Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium Edition—with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive and Acrobat 7.0 Professional—is an outstanding collection of software at a terrific price. (PC Magazine)When Adobe launched the Creative Suite a year and a half ago, it offered an outstanding collection of software at a terrific price. With Version 2, Adobe has made sweeping improvements to the functionality and integration of all the included programs, and even topped the whole package off with a more attractive price.
For $1,199 ($30 less than Version 1), the Creative Suite 2 Premium Edition includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, and Acrobat 7.0 Professional. The Standard Edition drops GoLive and Acrobat, and retails for $899. With either edition, you also get Version Cue CS2 (Adobe's improved file-management solution) and the indispensable new Adobe Bridge.
For more on the introduction of Adobe Creative Suite 2, click here.
Although it's a stand-alone application, Bridge is directly descended from Photoshop CS's built-in File Browser. Bridge is included not only with the Suite but with the individual purchase of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or GoLive. Accessible from within any of these applications at the click of a button, Bridge is in essence a visual file browser that displays scalable thumbnail previews of the files on your hard drive. But Adobe has packed Bridge with time-saving features, such as drag-and-drop import, editable and searchable metadata, file rating, slide shows, batch processing, Camera Raw conversion, and color-management synchronization.
There's also a direct link to the new Adobe Stock Photos online service (actually a clearinghouse for half a dozen of the leading stock photo agencies), which lets you search, view, and buy images from within the app you're using. Bridge demands a lot of RAM and can be sluggish when creating previews for large numbers of files, but productivity-minded artists and designers will welcome this enhancement to the suite.
Click here to read PC Magazine's review of Adobe Photoshop CS2.
Click here to read PC Magazine's review of Adobe Illustrator CS2.
Click here to read PC Magazine's review of Adobe InDesign CS2.
Click here to read PC Magazine's review of Adobe GoLive CS2.
Graphics Tools 
