This month’s launch of Adobe Systems Inc.’s new suite of imaging products will draw big sales, says the head of one of the country’s biggest corporate resellers of the software.
“”We expect this will become the biggest (Adobe) seller,”” Dave MacDonald, president of Softchoice Corp. of Toronto,
said of Adobe Creative Suite (CS). Users upgrading their operating systems will likely upgrade to CS at the same time, he said. “”We’re thinking a 10 to 20 per cent uptick at least”” over current Adobe suite sales.
“”It’s a great solution for the customer and brings a lot more value at a lower cost.””
Adobe CS, which debuts Oct. 24 for Mac OS X and Windows, comes in two versions, each with upgrades of the company’s leading products:
Premium includes Photoshop CS, ImageReady CS, Illustrator CS, InDesign CS and GoLive CS and Acrobat 6.0 Professional, along with Version Cue, a file and version management application. It will have a street price of $1,868, or $1,138,50 for existing PhotoShop users.
Standard edition, which doesn’t come with GoLiveCS or Acrobat, and will have a street price of $1,518.50, or $835 for those who already have Photoshop.
The big news, says Adobe, is Version Cue, which comes in both editions and can’t be bought separately. It allows users to add searchable descriptive metadata to a file, avoiding lengthy and confusing file names. Version Cue also generates thumbnails for finding documents in the CS versions of PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive.
“”File names have proven to be completely inadaquate when people may have 20 versions of a document, said Colin Smith, technical resource manager at Adobe Canada.
While older Adobe suites prevented more than one user from opening a document for safety, that wasn’t helpful for other reasons, he said. So Version Cue lets CS application users open and save a separate version of a file a colleague is working on.
Freelance users of either version of the CS suite who work at a studio also using a CS suite with their laptops will be able to use their copy of Version Cue to access files on the studio’s network.
While the price of the suite has gone up compared to the Adobe Collection (which included PageMaker in the Windows edition),””we think once our customers see the value in the whole suite they’re going to buy it,”” Smith said.
The CS suites also include video CDs and a design guide to help users use the applications more efficiently. “”We’ve been told by customers they tend not to read the manuals,”” explained Smith. “”They tend to dive right in.””
New to Photoshop CS, which is also available as a standalone application, is Match Colour, which reads colour statistics to quickly achieve a consistent look across a series of photos, and Shadow/Highlight, which impoves the contrast of over or underexposed digital images. Photoshop CS also integrates with ImageReady CS to prepare graphics more easily.
Photoshop CS will have an estimated street price of $986.50.
“”A good thing for the channel is that if they have a customer looking for a low margin Photoshop upgrade there’s a good chance they’ll be able to sell them the CS suite, becasue there’s so much more value,”” said Smith.