Creative suite 6 mac review
With the release of the latest version, part of their major CS6 update, Adobe is working very hard to make sure their clientele stays put. Adobe After Effects CS6 review. Adobe After Effects has a huge user base in the motion graphics and animation sectors, so any update to the power of this venerable compositing workhorse will be eagerly scrutinised by those working in broadcast and cross-media applications. Luckily for those artists and Adobe , After Effects CS6 will do nothing to tarnish its status and appeal. Adobe Illustrator CS6 review. Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard tool for vector drawing and illustration, used by a wide variety of creative professionals including editorial illustrators, identity designers, textile and pattern designers, UI designers, motion artists and many others.
It's always been an incredibly versatile tool, thanks to a broad feature set, and of course the fact that vector graphics are infinitely scaleable and in most cases relatively lightweight. Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 review.
Creative Suite 6 or Creative Cloud: Which one is best for you?
The web doesn't stay still, and new browsers and new technologies mean changes to your sites. With the explosion in mobile browsing, those changes are now bigger than ever before. Dreamweaver CS6 has added new tools for working with sites that scale from desktop, to tablet, to phone, using some of the latest CSS features.
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Adobe Flash Pro CS6 review. Over the last 24 months web development has seen a change in focus. However, Flash has always had the luxury of being ahead of the curve when it comes to new features and new areas to expand and extend into. Adobe InDesign CS6 review. CS6 gives you lots of new ways to trim edit points. You can also use the numeric keypad to assign a set number of frames to trim or even dynamically trim by selecting the Roll Edit then double clicking on the edit point. This displays both clips in your program monitor allowing you to drag the edit point in the timeline or adjust directly in the program monitor window.
These are tools designed to speed up the process, but we found it took some time to get used to how they worked. Once we spent some time with them, we found ourselves using them more often.
Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) review | TechRadar
If you shoot with a DSLR, you know all about the rolling shutter problem. While there are several third-party solutions for this problem, we are glad to see Adobe take it seriously enough to integrate their own. We tested it with a tracking shot of a passing car that had background buildings looking like they were made by a 12th century Italian architect.
We applied the effect, set the scan direction to top to bottom, selected Pixel Motion rather than Warp under the advanced dialogue and presto — our leaning Towers of Pisa were no longer a tourist attraction! There are many smaller, but equally welcomed improvements such as: By pressing the Ctrl and Accent keys we were viewing a clutter-free full screen image on our inch monitor. Multicam is no longer limited to just four streams and is much easier to use. The three-way color corrector is more intuitive but the new SpeedGrade will more than challenge you if you need finer controls more on this in our next article.
When creating new sequences or adding new dissimilar footage, if the clip you import into a sequence has different settings you are prompted to alter either the clip or sequence settings. And one of the most pleasant changes — playback now continues rather than stopping when you click outside the Premiere program window like to type notes in a word processor when doing a review.
Other improvements include thumbnails that automatically play with mouse-over, hover-scrub improved methods to set markers, notes, and input metadata. Audio tracks now are type-independent…so no more mono-only or stereo-only tracks. Just drag and drop, both can exist on the same track. With the exception of direct-to-disc recording, it goes a long way beyond where the now defunct OnLocation left off.
Prelude gives you the ability to import full or partial clips, add metadata, trim, add searchable markers and comments, create rough-cuts and send to Premiere Pro as a timeline or even export as a project with all media to any other location including an FTP server. We clicked on the Ingest tab, selected our card reader and it quickly populated the window with thumbnails of our shots.
But unlike normal thumbnails, we could scrub each clip and, most importantly, could place in and out points to ingest just the part we wanted. This is potentially a huge hard disk space saver. To save partial clips you do need to transcode the file, but there are plenty of high quality options. Transcoding automatically opens Adobe Media Encoder and begins the process.
Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium Advanced Editing Software Review
During the ingest process you can also send the files, with the same or different transcoding settings, to multiple locations. We found this great for doing our backups at the same time. We stacked our clips with all of these, easily adding, naming, moving, trimming and deleting each type. Here you can make changes to marker types and nearly all parameters. Finally, we clicked on the last tab and created a quick rough cut in Prelude, saved it and with one click, sent the timeline and all associated clips almost instantly into Premiere Pro. If you do much work syncing audio to video and labor over getting your audio to match a given length, the new Automatic Speech Alignment and real-time clip stretching tools are practically worth the upgrade alone.
So we recorded the script later in the studio and were excited to us the new Automatic Speech Alignment tool in a real-world application. One clip was nine-seconds long and the other was nearly ten with lots of differences in inter-clip timing — a real Godzilla scenario. Once we selected both clips we opened the Automatic Speech Alignment dialogue, we had options to choose the reference clip, the reference channel and the unaligned clip and channel. You can also select from alignment methods that include a balance between aligning and stretching, the tightest alignment or the smoothest stretching.
We selected the balanced approach and got a perfect match on our first attempt.
Creative Cloud coming soon
No odd stretching of vowels or strange cadences. This may not work in every scenario but it saved our skins on this job. The real-time clip stretching does just what it claims — within reason.
We did a rough edit to get it down to about 35 seconds, five seconds more than our required finished length of 30 seconds. We then selected all of the clips and enabled Global Clip Stretching. We easily were able to shrink the length down to seconds without any audible artifacting. In fact we kept pushing it to see where the audio quality started to suffer.
We were able to reduce the length to 77 percent of the original before we heard any anomalies. You can push this even further if you choose to move out of the real-time stretching and decide to render. No matter how much time you spend editing video and audio, there always seems to be a need to dive into Photoshop to tweak a still or graphic here and there.
Adobe gave the user interface UI a facelift to make it look more like the rest of the suite applications with a neutral grey color and simplified default workspace. There are a few interesting new tools such as the new content-aware move and extend that allow you to enclose an object with a very rough selection and simply drag the whole object, or parts of it, and Photoshop will fill in the hole and do its best to integrate the object to its new location. The results of our tests were highly variable since many backgrounds that we needed to move objects over were too complex or varied for Photoshop to do a good job.
On simple backgrounds this could save you time.
Breaking the upgrade cycle
We were able to convincingly de-fish some stills we took with a 12mm wide angle lens using the intuitive Adaptive Wide Angle filter. There are also several new painting tools and brushes but the majority of changes in Photoshop come in the form of minor to moderate improvements in current tools and capabilities. There are better image selections with Truer Edge technology, 3D editing is getting more attention, and we confirmed that a few key processor-intensive tools like Liquify, Transform, Crop and Lighting Effects now bit are much more responsive, partially due to accessing the Mercury Graphics Engine.
There have been refinements to the basic video timeline editor within Photoshop, but it remains largely a tool for those without access to full-featured editors. Illustrator, an often overlooked vector-based tool for video production, got a complete redesign in CS6. It is now native bit and takes advantage of the Mercury engine for GPU accelerated performance. It has a new UI and several new tools and capabilities such as applying a gradient to a stroke and a new tracing engine for creating paths from raster images. With a few new vector drawing enhancements in Photoshop, Illustrator may remain a stepchild for many video editors, but remember that vector graphics open up a whole new world of creativity and quality when working in After Effects.
All of the programs in the CS6 Production Premium now feel like a truly unified suite of tools. Menus and operations are now so similar between each application you almost feel as though you are working in just one program. Most applications are faster, more stable and are peppered with useful new tools that indicate to us that Adobe has been listening to users. CS6 Production Premium is a complete and capable set of tools that will allow any content creator to achieve their vision with speed and sanity intact.