Adobe Creative Suite 3 overview

Well, Apple is going to be relieved about this. Mac sales are so dependent on Photoshop that sales of Apple’s Mac Pro machines have been suffering because of the long wait for a new version.

What's more, it's the first version of Adobe's Creative Suite that's available in Universal Binary format - so it's designed to run old Macs as well as the new Intel versions.

Read our review of Adobe Photoshop CS3
Read our review of Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

But Mac users aren’t the only people who will welcome Adobe’s new range of Creative Suite applications. Adobe has spent the last couple of years working on major upgrades to all its key programs, such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

And, of course, it also swallowed up Macromedia a year or so back, which means that it’s now got the likes of Flash and Dreamweaver to look after as well.

The acquisition of Flash and Dreamweaver has added a new dimension to the Adobe product line. In the past, Adobe’s core markets were what you might call ‘old media’ – the paper-based graphics, design and publishing markets.

Its attempts to move into the digital media arena of the Internet were less successful, and its own GoLive web design tool made little progress in challenging the success of Dreamweaver.

Adobe now owns Dreamweaver, along with Flash – the program responsible for the likes of YouTube and its many imitators (just right-click on any YouTube video clip and you’ll see Flash Player menu pop up).

This means the Creative Suite 3 range (more commonly known as CS3) now splits into two separate strands – Design and Web. And there are both ‘standard’ and ‘premium’ versions of each suite.

The Design Standard suite contains Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat, while the Design Premium version chucks in Flash and Dreamweaver as well, along with the new ‘Extended’ edition of Photoshop.

Web designers can start with the Web Standard suite, which includes Flash, Dreamweaver, the Fireworks graphics program and the low-end HTML editor, Contribute. The Web Premium version of the suite adds Photoshop and Illustrator to provide some extra graphics and image-editing tools.

There’s a fair amount of overlap between the various versions of the suite, so you might want to take some time to decide which one provides the specific set of tools you need.

Now read our reviews of Photoshop and Dreamweaver CS3.

Reviews of Flash CS3 coming soon...

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