Adobe Creative Suite CS5 review

Let's face it: if you need Creative Suite 5, you've already bought it. At almost £3,000 for the whole suite, it's an entire office in one. On an individual basis, you're talking £643 for the new Photoshop, over £1,000 for After Effects, almost £800 for Premiere Pro, and the list goes on.

They're essential pro tools, and you don't need us to tell you how good they are. Individually, most of the suite leads its respective market. Their hands appear in almost any media you might watch. There's so much power in each menu that it almost feels wrong to be playing around with the demo if you're not a top-flight creative type.

In many ways, that's why the applications are so interesting. More than any other individual package, it's Creative Suite that rewrites our world on a regular basis – especially the great Photoshop.

Even if you're not in, say, the celebrity touch-up business, you'll see its effect. As such, we're not going to review Creative Suite. There's no point. If you can afford it, you can't do better. Instead, read on for some hands-on impressions of its most notable new features, and how they live up to the hype.

Content-Aware Fill

This is Photoshop's big new trick. Select an unwanted person or object in your picture, hit 'Content Aware Fill' and that person or object is erased... seamlessly. The demo made a huge YouTube splash, but is it any good?

In short: yes, with a but. The image's background must have at least some regularity to it, and ideally not on an angle. A wall, a beach, trees, the sea – all of these will work well. Railings at a 45- degree angle – good luck. Small items, like rocks, are removed with no problem, and it does a great job of dealing with shadows and other complicated effects. People and large items will often leave a noticeable corona around the edited area, although this can be fixed using the Content-Aware Paintbrush.

When it works, it's much faster than using the Clone Brush. When it doesn't, it's fast enough that you haven't wasted any time. It's not a magic wand, though, and often pulls in the wrong data, duplicating unique parts of the background (including people's faces). Still, it's impressive stuff, and a great timesaver for clearing up your snaps.

Puppet Warping

Puppet Warping is a slightly more gimmicky feature, and one that we're undoubtedly going to see abused many times over the next few years. Cut out a figure and Photoshop will work out a mesh that fits its shape. By adding pins to the mesh, you can move the limbs around one by one, with the rest of the form following suit. It's a very creepy effect, and one better suited to subtle edits than completely altering someone's stance.

The most impressive demos don't involve people at all, but instead show solid objects being manipulated – Adobe's showpiece being a picture of a piece of rope that gets threaded in and out of itself on multiple levels.

In-camera effects

Photoshop CS4 offered a decent range of photography features, but a couple let the side down: weak noise controls and underwhelming support for HDR. Both are better now (and if you really want to add noise to an image, that's doable in Camera Raw), but not to the point that we'll be giving up our copies of Noise Ninja and Photomatix respectively.

Automatic lens correction is a useful addition, but if basic photo processing is your primary focus, Lightroom will still likely work much better for you.

Painting in Photoshop

Photoshop now offers a full set of natural media painting brushes with a 3D twist. The Mixer Brush offers live mixing on the canvas, with textured painting via a set of swappable brush tips. It's great to have these features in the same editor as Photoshop's other abilities, but we suspect it'll be tricky to get long-term Painter fans to adopt the new interface and kitchen-sink approach to their art.

Your CMS in Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is an excellent website editor, but in recent years many bloggers and small site owners have moved away from it and WYSIWYG in favour of a simple copy of Notepad.

You could always build a template and then add in the necessary tags to make it work, but now you can do development in Dreamweaver itself – hooking it up to platforms like Wordpress and Drupal and having it discover the necessary extra files. Even if you only use the Code view, Dreamweaver's interface makes it much faster to write the necessary files, and now it can work with your CMS instead of design being a separate layer.