Showing posts with label PhotoShop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PhotoShop. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium Mac Review


Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium
Mac (Image via Amazon aStore)
If you're serious about production and design for the web, then the Adobe products are pretty much where you can expect to spend your life. Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium is a good balance of capabilities for the price, including Dreamweaver, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash, InDesign and more. Thanks to Amazon's absolutely fantastic pricing, I was able to get off the month-by-month rental Adobe offers, and take ownership of my own copy.

The software is quite large and needs a fairly heavy-duty machine to work best. My 27" iMac with a 3.4Ghz quad-core i7 processor, 1TB solid-state drive and 16GB of memory is blindingly fast with most apps, but only "okay" with some of the more complex PhotoShop filters. Some of the blur and sharpen algorithms can take 15-20 seconds on my system. I do a lot of serious photography, and driving my Epson R3000 with PhotoShop seems to produce (very) slightly better looking prints than any other app I've used, including older versions of PhotoShop - I guess this makes all the resources worth it.

I tend to use PhotoShop and Dreamweaver more than the other apps, and the CS6 upgrade was a major difference for me and definitely worth the upgrade from CS5. I admit to having a bit of a "love/hate" relationship with PhotoShop - I know what it can do, but I tend to spend way too much time searching for just the right tool and outcome I want. No different from previous versions of PhotoShop, for all the power of these products, Adobe certainly could use a few lessons in user-experience design.

There's a whole community of add-on apps for PhotoShop, and I'm happy to report that most of the ones I tried, especially the Nik Software ones, worked flawlessly with CS6. To me, this would have been a deal-breaker, so I'm glad things just seemed to work.

To be clear, while these are some of the industry's most powerful apps for web design, they aren't really best for the casual user. It can take months to master each of the capabilities in this suite, and unless you're willing to put in the time, you'll probably find yourself overwhelmed. Adobe has a very good trial program where you can try before you buy - definitely take advantage of it if you're not sure what you're getting into.

Still, with the right commitment, the rewards can be stunning, world-class web sites, beautiful photographs, compelling documents and so forth...


Article Source:
http://www.amazon.com/review

Enhanced by Zemanta

Facebook Social Comments

Social Media Marketing News Headlines