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Adobe CS3 is out now, so how is it?

hdsalinas

hdsalinas

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 28, 2006
397
0
San Pedro Sula, Honduras
I read everywhere that CS3 is now shipping. Surprisingly I have not heard anything about how well it performs. I was expecting a big fanfare but it has been very quiet.

So how is it? I am interested in the design version (illustrator, photoshop and indesign) Is there a significant boost in performance compared to CS2?

Just wanted to know.
 
hdsalinas said:
I read everywhere that CS3 is now shipping. Surprisingly I have not heard anything about how well it performs. I was expecting a big fanfare but it has been very quiet.

So how is it? I am interested in the design version (illustrator, photoshop and indesign) Is there a significant boost in performance compared to CS2?

Just wanted to know.
Click to expand...

Have you tried the PS CS3 beta? It's like that, opens in 3 bounces and everything is fast again, no more waiting. :cool:
 
Some reasons why it may be quit on the Adobe-front. It's expensive and from what I hear, harder to crack. I'll give the pirates a few weeks and the bloggers another after that to pump out reviews. :D

All jokes aside, check out the Design and Graphics section on this forum. There are people talking about it there. This section here is not really geared at pro-apps so much.
 
Have you tried the PS CS3 beta? It's like that, opens in 3 bounces and everything is fast again, no more waiting.
Click to expand...

Yes I did, In fact I just uninstalled it from my MBP and installed CS2 again. CS3 Beta gave me a few problems and was not opening a file and would quit when trying to save.

For some reasons CS2 feels faster on Windows (on my MBP) than CS3 did under Mac. I have no benchmark numbers but it just felt that way.

I hope that the final version of CS3 is a lot faster. Running illustrator CS2 on a C2D MBP is a pain. It quits randomly.
 
Vinnie_vw said:
from what I hear, harder to crack. I'll give the pirates a few weeks
Click to expand...
Ummm, yeah. ;) It's extremely easy to obtain a cracked CS3 suit already... probably since day 1 or earlier. That said, I'm "eager" to spill out $599 for my copy of CS3 Design Premium, seeing how awesome Photoshop CS3 beta was.
 
kixsand said:
There's an article on macworld.com today that benchmarks Photoshop performance improvement at 39% over CS2.
Click to expand...
I can testify to that (first hand). I've been working with Photoshop CS3 for a couple of days and it is blazingly fast compared to previous versions. I'm also getting used to Dreamweaver which is pretty nice. Used to be a GoLive guy :p Haven't yet had the opportunity to work with Flash, InDesign or Illustrator CS3, but their time will come. I'm very pleased with my purchase.
 
I just finished installing it. I can't get over how fast it starts up. I'm having a problem with my Nik Color Efex Pro plug-ins. They don't want to be recognized. Other than that, nothing else is troubling me, but I haven't really done much with it though.
 
I'm still waiting for them to ship mine. Glad to hear everyone is happy with theirs.
 
heehee said:
Have you tried the PS CS3 beta? It's like that, opens in 3 bounces and everything is fast again, no more waiting. :cool:
Click to expand...

I have a Mac Pro and it doesn't open in 3 bounces. The splash screen shows up in 3 bounces ... but that's hardly "opening" ... opening (as in, tool palettes showing, able to work with images) still takes at least 5 or 6 seconds.
 
there's good and bad.
PS extended -- great, the new UI is really well done (though dual monitor support would be nice); non-destructive filters are tremendously helpful. overall just feels very solid and well done. 5/5

illustrator -- again solid feeling UI; some nice little additions. still some oddities in the UI between what should be identical widgets between ps and ill. 4/5

flash -- miles better than the crap macromedia has been foisting on us for half a decade. there's still remnants of garbage in there and the ui can be a bit wonky when switching to other apps, but much, much better than the previous 3 versions. AS3 is fantastic, the ps/illus import feature is great. new debugger is nice. having said that, flash had fallen in to such a hole of crapulence that i can still only give it 3.5/5 (i think CS4 will be fantastic)

dreamweaver -- sucks. they've not really included much worthwhile here. the spry ajax frameworks seem to be the biggest addition, but you can get those free and they're not that good anyway. has the same horrible UI as mx, mx2 and 8. i don't really care as i use it maybe once a year. 1/5

fireworks -- from an incredible app at versions 2-4, it's been going downhill ever since. about the only thing worth doing in fireworks is exporting images as its compression engines seem to offer greater range and more discrete control. though i have not done a comparison between the latest two releases. hopefully adobe just rips the compression engine from fireworks and put the app out of its misery. 2/5
 
Mine's not arrived yet - I was told April 26th for Indesign CS3 so we'll see later this week. Cant complain about the price - £160 upgrading from a cobweb-laden Pagemaker 7.0!

