Adobe's Creative Suite CS2 Hits the Shelves Adobe Bridge Among Many Signficant New Features and Product Additions Scott Koegler
Adobe's Creative Suite CS2 adds significant new features to each of its individual applications and also integrates several new functions that are likely to make life easier for professionals using Adobe's products.
The Creative Suite CS2 software is available in a Premium Edition and a Standard Edition, both of which include Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, and Illustrator CS2. The Professional Edition adds Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional and GoLive CS2. In addition to these upgraded applications, both packages include Version Cue CS2 to coordinate and synchronize projects being worked on by multiple people; Adobe Bridge, an enhanced file browser; and Adobe Stock Photos service, a service that provides searchable access to royalty free images.
Each of the upgraded packages includes a wide variety of feature enhancements and additions. But because these are already such feature-rich programs, it's likely that all but the most obvious changes will be lost on uninitiated Adobe users. That's not to say the enhancements aren't welcome or useful additions, but it's the Bridge and Stock Photos that are likely to be seen as significant advances by both experienced enthusiasts and new users.
Adobe Bridge CS2
Adobe Bridge CS2 is an image browser on steroids. We launched the Bridge and were greeted by a thumbnail page of the images in the My Pictures folder of My Computer. That isn't so unusual, but as we looked more closely we noticed that not only were my JPG and TIF files shown, but all our native Adobe files were visible as well — a handy trick that isn't available from within most file or image browsers. Bridge will display thumbnails for any of Adobe's files that include embedded thumbnails. In short, that means you can more easily identify your PDF, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign files without having to first open them.
Bridge also does what its name implies — that is, it acts as a bridge between the various Adobe applications. We opened InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator and were able to browse the Bridge for images and files and then drag our selections to the InDesign document. Bridge maintains your files' metadata and automatically populates a variety of statistical fields to identify usage and placement information. Placement information is useful when using content from one object in another object, meaning, for example, that an image can be automatically placed in the same position in the destination document that it occupied in the original. The same is true for text.
Bridge allows you to add keywords and similarly categorize your files, making it fast and simple to search on both existing metadata (date, camera used, shutter speed, etc.) as well as your own references (pool party, dogs, wedding).
Adobe Stock Photos CS is accessed through Bridge and adds the ability to search and select from more than 230,000 images. We searched for a "blue house" and were presented with 375 images that were predominately blue in color. Being able to search on color is a nice feature, but we had to rely on our own eyes to find ones with houses. Other searches were more successful. A search for 'scowl' found nearly 400 images of unhappy people. You can also browse by category or photographer, and download unwatermarked comps for free. This makes it simple to use the photo for placement and preview before committing to purchase the images.
