Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium Upgrade Mac

Upgrade only; previous version of CS Premium, Standard or Studio required

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web and mobile publishing. It combines all-new versions of essential tools for professional page layout, image editing, illustration, and Adobe PDF workflows with new tools for producing engaging websites, interactive experiences, and mobile content — all in a unified, intuitive design environment. It's productive, intuitive, and tightly integrated environment with everything you need to design content for tomorrow as well as today. Import layered Photoshop and Illustrator files into Flash, animate them and export in ActionScript 3.0 for developers Preview and test your designs using mobile device profiles in Adobe DeviceCentral CS3 Easily organize, browse, locate, and preview assets with Adobe Bridge CS3 Use InDesign for direct access to Adobe Stock Photos Export InDesign layouts as XHTML to use in web designs in Dreamweaver

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars True Upgrade
I'm writing to offset some of the remarks about this not being a worthwhile upgrade. If you've used CS3 and don't think this is a worthwhile upgrade, you most likely haven't taken the time to learn about the new features, modifications and thoughtful details that add up to the great upgrade that is CS3.

3 Stars An expensive cumbersome pig of a product
I am a professional illustrator/designer/web developer and have been an Adobe fan since I discovered Photoshop (2.5?!) in high school. But lately, Adobe has given me a lot less to love, starting with the intrusive online activation of CS2, PDF overhead, and Adobe's sloppy followup to the Flash player (9 fails to install on a lot of people's OS X).

CS3, in similar fashion, seems slapdash. Photoshop and Illustrator are Adobe's cash cows, and CS3 feels like a rushed product to squeeze money out of designers. It's a PIG! It took 45 minutes to install Design Premium on my Quad Core workstation at the office. It loads slower than CS2 and takes up more resources. After opening Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash to see what Adobe changed, I promptly went back to using CS2 and never used CS3 again. I didn't see any compelling reason to switch, or relearn the interface, as Adobe seems to require you to do every new version.

I had low expectations for CS3, as I'm usually skeptical of new product releases. This perception of cash milking wasn't helped by the fact that Adobe confusingly split the line into 6 packages. Now you have to decide which version fits you. You may end up paying for something you don't need, or want one piece of software that's in another package. You can't save some money by removing something you don't want, or adding something that you do.

One bright light I was holding onto was the possibility of Flash being better integrated with the Adobe interface and workflow. One of the most annoying things about Flash was its unfailing ability to paste shapes and gradients from Illustrator all messed up. Gradients end up as bitmaps, curves get bent, and complex shapes just seem to make Flash choke. Importing from Flash into Illustrator via cut & paste would result in similar disasters.

I was also hoping for an Illustrator-styled gradient tool (drag a line from the start point to the end point to paint the object), instead of Flash's bizarre and cumbersome one where you have to rotate a circle for radial grads, or sandwich lines for linear grads. I didn't test out CS3's cut & paste compatibility, but sadly, the interface was not integrated. It's the same old Macromedia styled tools.

As for Dreamweaver being added here, that's much like every new version of Microsoft Office that comes out each year. Do you really care? It's an HTML editor, for Pete's sake. How much improvement can you make on what is essentially a text editor? For people who handcode, you can stick w/ your old DW… or GASP! Notepad.

For me, I'll continue to use CS and CS2. Personally, I see absolutely no reason for this upgrade, except to reward Adobe for a lackluster and, what I feel, is an unfinished product. It feels very much like an early-adopter product. CS just keeps getting bigger and bigger with each version, but not more stable, dangerously approaching the point of bloatware. If it's all a suite and integrated, why the need for 4 gigs of space to install? Shouldn't many components be shared between all the products, and result in less memory/hard drive use? 700+ megs for Acrobat?! Like others have said, wait for CS4 when they actually might integrate the Macromedia products properly.

5 Stars Excellent Upgrade
I cannot emphasize how much easier it has become to navigate The Creative Suite interface. The UI has evolved into one that is both clean and attractive, while becoming much more customizable. CS3 offers much better integration between applications and has some really cool new additions.

1 Star Overpromised, Underdelivered
I was hoping Adobe would fix a lot of the bugs in Dreamweaver (especially, the horrible slowness on the Mac platform) but it seems they ignored Dreamweaver altogether and focused on redoing their own products.

Avoid if you can.

5 Stars An amazing upgrade
As a huge fan of Adobe (except for Illustrator… been a Freehand user for years but am adapting to Illustrator) I was expecting a great upgrade from CS2 and I got it. All of the apps are zippy and they are jam-packed with new features. In particular, the Photoshop Extended is great because you can create different work environments. You want to work on web graphics and prototyping a site, switch to the web workspace. The menus change and the features you used to find in ImageReady are now available…all in one app. InDesign CS3 is fast and the way it now handles your tools is so much more convenient. And let's not forget Dreamweaver and Flash. These programs are the defacto standard in web development and they really shine in CS3.

I gave the whole suite 5 stars because it just deserves it. As the owner of a graphic design/marketing firm I need my software to be intuitive and easy to use so I can crank out work quickly and efficiently. CS3 helps me do that.

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