Byte Media Lab 2004 Imaging Awards, Part 1

By David Em

March 15, 2004

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Every year the Media Lab gang evaluates dozens of imaging hardware and software tools. A very small number of these products become part of the select "best of breed" products we use as our gold standard to test the next round of products against. This week I'm handing out awards to the best software applications we tested over the last year. In my next column I'll take a look at the best hardware tools.

Design and Imaging

The first award category is Design and Imaging. The clear winner here is Adobe for their $1,299 Creative Studio bundle that includes the new Photoshop CS (photo and image manipulation), Illustrator CS (graphic design), InDesign CS (publication layout), and Acrobat 6.0 Professional (portable document creation). Each of these applications deserves an award in its own right, and each sets the bar against which directly competitive software must be judged.

Photoshop is a great program that just keeps getting better. Virtually all serious image makers, from Web designers to special effects artists, own a copy. The new CS version introduced 16-bit color for most functions, an improved integrated image browser that eliminates the need for third party products, and the ability to natively read the RAW formats of most digital cameras.

Illustrator isn't an application I use day in and day out, but I do rely on it from time to time to design page layouts, Flash animation elements, and complex curves for 3D modeling. The program's range of capabilities is extensive, but what impresses me most about Illustrator is that I can always figure out how to do what I need to do more or less instantly, even though I don't consider myself an expert user.

I don't miss InDesign's predecessor PageMaker, which had altogether too many quirks, one bit. InDesign's major competitor, of course, is QuarkXpress, which dominates the publishing industry by a wide margin. Quark is so deeply entrenched it won't go away anytime soon, but for my money, InDesign's feature list and ease of use make it the publishing program of choice.

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