Creative Professionals worldwide have enthusiastically circled the month of April 2005, highlighting what will soon be a life-changing event. Earlier in the month, Adobe Systems announced a new release of Adobe^® Creative Suite, the now ubiquitous design environment that radically changed print and web workflows. Dubbed "Creative Suite 2" or "CS2", this release contains all new versions of Photoshop^®, Illustrator^®, InDesign^®, GoLive^® and Acrobat^® plus lots of cool new features that will make creative work more fun and productive. This new powerful product family packs a punch with several groundbreaking features including:

1. The Adobe Bridge
Perhaps the most exciting new feature is the Adobe Bridge. This visual file browser has evolved beautifully; it has more features, is accessible both independently and within CS2 Adobe applications and manages files from both Adobe and non- Adobe applications. The Bridge allows you to efficiently organise, browse and locate the assets that you regularly use in your design work. By simply dragging and dropping, you can place assets in your layouts as needed, preview them, add valuable metadata, track them with Version Cue and automate workflow with built in scripts (including batch naming files and building a contact sheet).

2. Adobe Stock Photos
This new service saves time, effort and money! Accessible from within Adobe Bridge, this convenient feature provides instant access to high-quality, royalty-free stock images from the world’s leading image libraries. This could well revolutionise photo researching!

Photoshop

3. Vanishing Point
This revolutionary filter lets you auto clone, brush and paste objects and image elements in perfect perspective.

4. Camera Raw Perks
Photoshop CS2 is the first version to enable you to crop your images directly in Camera Raw. Another killer improvement is the multi-image digital file-processing feature. You can simultaneously process multiple images while you are working on other things; it processes in the background and auto adjusts for exposure, shadows, brightness and contrast! If you alter one image, you can easily apply those changes to other images without interrupting your creative genius.

5. Image Warp
If you like the Warp Text feature, you’ll love this! Adobe takes this technique to the next level by letting you stretch, bend, curl and wrap images around any shape. You can customise the tool and easily create mock-ups, dummies and other dimensional effects.

6. Live Trace and Live Paint
Live Trace is a groundbreaking tracing tool that will change how you create vector graphics. With it, you can immediately convert scanned line-art or bit map images to editable and scalable vector paths. The Live Paint tool lets you apply colour, fills and strokes to anywhere in your art or design. The tool intuitively colours and auto-detects and corrects gaps and best of all, uses overlapping colour paths to create new shapes.

7. Custom Workspaces and Control Palettes
No more cluttered desktop! Finally you can display only the palettes that you need for a specific task. You can create, save and share customised workspaces or use templates and quickly access specific tools from a single location. Now only your desk will be messy!

8. Snippets
You can easily export selected text, graphics, or other design elements as snippets for reuse in any layout. When you drop a snippet into a layout, InDesign auto re-creates the original objects with their formatting and positioning intact.

9. Compatible PDFs
CS2 features global export presets that enable consistent and painless Adobe PDF creation throughout the suite. The interface works the same in all applications, so no matter where you save or export a PDF from, it will be easy to load and share.

Adobe 7.0 Professional has new editing tool capabilities. Anyone with the free Adobe Reader 7.0 software can electronically comment and mark up the document, and in tight production environments, this fast-turnaround capability is extremely advantageous.

10. Version Cue
The file-version manager is smarter and user-friendly! Version Cue is accessible through Adobe Bridge and can be used to prepare PDF reviews. It manages and accesses historical or original files as well as parallel "alternates", in both Adobe and non-Adobe file formats, which can greatly streamline any design review process.