more Adobe-like in CS5.
Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat are exceptional products. They are the basis for my graphic design workflow, and allow me to turn out world-class designs for print and web for my clients around the world. I’ve yet to learn how to use Flash and Fireworks, but I’ll be getting a subscription to Lynda.com to learn them in due course.
One additional caveat: Epson doesn’t make drivers for hardly any of their scanners that work with Photoshop CS4 yet. My Perfection 2450 scanner is now idle because Epson doesn’t make a plug-in that even works with Photoshop CS3!! I’ll be needing to find standalone scanning software–or try to find a new scanner that works within Photoshop CS4. Epson should really be more forthcoming with its driver updates, especially as so many people (tons of professional photographers) use Photoshop for retouching and compositing. What were they thinking?!!
5 Stars Adobe Upgrade is Great!
This suite of design applications is fantastic. The InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop parts are worth the price alone, but then you get Dreamweaver, Flash and Acrobat are added to complete to cornucopia of treasures.
Try it, Mikey, you will like it!
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