Never the one to rest on their laurels, and CS3 had some pretty impressive laurels to rest on, Adobe are back on the front line with their Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.   CS4 has the usual suspects in the line up, InDesign, PhotoShop Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, FireWorks, AfterEffects, Premiere Pro. And, a few extras and new bods to get your hands on SoundBooth, OnLocation, Encore, DeviceCentral, Bridge and DynamicLink.

Adobe CS4 Master Collection is most definitely and definitively a Master's Toolbox. A Suite of tools created wholly for professionals who spend their days crafting rich multimedia content like web pages, video content, digital imagery, audio, and mobile media. If that's not you, then there are other Suites which don't carry the same weight as this one, like Web Premium, Design Premium and Production Premium, check the Adobe site for details.

On opening up elements of the Suite the first thing that is blatantly obvious is the new look interface, which, according to Mark Cokes, Adobe Marketing Manager, Pacific, was done to create a uniform interface for all products, including the old Macromedia ones like Flash and Dreamweaver ... I guess they've been Adobe-fied. All this really means is that users will have a slight learning curve to undertake. Mark, however, assured us that it would be worth spending the time to come up to speed with the new interface because of the new hefty features incorporated in the Suite. Of course, the new interface also means that workflow between elements will speed up and there are some innovative new ways to move from one medium to another within this Suite.

Bring on the Power ... This Suite needs some power to run properly so make sure you run through the technical specs before purchasing. We will be taking a close look at most of the big boys in this bunch but for now let's look at the main new features of individual elements:

Indesign CS4:
Live Preflighting, Easy Flash document creation, Smart guides and spacing tools.

Photoshop CS4 Extended:
Content aware scaling, 64-bit for Windows, Expanded 3-D paint, lighting and rendering tools.

Illustrator CS4:
Multipage documents with different sizes, Indesign-style separations preview, Many updated tools like gradient and blob brush.

Flash CS4 Professional:
Powerful Animation presets, H.264 encoding, Expanded 3-D transformation and object support with inverse kinematics and bones.

Dreamweaver CS4:
Better interactive Live View mode, Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript, Photoshop Smart Object support.

After Effects CS4:
Better 3-D compositing and 3-D model support, Better mobile device authoring, XMP metadata support for asset management.

Premiere Pro CS4:
Speech search for finding dialog within footage, AVCHD, P2, XDCAM EX, and XDCAM HD camera support, Better batch encoding via Adobe Media Encoder application.

Encore CS4:
More sophisticated Blu-ray authoring support, DLT exporting for masters, Firewire video out and DTS support.

Fireworks CS4:
Adobe AIR authoring for output to a variety of formats, PDF and CSS export, Better asset management and libraries.

DynamicLink
Tighter-than-ever integration when moving assets between After Effects, Premiere Pro, Soundbooth and Encore.

Two of those new features above should immediately STAND OUT and have you sitting on the edge of your seat ...

1) Searchable video text in Premiere Pro. And, yes you did read that correctly. I'll just let you sit and think of the ramifications of that little feature. Search engine friendly video!! Amazing.

and 2) Content aware scaling in Photoshop. Mark Cokes demonstrated this feature to us and I was gob-smacked, literally, and if you've watched Deke McLelland's CS4 video you'll know that he was as well. All I can say is that squished images are a thing of the past.

For me, these two features alone are the biggest selling point of Adobe Creative Suite 4 and if you add a cute new little tool called Kuler into the mix, then it's a must-have. I happily give the Suite a double thumbs up ... I'm impressed, I'm energised and I'm itching to start my Photoshop CS4 extended review. I'm sure this small sample has whetted your appetites for more ... so stay tuned.

Adobe CS4 Installation Issues:
There were a few installation issues with this Suite but they were easily resolved once I performed a cleanup using an Adobe tool created specifically for the task.  If you are experiencing any problems, especially if you have Adobe CS3 installed, then take a look over the notes on this Adobe page or this Adobe page.