Cant wait to get stuck into it though. Anybody using it yet?
 
It seems to have deleted my Myriad and Helvetica medium fonts :confused: And I only noticed because otherwise fine indd opened with the missing font warning after CS3.
 
Great points dashiel,

some comments on some of the apps:

Illustrator:FINALLY an align to art board button in the align panel! Freehand and Flash had this feature for years and I could not understand how Adobe had not added it yet.

Flash: Won't repeat the comments that have been made. It is a very nice upgrade. One thing I would like, is that they fix the timeline, the static frame by frame timeline is a bit tedious. I would love it if the timeline were similar to After Effects or as LiveMotion was. It makes things far more easier.

Dreamweaver: Amazing app that seems to have skipped the CS3 upgrade. Really disappointing that it didn't get the same interface overhaul as the other applications.

Fireworks: Same as Dreamweaver here. I prefer how easy it was in ImageReady to animate. It is more complicated and less user friendly to do it in Fireworks.


Evo
 
CS3 works Great

I have had my copy of a couple of days and the speed over CS2 is unbelievable. I bought my first mac last August a Mac Pro 3.0 ghz, 2 gigs of ram and 1.5 tbs of storage. I shoot mainly youth sports photography and a lot of action photography. With CS3 I can shoot in JPG and then open my files in RAW which is great for correcting photos for print. Before all I had was brightness/darkness and exposure to edit JPG files.
Another new feature in CS3 camera raw is fill. Fill is like having a fill flash to lighten photos that are dark. This program was worth the wait!!!!
 
The General said:
I have a Mac Pro and it doesn't open in 3 bounces. The splash screen shows up in 3 bounces ... but that's hardly "opening" ... opening (as in, tool palettes showing, able to work with images) still takes at least 5 or 6 seconds.
Click to expand...
In my MBP, PS CS3 opens between 3-6 seconds, depending on how many applications I'm running at the time. Sometimes the splash screen comes on in one bounce, no joke. :confused:
 
CS3 is great so far for me. I've been using PSbeta for months now, so I was already used to the UI and speed advantage, but having a polished app is only better. I spend most of my time in PS, and it's really the most improved app I've used. I literally use some of the new smartfilters and black & white adjustment layers daily, I'd definitely miss these features if I went back to CS2. I use dreamweaver once a week or so, and it's definitely better (and a ton faster on intel) than MX, which is the last version I had, but it's not a huge upgrade in features that i use. Indesign and illustrator are both improved, but not incredibly. I don't use them nearly as much as PS, so I haven't noticed much difference outside of speed and look.

I didn't have any trouble installing, just ran the uninstaller included when i installed PSbeta and I was set. No problems whatsoever with file compatibility or stability; I never even got PSbeta to stop responding.

Truthfully I only really needed PS CS3, I could live with CS2 for everything else, but work covered most of the cost and it didn't cost me much more at all to get design premium. And boy oh boy is it faster, I can have lightroom on one monitor, PS on the other, and still preview stuff in acrobat or put it together in indesign with 1.5gb ram. Rosetta would not have liked that situation.
 
I just received and installed PS CS3. So far i've barely used it, but it loads in a flash and looks great. Now i need to start playing with the new functions and filters. :)
 
hdsalinas said:
I hope that the final version of CS3 is a lot faster. Running illustrator CS2 on a C2D MBP is a pain. It quits randomly.
Click to expand...

I agree. CS3 Final better be a lot faster than the beta. I wasn't too impressed with it. I'm installing now will post how it goes.
 
Does anyone have a scanner hooked up and working? I couldn't use this when i had the beta either, i used cs2 when i need to scan. I can't get the Twain utility in CS3 to use my scanner.
 
Vinnie_vw said:
Some reasons why it may be quit on the Adobe-front. It's expensive and from what I hear, harder to crack. I'll give the pirates a few weeks and the bloggers another after that to pump out reviews. :D
Click to expand...
Erm...right...cause the mac version was leaked and cracked before Adobe even started shipping the first CS3 orders and the windows versions of whatever's out to date pred a while ago.

Anyway, on a sidenote of sorts, I love CS3. Photoshop is amazingly more responsive compared with CS2.
 
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