Adobe Illustrator CS2 Upgrade – Customer Reviews
too slow to rate a 5 star
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Illustrator CS2 is an application loaded with features, but it is too slow that after I execute a command I wait almost 30 seconds before anything happens. Oftentimes I click again because there is no hour glass or timeline to indicate it is doing anything and that usually ends in Illustrator not responding and hanging up. I'm use to Photoshop being so fast compared to Illustrator that I get impatient.
8/18/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
Novice heaven (for an Adobe product)
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Nobody, and I mean NObody, could be more of an Illustrator novice & ignoramus than I.Several months ago I was given a licensed copy of Illustrator 9 that a departing coworker had used.Wanting a chance to design the departmental logo that otherwise would've gone to an agency, I raised my figurative hand and volunteered for duty.Having taught myself everything from MS-DOS to TurboCAD, to Photoshop Elements, not to mention Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (don't get me started on that latter program, argh), I figured I could tackle at least the basics of Illustrator 9.Loaded it on my laptop, took it home for a weekend....and just about lost my sanity -- and several fingernails -- trying to learn that confounding program.I managed to produce a few logos, one of which was chosen.But egads, what a big, stinky bear Illustrator 9 was to wrestle.
When I saw that CS2 had this Live Trace feature, I pleaded with my workplace Santa to get it for me, and WOW!What an overall improvement!!
Illustrator will still not be as intuitive to pick up as an MS Office product, but this comes darn close.With CS2, they've given us "hot tips" -- little clues about what some of the tools do, that pop up when you mouse over the tool.The intuitive menus are nice too.Also cool is that all the text & paragraph and fill & stroke features, which used to be huge boxes taking up valuable real estate on the screen, are now condensed up on a small horizontal toolbar, like in the Office products ... and when you mouse over them, the screen tips tell you how to expand them.Aaaahh!Finally some help for dunces like me.
Live Trace and Live Paint are unbelieveably cool.The very first thing I did after loading CS2 was to grab a .jpg photo of a soccer ball off Google Images, and within 20 minutes, without consulting any book or online Help, I'd converted it into a simple graphic image painted into the 2 colors I wanted.
But as for a great guidebook, the reviewer who suggested Illustrator Visual Quickstart guide by Elaine Weinmann was dead-on.I've bought several other "highly rated" books to try to help me through the quagmire of Adobe products, so I've seen them all.The Visual Quickstart book doesn't have any of that insufferable "wanna-be-a-comic-novel-author" writing, and focuses just on the basics.And it's very literal, with step-by-step instructions.Still there's no substitute for the utterly excruciating process of learning Illustrator through experience.But the Weinmann book's better than any I've seen yet.
The only reason I haven't given this product a 5 is because it still doesn't have the intuitiveness that it needs.In that way it's still "snobby" -- aimed at pros, not folks like me who need to do occasional stuff but not for a living.But this is a far, far, far cry better than Illustrator 9.Absolutely worth the money, just for Live Trace and Live Paint alone.7/14/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
Don't bother with CS2 - stick with CS!
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If I had $1 for every time a CS2 app crashed and made expend real hours to redo work, I'd have about $10. And that's enough for me to say, BEWARE of this set of applications! Adobe has allowed them to get too bloated, too slow, and the results are that all the programs (but principally GoLive, InDesign and Illustrator, in that order) are crashy and will quite suddenly, forcing you to expend the precious hours of your life redoing work you just finished. I cannot stress how disappointed I am in Adobe, and how distraught I am that we as a nation have allowed the only two competing companies to join, thus guaranteeing that there will be less quality and innovation in the future. In any event, do not buy the CS2 apps, Adobe does not deserve your support!
4/11/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
Adobe Illustrator CS2
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This new version of Illustrator is great, glad I upgraded! The Live Trace feature is cool!
4/5/2006 12:00 AM | Rating:
Adobe Illustrator CS2 Upgrade
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Came quickly, was factory sealed, loaded-up as it should.
Thanks:
Dale Tollefson2/23/2006 12:00 AM | Rating: