Adobe Creative Suite 3, Part 2

Contribute CS3

Adobe Contribute CS3 is a program I really wanted to like. Really.

In theory, Contribute provides a simple front-end to enable users to edit existing content and add new content to a site that is already up and running. Unlike Dreamweaver, Contribute (which also came with the Macromedia acquisition) cannot create a site from scratch, but once the site is set up, Contribute separates underlying page structure from page content, enabling users to modify the latter without webmasters worrying that they'll inadvertently mangle the former along the way. It's intended to be exactly analogous to a blog front end for sites that aren't blogs: give the author access to what they need to write or edit content, but keep all the complex underpinnings hidden. And actually, Contribute is intended to handle blogs as well, offering a nice PC-based front end for updating your blog as an alternative to the usual web-based interface.

In practice, however, I found the software not only unusable, but in some cases downright dangerous (the latter, when it made changes to site files on a blog without being asked to do so).

For starters, Contribute relies on the presence of Dreamweaver template tags in site files to inform it about which areas of a page should be open to editing, and which areas must be kept off limits in order to preserve the page template. That's the first gotcha: virtually no blog templates come with Dreamweaver template tags (in WordPress, for example, templates come in pieces, none of which is actually a valid XHTML page, so these things are not typically created with a visual page editing environment like Dreamweaver), and nor do any other non-blog sites except for those which have been created by Dreamweaver in the first place. Fair enough, this much is not at all insurmountable, because the site administrator can always add the relevant tags to the blog files, or to a non-Dreamweaver site, provided they're happy to have these extra gubbins cluttering up the page code.

It gets worse, however... Suppose you are working with a Dreamweaver-based site. In most cases, menus which tell readers where to find your content will be part of either a page template, or a library item; they will almost never simply be a part of the normally editable content. So Contribute users may be able to edit existing content, or add new pages, but there does not appear to be any way for them actually to link to any new pages, except by inserting links into regular page text (not into menus). And if the whole point of Contribute is to allow administrators to preserve the architectural integrity of the site, while turning over the job of content maintenance to other people, breaking synchronization between navigational menus and available content seems to me to undermine the software's goal pretty severely.

Quite apart from these types of issues, however, my experience of Contribute simply as an application was dire: in my experience, the package was extremely sluggish and slow, and it crashed well over half of the times I attempted to use it. By comparison, Dreamweaver itself is extremely snappy, and solid as a rock.

For non-blog sites, Contribute has potential, and if the software's stability issues could be remedied, and its conceptual conundrum with site menu structures overcome, I could see it becoming a useful tool at some point in the future. For blog-based sites, however, I simply cannot imagine any good reason to tempt fate with Contribute in preference to comparatively inexpensive and much more competent blog front ends like MarsEdit or Ecto.

Photoshop CS3

The Mac-only Photoshop 1.0 was released by Adobe in 1990, with a Windows port following in 1992. The program has now been around so long that many of its adult users have never known anything else. Heck, some of its users hadn't even been born yet when it first came out. With that long history behind it, Photoshop has become without a doubt the industry standard image editing program. It isn't perfect, by any means -- and other packages like Apple's Aperture are now starting to encroach on specific areas of what was formerly purely Photoshop territory -- but for large numbers of people, professional image editing begins and ends with Photoshop.

Photoshop, which as of CS3 now comes in two version (Extended and Standard), adds several significant features and refinements, without significantly altering the underlying powerhouse that has dominated this market segment for years.

For starters, Photoshop probably shows off the new CS3 interface better than any other component in the suite. Case in point: panels (tool palettes) collapse into single icons which are in turn collected into docks; these can be summoned with a keystroke or set to appear automatically as you mouse near the edge of the screen. You can easily drag panels between docks, and mix and match what will be expanded and what will be collapsed into an icon. Although it might not seem like much, in my view this single improvement in how you can organize your workspace makes this large and complex program significantly more accessible to Photoshop lightweights like me.

(What may stump many users, by contrast, is the removal of ImageReady -- which used to be a great companion application for slicing images, creating rollovers, and related tasks centred on using images in web sites. As it turns out, most capabilities of ImageReady, but not all, have either been rolled into Photoshop or are now handled by Fireworks CS3, another new addition that came with the Macromedia acquisition. Adobe provides a knowledgebase document that explains where to find the functionality that used to live in ImageReady, but some users are still very unhappy with the changes.)

Two more changes that strike me as particularly notable are much more than skin deep. First, brightness and contrast adjustments have received a major overhaul and now preserve black and white points properly (preserving the distribution of tones in the image). Enhancing contrast is now similar to creating a sigmoid curve in the Curves dialogue, without moving the black and white points. And for finer control, the Curves dialogue box itself is much improved, now showing the histogram in the background and enabling you to check tonal clipping as you go. Second, Smart Filters can now be applied to Smart Objects non-destructively. You can apply a filter to a layer and then adjust that filter later on -- or even re-order it in the set of filters you've applied, all without reverting to the original image.

Photoshop also now provides a Quick Selection tool which is extremely clever at identifying the edges of an object and selecting it; combined with a new Refine Edge dialogue box (like Feather Selection on steroids), it's quicker and easier to select and manipulate objects within an image than ever before. (Although I suspect that more advanced users will probably continue to do this sort of task in other ways.)

And 'finally' (which I put in single quotes because this review has only begun to scratch the surface of what's new and notable in Photoshop), Photomerge -- based on new Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers functions -- now makes it possible to create seamless stitches between images even with minor exposure and colour differences. This can be used to stitch photos both horizontally (for panoramas) and vertically.

There really is much much more to be explored in the new Photoshop CS3. The bottom line is that it's a clear improvement over the previous version, so if you're already a Photoshop user, this upgrade has much to recomment it. (And if you're an Intel Mac user, the fact that it's now a Universal Binary may be reason enough, all on its own.) If you're not already a Photoshop user, then my only caveat is just the same as it always has been when it comes to Photoshop: you can do truly amazing things with this software, but it will demand a significant chunk of your time in return. I.e., to take advantage of its capabilities, you really need to spend some time learning it. This isn't Picasa, and it isn't iPhoto: it is extremely unlikely that you'll simply sit down with it, play with it for a few minutes, and get results you're happy with. But if you are willing and able to invest the time, and if you have the need for its sophisticated capabilities, it is head and shoulders above anything else available; there really is no other choice.

Continue to Part 3...