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Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection Released

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Designers, computer artists and developers, here is what you’ve been waiting for: the highly anticipated Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 product family has finally been released. With more than 250 new product features, the Creative Suite 5 product line is power-packed. It features revamped versions of its leading arts, design, video and animation tools, plus two new web-design applications, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

Adobe Mobile

The Adobe CS5 product family is powering the creation of content and applications for the release of Flash® Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR® 2, which are optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer, more integrated user experience. Featuring integration with online content and digital marketing measurement and optimization capabilities for the first time, Creative Suite 5 products include access to signature Omniture® technologies, to capture, store and analyze information generated by websites and other sources.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 products also integrate with Adobe CS Live*, a set of five innovative online services that accelerate key aspects of the creative workflow and enable designers to focus on creating their best work (*CS Live services are complimentary for a limited time).

Master Five

The Creative Suite 5 line-up includes five new versions: Creative Suite 5 Master Collection, Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Creative Suite 5 Web Premium, Creative Suite 5 Production Premium, Creative Suite 5 Design Standard, as well as 15 point products and associated technologies. Creative Suite now includes a brand-new component, Adobe Flash® Catalyst™, a professional interaction design tool that allows designers to rapidly create expressive Web application interfaces and design interaction without writing code.



“We’ve seen from early customer reaction that Creative Suite 5 continues to inspire the design and developer world by combining time-saving workflow and productivity features with astonishing new capabilities, such as Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5, that really push the creative envelope,”
said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. “Whatever the media, CS5 is ensuring that publishers and creatives can deliver stand-out work and build great businesses around their unique digital assets and content.”

Updated Creative Tools

Also available as part of the Creative Suite 5 product family, sold separately or in one of the five Creative Suite editions, are new versions of the Adobe Creative Suite tools, including Photoshop® CS5, Illustrator® CS5, InDesign® CS5, Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash CS5 Professional, Dreamweaver® CS5, Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS5, After Effects® CS5 and more.

Photoshop CS5

Photoshop adds new show-stopping tools with each version. And CS5 offers more a plethora of these. Digital artists, listen up, the Mixer brush tool will be your new best friend. It’s a new paint system with a ‘wet canvas’ method for picking up multiple colors on a single tip while mixing and blending them with the underlying hues on the canvas. CS5 also performs magic with the Content-Aware Fill tool.  It removes elements from an image and fills the space with matching lighting, tone, and noise.

Innovate in 3d

3D is the rage in film and design. With the extended version of Photoshop CS5, you go beyond traditional image editing by bringing 3D elements to your 2D artwork directly within your favorite digital imaging application, which now offers an easy on-ramp to 3D image creation. Here are some of the features:

3D extrusions with Adobe Repoussé new

Create stunning 3D logos and artwork from any text layer, selection, path, or layer mask with Adobe® Repoussé technology. Then twist, rotate, extrude, bevel, and inflate these designs to get the look you want.

Rich 3D materials library and picker new

Explore different looks for your 3D objects by applying materials like chrome and gemstones from a rich materials library. Select and apply materials using intuitive tools, and add to your library by downloading materials from the web.

Ability to wrap 2D data around 3D geometry

Use convenient presets to wrap 2D images around common 3D geometric shapes, such as cylinders and spheres.

3D mesh creation enhanced

Quickly generate 3D objects from grayscale depth maps.

Depth of field for 3D new

Experiment with different focus points in your 3D scene by previewing and adjusting the range for depth of field.

Easy shadow creation new

Enhance the realism of your 3D designs by generating shadows in a few clicks with the shadow catcher.

Image-based lighting new

Use HDR images or panoramas to light your 3D scene.

Better 3D performance and workflow enhanced

Take advantage of a new ray tracer for immediate progressive feedback on rendering states. And experience superior 3D performance with improved import, interaction speeds, and merging of 3D objects into a single scene.

OBJ file import enhanced

Import Object (OBJ) files up to 50% faster.

3D object painting

Paint directly on 3D models or their unwrapped textures. Edit your textures directly using all the power of Adobe Photoshop®, and even view UV overlays on flattened textures for guidance.

An example of what you can do with Extraordinary Painting Tool.

3D object and property editing enhanced

Edit, enhance, and manipulate 3D scenes in a streamlined interface without dialog boxes. Enjoy a single, easy-to-use panel that contains all your 3D controls for meshes, materials, and lights.

Volume rendering

Add depth to pixel layers, text, 2D shapes, and DICOM frames with volume rendering.

3D and 2D image compositing enhanced

Combine 3D layers into a single scene, or incorporate 3D content into 2D composites. Support for popular 3D formats lets you import and export Collada, OBJ, U3D, and KMZ models, as well as import 3DS models.

Navigating and moving 3D objects enhanced

Use the new 3D axis to position objects, cameras, lights, and meshes. Use bounding overlays to easily identify which material or mesh is targeted, and toggle these on or off along with the ground plane and lights.

3D animation

Create 3D animations by mapping object movement, camera position, render settings, and cross sections to keyframes in your timeline. Take this further by using video layers to animate your textures, and include image-based lights.

Integration with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and After Effects

Collaborate on 3D content easily through tight integration with Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro Extended and After Effects®. Convert to the robust COLLADA interchange format, enhance models, and embed 3D models into PDF files for review. Use 3D layers from Photoshop Extended in After Effects projects.

