This is part three of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS3 earlier this year, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Photoshop CS3? On Windows you need an Intel® Pentium® 4, Intel Centrino®, Intel Xeon®, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista, on Mac, PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.8 – 10.5 (Leopard), 512 MB RAM, 64 MB Video RAM, 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card, 2GB hard drive space and DVD-ROM Drive.

Illustrator CS3 is the vector-based graphics editor that is developed and published by Adobe Systems. It was first developed for the Apple Macintosh in 1986 and is said to be a companion product of Adobe Photoshop. It wasn't until Illustrator 7, released in 1997 with ports for both Windows and Mac that Illustrator became a standard for designers. Illustrator CS3 is technically version 13.

Illustrator CS3 is a vector graphics editor. That is, it is an editor that allows users to create sharp-edged artistic illustrations such as cartoons, clip-art, and complex geometric patterns. The other popular image editing format is a bitmap format. Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap image editor.

So what is new with Illustrator CS3

• Live Color – CS3 gives you a complete color exploration environment. If you ever had to color objects individually, you will like the new interactive scheme to create and apply colors. The new tools include the Color Guide Panel for exploration of color groups without affecting your artwork. There is the Live Color dialog box allows you to dynamically apply colors to selected objects. And Live Color also allows you to save color variations to present color options to clients.