Software Review – Adobe Master Collection - Illustrator CS6 From Adobe Systems

This is the second of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe CS6 Master Collection. Adobe releases CS6 with four separate suites of products. They are Design Standard, Design & Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. Add to that, they a have also have the Creative Cloud – a subscription based suite that gives you access to all of the individual products for a $49.99 per month subscription fee. 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.

Adobe Illustrator CS6 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 it is the 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 CS6 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 raster image editor.

So what is new with Illustrator CS6?

• Mercury Performance System – has been added to Adobe Illustrator CS6 in the same way as it was added to Adobe Photoshop CS6. This engine is based on the Premiere Pro CS5's Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine and provides you with precision, speed, and stability on large, complex files due to native 64-bit support on both the Mac OS and Windows systems. You have full use of all the RAM on your system and it enhances overall performance optimization and is apparent in many different ways. What this really means is that you can work on projects with hundreds of layers using many effects and still have responsiveness that would not be available in prior versions.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging.

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