Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium

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Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium

5/30/2007

By David Nagel

Some Other New Features
Aside from the new creative features, InDesign CS3 provides smaller enhancements in the area of workflow and productivity. These include:

Interface tweaks to provide consistency with the rest of the Creative Suite;
Expanded Quick Apply;
Advanced Find/Change;
New table and cell styles functionality;
XHTML export to Adobe Dreamweaver CS3;
Automated bullets and numbering;
Text variables;
Dynamic generation of page layouts with formatted text and graphics based on applying rules to imported XML.

Illustrator CS3

Performance, Compatibility
Like InDesign CS3, Illustrator CS3 marks the first release of of this graphic design tool to offer native support for both Intel-based Macs and Windows Vista. And this enhanced compatibility, combined with some obviously thoughtful coding, brings some pretty significant performance benefits to Illustrator CS3, particularly, again, on the Mac.

Where before, on Intel-based Macs, Illustrator was a cumbersome, emulated, resource-hogging behemoth, the CS3 release sees it transformed into a true speed demon in most areas. As with Photoshop CS3 Extended, I was able to run a battery of benchmark tests on Illustrator CS3 running on Intel Mac hardware to find out precisely much faster it really is.

For the first test, I ran a series of transformations on an object that had a gradient applied to it. This included duplicating, rotating, and moving the object so that, in the end, I wound up with 3,721 gradient-filled objects spiraling out from the center of my canvas. Almost needless to say, this is an extremely taxing sequence of operations. But Illustrator CS3 has been fine-tuned in the area of transformations so that, now, such a sequence of commands took seven seconds to complete, compared with more than two minutes under Rosetta on the same Intel-based Mac and about a minute and a half on a comparably equipped dual 2 GHz G5 Mac in Illustrator CS2. On the same macBook, running Windows XP Pro/SP2 natively, Illustrator CS2 came in at 37 seconds. So it's a dramatic improvement any way you look at it.

Test 2, however, showed that Adobe has not paid as much attention to fine-tuning 3D performance in Illustrator. This test involved 3D objects with complex shading. The objects were duplicated, aligned, rotated, and duplicated multiple times. Illustrator CS3 came in behind Illustrator CS2 compared with all configurations except running in emulation mode under Rosetta.

For the final test, I created and duplicated more simple objects, then aligned and transformed them several times, rasterized them, and finally applied some Photoshop filters to them. This sequence took two seconds in Illustrator CS3 running natively under Mac OS X on an Intel-based MacBook, tied with Illustrator CS2 running under Windows on the same machine, but considerably faster than Illustrator CS2 running under Rosetta on this MacBook and running natively on a dual 2 GHz G5 workstation.