Adobe has come out with its most recent version of software suites with Creative Suite 4 is the software suite that has everything you need to design your own website and take it to the limits of the internet and your imagination.
Adobe Web Premium comes with Photoshop and Dreamweaver also Flash, Illustrator, Fireworks, Acrobat, Soundbooth and Contribute. Creative Suite 4 also comes with some handy all around management programs like Device Central, Version Cue and Bridge.
What these new features really mean is better work flow for everyone on a project or for a single project for one person, as an example you can work with one webpage. use pictures on your website and edit them in Photoshop.
Now you can quickly make simple changes without going from one program to the next to keep your work flowing when using Dreamweaver and it saves the original file with the changes where it is at. This also works from inside other programs like Fireworks using Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash files without having to go back to those programs.
One really nice feature that you can stumbled upon while writing this was Live View, in Dreamweaver CS3 in order to see what the website looks like in a browser you would have to publish or put it to your server. Now Dreamweaver has a Live View function that shows your webpage as it would appear in Internet Explorer for a regular view to check the page.
According to Adobe the files are imported with layers, vector paths and other data so you can work on them inside other programs without the time consuming need to open those programs.
Fireworks and Flash features like tools and premade animations have been added but some of the main ones regarding the rest of the programs of the Web Premium suite are the integration. Fireworks is a smooth graphics program for web pages that seamlessly creates buttons and other web based objects then allows you to export them in HTML for working on in Dreamweaver.
Another new feature that I have run across is Content-Aware Scaling in Photoshop that allows you to resize an image and keep certain aspects of the image. You can highlight figures across a wide picture and scale the picture down in size and keep those figures on the picture without cropping them off.
A really good example of this I saw on the internet is a picture of four surfers walking on the beach in a wide shot which was sized down but kept all four people in the shot. I did check this feature out and it works pretty well but just not well in some circumstances like buildings, I think it will work great for outdoor pictures with people like the example I found.
Photoshop Extended that comes in the Web Premium package also has better workflow and integration with Lightroom 2 if you happen to own that as well as the new Photoshop. Many of the aspects and underlying technology of various programs from Adobe have been redesigned to make them more compatible with each other so that parts of projects will be easier to work with in various programs as a whole project.
While they have really worked hard over the years to give a lot of features that are nice and work well in their software they also worked hard at listening to people to see what they want. With programs like these that have been out for so long adding more and more features would get to be redundant so they have been working instead on workflow and what people really use and need.
Adobe CS4 Web Premium is designed not only as a web designer suite but one that has been integrated so that the designer has total control over his workflow and projects. From all I have been looking at while using these programs and reading on the internet the whole suite has been carefully thought out as a single project tool to create your website.
Adobe CS4 may not be for everyone but many of the programs in the suites do have a lot going if you have need for a better workflow in your design creation. I will be working on more reviews soon and will start with an in depth review of both Photoshop Extended and Illustrator for my first of this series.
More information about Adobe CS4 Web Premium
