Adobe's Creative Suite 2

By David Em

July 4, 2005

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Just as Microsoft dominates the world of word processing and spreadsheets with Office Suite, Adobe dominates image processing and publishing with its Creative Suite (CS). Now in its second revision, the $1,100 CS2 packs a powerful whallop with the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, and Acrobat.

Armed with these five programs, you can edit photographs, create illustrations, produce books, and design web sites on a professional level. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat skills are literally essential in the graphic arts trade. You're unlikely to get hired at any level of the industry without them.

Photoshop

Photoshop is Adobe's flagship program. It's the image-processing standard for designers, artists, and photographers around the globe. Photoshop's the only software I can think of offhand besides Google that's become an English verb (as in: "Do you think that picture's been Photoshopped?"). All the programs in CS 2 have received upgrades, but Photoshop got the lion's share of new features this time around.

The most important new capability is one that hasn't received much attention yet. Photoshop can now access up to 3.5 GB of RAM under the new 64-bit version of Windows XP or a G5 running OS X. This is a huge boon for anybody who works with photographs or multilayered image files. Previously Photoshop only used a single gigabyte of memory, forcing the host machine to cache to disk, which slowed down operations considerably.

This version of Photoshop is still a 32-bit program, but it has 64-bit extensions that make this possible. A couple nights ago we finally got 64-bit Windows XP running on Atlas, the dual AMD Opteron workstation we recently built. Atlas has 8 GB of memory on board, and we are keen on finding ways to exploit it.

I installed Photoshop and started loading it up with pictures while keeping track of RAM usage via XP's Task Manager.

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