CS5 Review

So you have read a million reviews, played with tons of demos, and asked everyone you can think to ask questions to. Have you decided which software you need? We have placed all the software in one easy place to find. Head over and read more reviews it you still are on the fence!

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	Adobe Flash Professional CS5 software is the industry-leading environment for interactive authoring and delivery of immersive experiences Communicate your creative vision without sacrifice and set the bar for interactive design with typographic precision, layout fidelity, and expressive motion-editing capabilities. Quickly and efficiently write code with powerful authoring tools and integration with Adobe Flash Builder software. Easily add interactivity directly in the ActionScript language by injecting extensible code snippets. Save time and reduce the steps involved when moving content from design, to development, and ultimately to delivery. Distribute consistently across PCs, mobile devices, and screens of virtually any size and resolution. Take control over your text with print-quality typography via the new Text Layout Framework. Work with columns and bidirectional text, and maintain layout and formatting with greater fidelity when importing Price: $665.99 ORDER HERE
Adobe Photoshop CS5 software redefines digital imaging with a focus on photography; breakthrough capabilities for superior image selections, image retouching, and realistic painting; and a wide range of enhancements. Create and refine images using state-of-the-art photography tools that deliver superior results with unprecedented ease and in fewer steps than ever before. Explore new creative possibilities with breakthrough tools that enable you to select, adjust, paint, and recompose images with tremendous precision and freedom. Accelerate your workflow with fast performance on 64-bit hardware systems, smoother interactions thanks to GPU acceleration, and dozens of time-savers throughout the application. Easily manage media with more flexible batch renaming, and access your assets in the context of what you’re working on by using the customizable Adobe Mini Bridge panel in Photoshop. Price: $649.99 ORDER HERE
	Whether you’re working in broadcast, film, or delivering work online and to mobile devices, Adobe After Effects CS5 software enables you to create groundbreaking motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects. Work more quickly with groundbreaking 64-bit performance that dramatically improves the experience of creating HD and higher resolution content. Streamlined tools and tight Adobe integration also accelerate your workflow. Express your visual ideas with freedom. Adobe After Effects CS5 revolutionizes motion design with an open-ended environment that fosters creative experimentation. Realize your vision quickly and efficiently by drawing on a broad and deep set of tools designed to help you solve any creative challenge. Master modern media: Deliver your completed projects to the widest range of formats, from large format feature films and high-definition television to websites and mobile devices Price: $937.54 ORDER HERE
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 software empowers designers and developers to build standards-based websites with confidence. Build dynamic standards-based websites and applications quickly and easily. Leverage powerful content management systems with integrated authoring and testing support for your existing frameworks like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal. Inspect, track, and preview web designs with powerful CSS diagnostics and functions. Improve your layouts and designs, and reduce the need for manual tweaking in the CSS code. Some of the new CS Live online services integrate with Dreamweaver, such as fast and accurate browser-compatibility testing with Adobe BrowserLab. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time. Design and develop in an environment that supports most leading web development technologies, including HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, Adobe ColdFusion software, and ASP. Price: $380.98 ORDER HERE
	Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection combines all the components of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Web Premium, and Production Premium software for ultimate creative toolset. Discover extraordinary new design tools and groundbreaking ways to extend your creative reach using one comprehensive offering?the ultimate design environment for virtually any medium. Work faster with extremely high-resolution images; fluidly edit large, complex video and motion graphics projects; and do more in less time with a wealth of productivity enhancements. Speed up design reviews, streamline website testing in multiple browsers, collaborate on script development and content authoring, and more thanks to integration with new Adobe CS Live online services. Your favorite tools keep getting better with features such as Truer Edge selection technology in Photoshop CS5, the Shape Builder tool in Illustrator CS5, and variably sized master pages in InDesign CS5. Price: $1152.98 ORDER HERE
Used by design professionals worldwide, Adobe Illustrator CS5 software provides precision and power with sophisticated drawing tools, expressive natural brushes, a host of time-savers, and integration with Adobe CS Live. Take advantage of exceptional precision and power to create distinctive vector artwork. Combine highly controllable drawing tools with expressive natural brushes and dramatic effects to make unique, striking designs. Speed up your workflow with innovations that encourage efficiency. Get the job done with purpose and agility using shortcuts and time-savers to take multiple ideas to multiple outputs. Incorporate vector artwork into essentially any project and deliver resolution-independent graphics across media. Enjoy tighter-than-ever integration with other Adobe products and go anywhere your creativity takes you. Enjoy easy type creation and professional control with more than 80 OpenType fonts, paragraph and character styles, paragraph composition, underlining and strikethroughs, transparent effects, and more. Price: $587.49 ORDER HERE
	Design with vector and bitmap tools together to achieve optimal imagery quickly. Enjoy pixel precision that maps to your resolution requirements, using graphics tools designed for screen-based output. Create rich, interactive screen graphics with fewer steps. Create and name slices efficiently, and then deliver superior-quality graphics optimized for the web and a wide range of devices. Quickly optimize designs for websites, rich media applications, and mobile devices. Edit assets from other graphics programs for wider deployment with Fireworks. Integrate client review into the design process. Work faster with significant performance enhancements, including greater control over pixel placement of design elements, improved file opening/saving, updated symbol operation, and quicker bitmap/vector operations. Import Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files while maintaining color matching, element fidelity, and editing capability. Export Fireworks designs into the Adobe Flash software family, or copy/paste into Dreamweaver. Price:$294.99 ORDER HERE

