CS5...whose made the jump...and why?

[schenkadere]

Ok, We are currently running CS4. Being that this release came out when the economy was beginning to bottom out, it seems not as many folks made the jump. Most of our customers(high end packaging designers)are still using CS3.

I think that from a production standpoint, CS4 made a few improvements, the biggest being the separations preview in Illustrator IMO.

I've read about the changes in CS5 and don't really see the urgency. Since we do packaging, Illustrator and Photoshop are our main Adobe applications. Very rarely do we need InDesign...maybe once or twice a year.

Anyway, in order for us to upgrade to CS5, I would need to upgrade 4 of our 6 Mac workstations to Intel based units. Being part of a large corporation, this becomes a big project and it's possible that the expense may have to be absorbed on a plant level. I can't really justify it at the moment and am simply wondering if I'm missing something fantastic and tremendously useful?

Thanks for any input.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

I'd say if you do strokes in Illustrator there are a few good enhancments, like the deciding on where the dash starts and how arrowheads behave. I have only uppgrade on my laptop. Desktop is a G5, and will stay with CS4.

 

[schenkadere]

I'd say if you do strokes in Illustrator there are a few good enhancments, like the deciding on where the dash starts and how arrowheads behave. I have only uppgrade on my laptop. Desktop is a G5, and will stay with CS4.

Um...wow...thrilling...I certainly hope there's more to it than THAT!

This can potentially be a big problem for me. The expense of 4 new Macs plus moving 2 more to the current OS...which means all our "minor" applications will have to be upgraded as well...that will get costly fast....all so someone can better define dashes and arrowheads?

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Well, ok there are more things in Illustrator, but they are creative things – don't know if they intrest you.

There is paste into, (means illustrator behaves as frames
There is even more art board management, "paste on each"
There is what is called beautiful strokes, a way to vary stroke weight
You can decide what part of a brush or a symbol stretches
There is a new kind of brush.
new ways to build objects (similar to pathfinder but click and drag).
Mesh grids can support opacity.

Illustrator has alot of web features updated.
snapping to pixel grid
symbol reference points
smooth integration with flash catalyst

 

[schenkadere]

Well, ok there are more things in Illustrator, but they are creative things – don't know if they intrest you.

There is paste into, (means illustrator behaves as frames
There is even more art board management, "paste on each"
There is what is called beautiful strokes, a way to vary stroke weight
You can decide what part of a brush or a symbol stretches
There is a new kind of brush.
new ways to build objects (similar to pathfinder but click and drag).
Mesh grids can support opacity.

Illustrator has alot of web features updated.
snapping to pixel grid
symbol reference points
smooth integration with flash catalyst

Maybe it's time they market more usage specific packages. The programs get so bloated with tools that people in one field or another never use. Then they can also have more focused support.

 

[Shawn]

I'd check out the videos at tv.adobe.com and see if any of the new features appeal to you.
AdobeTV | Illustrator CS5 Feature Tour
AdobeTV | Photoshop CS5 Feature Tour

Personally we've found that the variable page sizes and "grid" features in InDesign are great, but since you don't use it much that won't help you.

In Illustrator the shape builder tool refinements are useful and in Photoshop the content aware fill looks cool and seems to actually work with a minimal amount of clean up.

Shawn

 

[wonderings]

We have upgraded to CS5 from CS4. The speed improvement I am finding to be a nice thing. Running on 2 computers, one iMac 2.6 Dual Core, the other my MacBook Pro i5 2.4

We have a few clients who jump on these right away, so I like to not have to ask them to down save and just be able to work with what they send. Photoshop is a nice improvement with the content aware... for simpler things, but still much better then CS4. Everything now works in CS5 that I had with CS4. I had issues with my scanner and photoshop (resolved) and an imposition plugin I used in indesign cs4 was not compatible with CS5 (resolved). Its not a huge upgrade in my opinion, just some nice little things.

 

[almaink]

LOL CS5. I've yet to see a CS4 file even tho I have it.

 

[stargate]

I switched to CS5. Why? Content Aware fills, Speed and I can use my 32GB of RAM for Photoshop on my Snow Leopard MacPro.

