MacDirectory Magazine

FEA TURE REVIEW CS5 WEB PREMIUM > SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE WORDS BY RIC GETTER Magical Selections It’s unfortunate that so much of what Adobe has done with Creative Suite 5 Web Premium has been buried by all the debate over the one thing that Apple said that it couldn’t do. Web Premium CS5 still represents some of the most important improvements in any of the Suites. In some cases, as with Fireworksand Illustrator, the lines of distinction between the applications have begun to blur. But with Flash Catalyst, new tools have been added that expand the reach of the suite to a much broader audience. With the exception of Photoshopand Adobe Media Encoder, the move to 64-bit architecture may have less importance to web designers and developers than it does to photographers, video and multimedia people. However, the many under-the- hood performance boosts, the ability to support enough memory to have files open in a number of programs simultaneously, and Adobe developers’ innate ability to tweak features to make your life easier means that this program will offer a healthy payback in terms of time and effort saved. With CS5 Web, that payback has to be substantial because Adobe made the somewhat questionable decision to drop the lower-cost, “Standard” version of the suite. Their aggressive upgrade pricing from earlier Standard versions will lessen the pain a bit, but for new users the cost of entry to the Adobe web suite will be rather high. Extraordinary Painting Whether you’re a one-person show or part of a team, there are two very different mindsets when approaching a web-based product: the design/content side and the developer’s side. We’ll be looking at the collection through both these perspectives. Content is King Partially out of tradition and partially out of habit, it is nearly impossible not to lead off any discussion of a Creative Suite product of a program other than Adobe’s perennial flagship. However, except for the folks focusing on photography and image manipulation, Photoshop CS5 Extended is not really offering anything truly groundbreaking for the web set. However, there are an immense number of interface and workflow tweaks that provide some noticeable improvements for users at virtually any level of involvement or experience. As mentioned earlier, this may be some users’ first experience with the Extended version of the program, so you may really love new Repoussé 3D, a new tool that lets you take a 2D object or text, extrude it out, manipulate and paint the surfaces, light it, and spin around it in three dimensions. The nice thing is that Adobe provided an interface that lets all this make sense to people new to 3D graphics. With a little more time and effort, you’ll be able to mix and merge 2D and 3D objects in a way that makes them look deceptively real. Another thing we may get asked to do a lot is to pull an element of a picture (person, product, etc.) off a cluttered background and matte it on top of something more pleasing (more often than not, empty space). Smart selection and smart edge refinement tools will help you avoid those hours of pixel-by-pixel cleanup that still never look right no matter how hard you try because of thinks like color contamination from the background, fuzzy hair and the like. These tools are startlingly effective and are MacDirectory 117

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