Adobe Creative Suite 2.0 Premium

Photo and design specialists will appreciate the increased integration of files among this suite's various applications, which include Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, InDesign and Acrobat.

If you have used any of the individual products in the past, we think that CS2S is a worthy upgrade at £381.87 (inc. VAT). Designers and those who need to prepare artwork for print publication should buy Creative Suite 2.0, but hobbyists will find CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 12 a better bargain.

New to Photoshop CS2 are Vanishing Point, a visual adjustment tool; Smart Objects, a feature that allows for non-destructive editing of images; and Camera Raw 3.0, a plug-in that provides access to a variety of popular digital-imaging formats. Illustrator CS2 ships with Live Trace, a tool that coverts scanned line art or bit-mapped images into vector-based drawings for editing. InDesign CS2 features better control of rich black and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) values.

Unfortunately, Adobe still hasn't fully integrated ImageReady CS2 within Photoshop CS2, which means some tools remain orphaned within ImageReady. As in Photoshop, you can set customised work spaces within Illustrator CS2; but unlike with Photoshop CS2, no preset work spaces are provided within Illustrator CS2, so you'll have to create them all from scratch. We noticed a slight file incompatibility between InDesign CS files and InDesign CS2 files that prevented us from being able to work on older files.

Finally, the Creative Suite 2.0 package is not for old hardware: you'll need a pretty powerful PC to run everything. That said, for design teams working in print formats, Creative Suite 2.0 Standard provides the tools you'll need.

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