Product: Abode Creative Suite Premium Edition Price: $10,830 Pros: Single installation for all essential editing, design and publishing programs Cons: Steep learning curve for GoLive CS, even for veteran Adobe users
If Adobe Systems were in a professional sports league, its Adobe Creative Suite Premium Edition could easily match the all-star rosters of football powerhouses such as Real Madrid or Barcelona.
The package combines new full-version upgrades of the company's market-leading professional creative software - Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Illustrator CS, Adobe InDesign CS and Adobe GoLive CS. It also incorporates Acrobat 6.0 Professional, Version Cue file version manager and Adobe PageMaker Plug-in Pack.
A standard edition, excluding GoLive CS and Acrobat 6.0 Professional, was released last October.
The premium edition is a complete design platform-in-a-box that gives professionals, business users and educators everything they need to publish content for print and the Web.
About a year since it was first released, it has become as important an all-in-one product as Microsoft's Office productivity suite.
All the programs in suite share core technologies, including Adobe's Colour Engine and OpenType support, which enable users to deliver consistent results across applications.