Vanishing Point with 3D support

Edit in perspective on multiple surfaces — even those connected at angles other than 90 degrees — with Vanishing Point. Measure in perspective; wrap graphics, images, and text around multiple planes; and output planes as 3D models to use in After Effects projects.

Illustrator CS5

Illustrator also has new ‘wow’ factor tools. The new Perspective Grid tool lets you draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, and 3-point linear perspectives. The new Perspective Selection tool lets you move, scale, duplicate, and transform objects dynamically in perspective. You can also move and duplicate objects from one plane to another. The new Bristle Brush lets you paint with vectors and mimic real-world brush strokes. You can set brush characteristics like size, length, thickness, stiffness, shape, bristle density, and paint opacity.

InDesign CS5

InDesign CS5, among the all of the applications, has seen the most dramatic changes in efficiency and ease of use in laying out pages. Enabling you to quickly rotate frames now, the Selection tool,  using on-screen handles, is a time-saver. InDesign also now automatically installs packaged fonts when you open a packaged document.

David Burkett, vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions at Adobe, says of Illustrator CS5, “Whether you’re creating for print or digital media, Illustrator CS5 strikes the right balance of productivity enhancements and powerful new drawing and paint tools that allow you to deliver striking, high-impact designs.”

Flash Catalyst CS5

Imagine a world where you can have interactive Web content without writing code. Poof! Flash Catalyst’s CS5 is a new pro design tool that allows you to just that. The main focus is on the components used to create interactive content—the buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, and checkboxes that let users interact with a product or service. With Flash Catalyst CS5, designers can add interactive Flash content to Web sites and applications by transforming Photoshop and Illustrator artwork or Fireworks files into functional content and user interfaces. It lets you build interactive designs using concepts like pages and states, resembling traditional print or Web design projects.

DreamWeaver CS5

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software offers a comprehensive integrated environment in which to design, develop, test, and deploy websites and applications of all flavors—spanning the gamut from the simplest, static HTML page to complete websites built upon complex dynamic application frameworks. Dreamweaver CS5 streamlines both front-end and back-end development tasks.

Unlimited Possibilities

The Creative Suite 5 products offer more than 250 new features that embrace interactivity, enhance performance and maximize the impact of creative content and digital marketing campaigns.

Design CS5 powers the transition to digital publishing with new interactive documents and enhanced electronic reader device support.

Image creation and editing get a boost with Truer Edge technology in Photoshop CS5, which offers better edge detecting technology and masking results in less time. Photoshop CS5 also includes the ability to remove an image element and immediately replace the missing pixels with Content-Aware Fill.

New stroke options allow Adobe Illustrator CS5 users to create strokes of variable widths and precisely adjust the width at any point along the stroke.

New Text Layout Framework in Flash Professional CS5 provides professional-level typography capabilities with functions like kerning, ligatures, tracking, leading, threaded text block and multiple columns.

In addition, Dreamweaver CS5 now supports popular content management systems Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress, allowing designers to get accurate views of dynamic Web content from within the product.

Native 64-bit Support

Performance improvements abound in the Creative Suite 5 product line with engineering breakthroughs, including native 64-bit support on both Mac and Windows® in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, that allows users to work more fluidly on high-resolution projects. The much anticipated NVIDIA® GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine allows Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 users to open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD sequences in real time and play back complex projects without rendering. The revolutionary timesaving Roto Brush tool in After Effects helps users isolate moving foreground elements in a fraction of the normal time.

Adobe CS Live Accelerates Creativity

Adobe Creative Suite 5 products integrate with Adobe CS Live*, a set of five online services that accelerate key aspects of the creative workflow and enable designers to focus on creating their best work. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time and currently include: Adobe BrowserLab, Adobe CS Review, Acrobat.com, Adobe Story and SiteCatalyst® NetAverages™ from Omniture. Adobe CS Review enables online design reviews from directly in Creative Suite 5 applications, while Adobe BrowserLab is an indispensable tool for testing website content across different browsers and operating systems. NetAverages provides Web usage data that helps reduce the guesswork early in the creative process when designing for Web and mobile. Adobe Story is a collaborative scriptwriting tool that improves production and post-production workflows in CS5 Production Premium. Access to Acrobat.com services, such as Adobe ConnectNow Web conferencing, is also included to enhance discussion and information exchange with colleagues and clients around the globe.

Create and Deliver to More Mobile Platforms

Using Flash Professional CS5, designers and developers can create, test and deliver Web content across a wide range of mobile platforms and devices such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks and other consumer electronics. Users can look forward to deploying content in the browser with Flash Player 10.1 and as a standalone application with AIR 2.

Affordable Pricing

Adobe Creative Suite 5 products and its associated point products will be available through Adobe Authorized Resellers, Adobe Direct Sales and the Adobe Store at www.adobe.com/store.

Estimated price for the suites is $1899 for CS5 Design Premium, $1799 for CS5 Web Premium, $1699 for CS5 Production Premium, $1299 for CS5 Design Standard and $2599 for Master Collection CS5. Upgrade pricing, volume licensing and education discounts are available. Adobe CS5 products integrate with Adobe CS Live online services which are complimentary for a limited time. For more detailed information about features, OS support, upgrade policies, pricing and international versions please visit: www.adobe.com/go/creativesuite.

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About the author

Lanee Neil