Derek

 

[frailer]

Basically having to, as a major client has already jumped. In a few weeks, after we move to Intel Macs, as we are on PPCs still. Thought we might delay it a bit by getting them to save down as IDML files (they're no longer INX files), but got VERY nasty text reflows. Having to ask them for PDFs currently, but we really need their native files, as they tend to proof-read their jobs on our Black Magic proofs. Files supplied 3 times is not unusual. Headbangers, really.

 

[TRYYZ]

OSX 10.5.8 and CS5

OSX 10.5.8 and CS5

Has anyone had any issues using CS5 on an Intel mac running OSX 10.5.8

Cheers,

 

[David Kunkel]

Have it both ways

Have it both ways

Basically having to, as a major client has already jumped. In a few weeks, after we move to Intel Macs, as we are on PPCs still. Thought we might delay it a bit by getting them to save down as IDML files (they're no longer INX files), but got VERY nasty text reflows. Having to ask them for PDFs currently, but we really need their native files, as they tend to proof-read their jobs on our Black Magic proofs. Files supplied 3 times is not unusual. Headbangers, really.

Why not have them supply "Illustrator Native" format PDFs? Those should be as easy to handle as any PDF in the workflow and yet can be opened in Illustrator without any loss of editability from the original native format file. Best of both worlds, I use it all the time and my printers love them (now a designer, previously a prepress guy)

--David

 

[Hopkins Printing]

We upgraded to support customers we knew would upgrade. We still support CS3 and CS4.

Cheers,
Jon Morgan
Hopkins Printing

 

[zbolan]

I wrote a review of CS5 for Print Action magazine that covers a lot of the new features, you can download a PDF here if you want to read it... Magazine Articles |

 

[Rick@IPCO]

We upgraded, because our customers will.

 

[DavidMa]

upgraded because I got CS5 for free when I bought a copy of CS4 right after the CS5 release announcement.

WOOT!

 

[Bec]

We upgrade because our customers did. So far so good.

 

[Norcrans]

We have CS5 in-house but have only loaded it to one machine so we can work customer supplied artwork that is provided in CS5. For the most part we export the artwork back so we can open in in CS4 but have recently been seeing some problems doing that.

One disturbing discovery we have made is if you apply effects to your design in InDesign CS5 (like shadowing, etc.) when you save the file backwards in CS4 and open it the opacity levels change. We had one instance where a customer applied shadowing to some picture files in InDesign CS5 and when we saved the file backwards to CS4 and opened the files the Opacity on the pictures went from 100% down to 20%. We contacted the customer and asked them to try the same thing to see what would happen and they received the same results. We are now having them supply us with .pdf files so we can avoid the issue.

 

[Magpie]

We also upgraded to Intel Macs and CS5 a couple of weeks ago as we more often had to ask for downsaved files from our customers.

As far as SnowLeopard goes it is really annoying how Apple wants to expropriate the Helvetica Neue typeface (one of our customers uses it almost exclusively). It also took me some time to get QuarkXPress running on the new machines and also had to upgrade our Font Management software but these things are pretty much natural when you jump a generation with Macs (although from PowerPC to Intel is sort of half generation jump only).

As far as Illustrator goes, personally I still prefer to use CS3 as from my point of view CS4 and CS5 are less effective. Some features in CS5 like if you select multiple objects of different colour and want to change one base-colour, it will change the other three as well, cmd+D wont consider the typed in transformations any more, and a few other things actually make it pretty much useless for me.
There are a few annoying changes in Indesign CS5, like from now on if you want to copy objects with alt+drag, you will have to press shift as well to keep them on their original layer but there are many really good improvements so all in all I would say it is better.
Photoshop is definitely better after you reset their stupid zoom tool to behave the original way.

Eventually you will have to upgrade and it definitely worth it (64 bit architecture, Photoshop, Indesign) but I'd suggest you to keep a copy of CS3 on your computers because of the new and 'improved' Illustrator.

 

[frailer]

We too will be getting 2 beefed-up Minis to run CS5. Am planning, against some internal resistance, to get 2 of these:

IOGear 2-Port USB DVI-D Cable KVM with Audio... (GCS932UB) at OWC

That way, clean CS5 install, running on the Minis. Switch to the G5 PPCs as required, for CS4/CS3 stuff. Builds in some redundancy, and we can transition over a longer time. Reduces Migration headaches. Just switch between Macs via the device, as required.