This CS5 review will show that the list of features on the new Creative Suite is smaller than previous version, but these features are better than ever. The new Illustrator has many features that are great for normal Illustrator users and graphic designers alike. I will list the best new features below. Let me know if you agree, or disagree.

The Perspective tools in CS5 are a long overdue feature that should have been added to previous versions of AI. The two new tools, Perspective Grid and Perspective Selection, are both very easy to use. The Perspective Grid tool brings a default grid to the page. This will now allow you to make changes to the grid visually. To keep items in perspective make sure to use the Perspective Selection tool. This is best used when moving or scaling perspective items. You will notice that a lot of the normal drawing tools will also work in perspective when a grid plane is active.

Another new tool called Shape Builder is a cross between the Live Paint tool and the Pathfinder tool. Similar to Live Paint you are able to work with highlighted shapes and then merge and subtract the overlapping areas. The merge and subtract are similar to the Unite and Minus Front options in the Pathfinder tool. This tool really adds value to the new AI, it’s not the main reason to purchase the software, but it is a great feature.

The Width tool is one of the greatest changes that has happened to strokes in some time. This tool gives you the ability to take a standard stroke and modify the width dynamically. This can be done by clicking on the stroke and then dragging it away from the center path. To adjust stokes only on one side you just hold down Alt and drag. The tool also allows you to save a profile and use it later. The new tool is agreat feature that allows you to save lots of time.

The Stroke panel now has arrowheads at the bottom. It is much easier to use them now. Instead of the arrowhead ending beyond the path anchor point, it now ends at it.

The Bristle Brush has also been addded to Brush panel. The Bristle Brush will allow you to create brushes that are similar to that of Photoshop and can be used with the Paintbrush tool. To better use the tool it is suggested that you use a tablet for proper freehand. If you use a tablet you will be able to see the brush shape and angle.

The multiple artboard feature has finally gotten the much needed attention that it deserved. The new Artboard panel can be added, duped, named, rearranged, deleted, and reordered. The panel will also let you jump from artboard to artboard.

To make working with symbols a lot easier, you can use the new Paste on All Artboards command. In previous versions the rulers really didnt do anything. Now each artboard is allowed to have a zero-point as well. The rulers also are similar to that of InDesign, being up in the corner and not in the bottom corner as previous versions.

Illustrator will now recalculate raster-based effects to be similar and not be as big of a difference in quality as was before. In older versions you could work with a lower resolution and then increase the resolution when in final output. The problem is fix for the most part with Illustrator recalculating for you. Pay attention because it is being recalculated and the appearance might change.

CS5 is also bringing three drawing modes. Draw Normal is the draw feature that is in other versions of AI. Draw Behind does what it sounds like. It will draw behind highlighted items. If you do not have anything highlighted then it will draw under all items on a layer. Draw Inside will draw inside highlighted items.

9-slice scaling has proven to be one of the most incredible improvements of symbols. The feature was available in other versions, but it was only for symbols that were being sent to Flash. Now it works for Illustrator as well.

