If you’ve done any kind of graphic editing on the computer before, you’ve no doubt heard about Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is the most popular and powerful image editing program out there, and millions of people use it every year to retouch photos, design graphics, and even create art.
If you’re a professional graphic artist, however, Photoshop is probably not going to be the only tool in your toolbox. That’s where CS4 Design Premium comes in. CS4 Design Premium is a suite of programs from Adobe that provides all the software tools that a graphic artist could ever hope for.
Adobe CS4 Premium is made up of 7 key programs, as well as an assortment of helper programs, that combine to create a set of programs that professionals rely on. The first of these, that we already talked a little about is Adobe Photoshop, a raster based image editing program that is second to none.
Photoshop utilizes an innovative layered graphic layout system, that allows artists and designers to build up their images slice by slice. In addition to the standard tools that can be found in most computer graphics programs, Photoshop comes with hundreds of customizable brushes, effects, and filters, and can be extended further by installing third-party plug-ins. Photoshop really is the Jack-of-all-trades of graphics programs.
Beyond Photoshop, Adobe CS4 Design Premium also includes Adobe Illustrator, which is a raster based graphic design program. Illustrator is used to create vector images, which unlike the raster/pixel based images of Photoshop, are defined mathematically, so that you can zoom in or out as much as you like without losing image quality, which makes Illustrator the program of choice for logo designers and other graphic designers that need images to scale.
Another great program in the CS4 Design Premium suite is Adobe Fireworks, which is another great vector editing program, which also ties in nicely with Adobe Dreamweaver, a web design and publishing program. By combining Dreamweaver and Fireworks, a graphic designer can easily create an attractive looking website without knowing any HTML code– the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor takes care of all the code for you, leaving you to focus on the graphic design.
Another program that is increasingly becoming a staple in the media-rich web is Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. Flash, for those who might not be familiar with it, is a video and multimedia plug-in that enhances the web experience by creating graphic and video rich environments that are closer to desktop applications than static web pages. Flash can be used for anything from video playback and music to sophisticated graphical navigation and online video games, and Flash CS4 Professional is the program that allows you to create these media.
Of course, even in this day and age, print is just as important as the web, and the CS4 Design Premium suite has programs for those as well. The first is Adobe InDesign, which is one of the top programs in the industry for page layout and desktop publishing. InDesign is used by professionals the world over to produce slick magazine layouts, brochures, and other print media.
The program that ties in with Adobe InDesign is Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. Acrobat is a program that allows you to create PDF documents, which are the digital format of choice for rich media. With Adobe Acrobat, you can take the beautiful designs you’ve created in InDesign, and save them into an attractive digital format. Acrobat also ties in with all the other programs of the Adobe CS4 Design Premium suite, so that you can export any of the works you’ve created from any of the programs into nicely formatted PDFs.
That is just a brief overview of the programs that comprise the Adobe CS4 Design Premium software package, but hopefully you get an idea of the power and flexibility that these applications provide. Of course, that power comes with a price, but if you search online at sites like Become.com you can shave a few hundred dollars off your purchase. CS4 Design Premium is the toolset of choice for graphic professionals everywhere, and if you want to do great quality work, you’ll want to make sure you have great tools to help you along.
-Takeshi, shopping blogger and expert photoshopper
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[...] to any size without losing image quality, and Acrobat ties in nicely with the other programs of the CS4 Design Premium Suite to create a tightly integrated graphical design workflow for graphics [...]