The Transform panel has some new features as well. Aligh Pixel Grid for existing objects and Align New Objects to Pixel Grid. When exporting images for the web these features will help to make them not blurred or fuzzy.

After looking into the new AI, I feel that it is a sound purchase with the new features. Adobe has continued to move forward with each new version. I can only imagine what the 6th version of AI will offer.

The most powerful software for graphic designers and effects designers is Adobe’s After Effects CS5. Finally Adobe has went to 64-bit native. The software will finally be able to take advantage of all the RAM your system has.

One of the newest features of After Effects is the Roto Brush tool. The tool allows designers to simply seperate elements out of the foreground. The tool also has support for Red camera footage, AVC-Intra 50 and also for AVC-Intra 100 codecs.

By far the best feature of the new software is the 64-bit performance boost. Users can expect 20 to 40 percent less render time on single core machines while multi-core process will see between 30 to 50 percent better render times. CS5 will also offer support for customer color look up and will now have the Digieffects FreeForm plug-in. The software also has an auto-keyframe mode and includes the newest Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse 3 LE correction tool.

After hearing so much good news about the increase in RAM, we had to put it to the test for ourselves. We did a project on a 2.6GHz MacBook Pro and we had around a 35% increase in previews and render time. A very big benefit to the production and graphic professionals is that the RAM usage is built to give you extended RAM previews. This can be seen greatly when you use a mulit-core system.

Do not uninstall the CS4 verison of After Effects due to CS5 not being backward compatible. If you wish to continue working on previous projects remember this fact.

One thing that you must remember is that you have to have OS x 10.5.7 if you wish to install After Effects. You will also need to make sure that all of your plug-ins have the newest verisons and they must also be 64-bit versions. You can expect to pay a little more for the 64-bit plug-ins as well.

AVC-Intra and RED Compatibility:

Professionals are going away from older technology and you can see this as there is a surge in popularity of HD video. After Effects takes into account that people are changing how they work. CS5 will be able to view native AVC-Intra files from the popular Panasonic P2 cards and also raw R3D video clips.

The new plug-ins, Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse 3 and Apply Color LUT has made color management very easy. After Effects gives you the ability to add these formats straight from the origin.

Roto Brush tool and Refine Matte effect
One of the greatest features in the new After Effects has to the be the Roto Brush tool. When first comparing the tool to the original, it seems that not much has changed. That is until you really begin working with the tool. It is much better and completely different than before. The tool now allows you to look at many frames of your project at one time. You begin using the tool by choosing the front element with broad strokes with the green brush tool and then it is best to make the brush size smaller and then you can take out the small elements such as ears and hair. Then the next step would be to use the red brush tool to select the background.

Another amazing new tool is the Roto Brush. This tool makes the annoying task of roto-matting much easier. The way the tool works is through a color coded system where the pink outline describes the matte edges, red shows the background and green is the foreground.

After you apply the Roto Brush tool to a segment of footage, the tool issues a keyframe point and begins to search for edges and differences on many frames backward and forward from the origin point. You will then be able to make changes as needed on different frames. Do not expect to be a pro right off the bat. Becoming a master at this will take time and effort. After you have mastered the Roto Brush tool it will become second nature.

The effect of the Roto Brush tool reaches across other tools as well. A new effect,Refine Matte, is applied when the Roto Brush tool is used. The effect is able to be with any matte layer or it can also be alone. The effect changes chatter, smoothness, motion blur, and others. This is a very important feature of the effect when matting people and other objects when they happen to be not standing still.

A major downfall of the Roto Brush is its ability to view pixels in sequence and not draw vectors that are much easier to be edited in a timeline.

Remember to take your time when editing. Small changes will make major changes to frames as far out as 10 to 15. Until you master the tool, it is better to make small segments of 10 to 15 frames of footage. It is much easier to edit smaller than larger segments. Do not assume that you will have the same quality as that of having your element shot against a green screen.

The Roto Brush tool will have a difficult time knowing the difference between the foreground and backgroung if you have a background that is full of noise or if the lighting is not even or it is not light enough. The best footage you can have is a still background and colors that contrast. The Roto Brush works amazing for separating images from the background and also works great when doing easy composites and color grading, but it is not by any means a miracle worker.