See our Photoshop CS5 Tutorials Page for free Photoshop 12 video clips.
Photoshop CS3 Free Trial - Download Photoshop Extended For A 30 Day Free Tryout

'To evaluate Adobe's creative software, we are offering fully functional 30-day trials of all Adobe Creative Suite 3 products and editions.
'There are two ways to get a trial: by downloading a trial or by ordering a trial DVD set. When the trial expires, you must purchase the software to continue using it. Our new trial process enables you to evaluate a product and then convert the installed trial to an unrestricted version by purchasing it and entering a serial number.
To simplify your trial conversion, we recommend that you try the product you intend to buy. If you evaluate one trial product and then buy another, you need to uninstall the original trial product before installing the purchased product.

Mar 27, 2007 Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium beta. Adobe created Creative Suite 3 Design Premium for digital designers specializing in work for print, Web sites, and mobile gadgets who need consistency.

• Apparently Adobe has completely shut down Creative Suite 2 and 3 inc Photoshop CS3 so it is no longer possible to replace your online serial key with an offline one (necessary for the steps below). This article is now for historical purposes.
• Here is the review for Adobe Creative Suite 3.
• Aug 29, 2012 Solved: Where can I download Adobe Creative Suite 3 Standard English for Mac? When we bought the license issued installation disk, but now can not find him.

Here is the direct link to the Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended 30 Day Trial. Photoshop CS3 Extended includes all of the features in Photoshop CS3 plus specialized features for editing 3D and motion-based content and for performing image analysis. The Mac version of the download is 759.57 MB, the Windows version is 463.59 MB.
System Requirements Windows
Intel Pentium 4, Intel Centrino, Intel Xeon, or Intel Core Duo (or compatible) processor. Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit editions). 512MB of RAM. 64MB of video RAM. 1GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation). 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card. DVD-ROM drive. QuickTime 7 software required for multimedia features. Internet or phone connection required for product activation. Broadband Internet connection required for Adobe Stock Photos and other services.
System Requirements Macintosh
PowerPC G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor. Mac OS X v.10.4.8. 512MB of RAM. 64MB of video RAM. 2GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation). 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card. DVD-ROM drive. QuickTime 7 software required for multimedia features. Internet or phone connection required for product activation. Broadband Internet connection required for Adobe Stock Photos and other services.
Get the Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended 30 Day Trial.
Photoshop CS5 & Photoshop CS5 Extended - Best Deals From Adobe
Adobe Photoshop CS5 delivers breakthrough capabilities to help you create images with impact. Refine your images with reengineered photography tools for removing noise, adding grain, and creating high dynamic range (HDR) images. Get precise results when making complex selections. Remove any image element and see the space fill in almost magically. Paint with naturally textured brushstrokes and realistic color blends. Learn more about Photoshop CS5.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended software helps you create the ultimate images for print, the web, and video. Enjoy all the state-of-the-art editing, compositing, and painting capabilities in industry-standard Photoshop CS5, and experience fast performance thanks to cross-platform 64-bit support. Also create 3D extrusions for logos, artwork, and motion graphics; edit 3D objects with advanced tools; and create and enhance motion-based content. Learn more about Photoshop CS5 Extended.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium
Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium software gives you fresh new creative tools, along with the ability to deliver ideas faster in print and create interactive content without writing code. Plus Design Premium integrates with Adobe CS Live online services to maximize your design time by streamlining critical nondesign tasks.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium combines Adobe InDesign CS5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CS5, Flash CS5 Professional, Dreamweaver CS5, Fireworks CS5, and Acrobat Pro with additional tools and services. Download a free CS5 Design Premium 30 day trial.
Photoshop CS5 Tutorials & CS5 Resources
See our Photoshop CS5 Resource Center for Free Photoshop CS5 Tutorials, and the Free Photoshop CS5 Trial Download. See our Photoshop CS4 Resource Center for Free Photoshop CS4 Tutorials.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended - New Features

Ideal for film, video, and multimedia professionals and graphic and web designers using 3D and motion, as well as professionals in engineering and science, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended software delivers everything in Photoshop CS3 and more. Render and incorporate 3D images into your 2D composites. Stop time with easy editing of motion graphics on video layers. And probe your images with measurement, analysis, and visualization tools.
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended includes key new capabilities that let you incorporate 3D and motion-based content into your image editing workflow. Now you can render 3D content into your 2D composites, edit existing textures on 3D models, and embed your edited models into Adobe PDF files for easy collaboration with colleagues. Plus, you can animate video frames, paint and clone over multiple video frames, and import and export video files in a wide range of formats.
Analyze images with precision
Photoshop CS3 Extended helps professionals in manufacturing, medicine, architecture, engineering, and scientific research gain more insight from images. Measurement and counting tools enable analysis of 2D and 3D images. MATLAB users can pull image data from Photoshop Extended into MATLAB and visualize results of MATLAB algorithms back in the software. And medical professionals can correct, annotate, and analyze DICOM files.
Work more productively
With improved performance throughout the editing workflow, Photoshop CS3 Extended helps you work more productively — even when editing the most specialized images. Experience native performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs and on Microsoft Windows Vista systems. Maximize your workspace with a streamlined interface, process raw images with increased speed and quality, and manage assets more efficiently in the revamped Adobe Bridge CS3.
Composite and edit with unrivaled power
Leverage the power of the industry standard for the utmost creative control in image editing and compositing. Now you can apply filters nondestructively, manage and correct color more easily, convert color images to rich black-and-white with one click, and retouch images with more powerful cloning and healing tools. Plus, you can enjoy advanced compositing with breakthrough tools for aligning and blending layers automatically and making image selections with one brush stroke.
Product highlights
Manufacturing and design engineers
With Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended software, you can easily import, rotate, and create different rendering modes and edit existing textures on 3D models to enhance 3D content or create compelling composites of 2D and 3D content.
Medical professionals
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended software helps you improve patient care with powerful tools for documenting and analyzing treatment and visualizing potential outcomes.
Architects and engineers
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended software helps you communicate your vision clearly and make an impact with all of your drawings and designs.
Scientific researchers
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended software delivers new tools for analyzing and extracting data from images, and offers powerful presentation capabilities to help you communicate your discoveries.
Students and educators
With features designed for professionals in video and motion graphics production, manufacturing, medicine, architecture, engineering, and scientific research, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended software is a key new tool for students pursuing careers in these fields, and for their instructors.
Product overview
3D compositing and texture editing
Easily render and incorporate rich 3D content into your 2D composites — even edit textures on 3D models directly within Photoshop Extended and immediately see the results. Photoshop Extended supports common 3D interchange formats, including 3DS, OBJ, U3D, KMZ, and COLLADA, so you can import, view, and interact with most 3D models.
Integration with Adobe Acrobat 8 software
Create, modify, and collaborate on 3D content more easily through tight integration between Photoshop CS3 Extended and Acrobat 3D software. Convert myriad 3D CAD formats to the robust U3D interchange format, enhance models and create composites with Photoshop Extended, and easily embed 3D models created in Photoshop Extended into PDF files to distribute for review.
Enhanced Vanishing Point with 3D support
Edit in perspective on multiple surfaces--even those connected at angles other than 90 degrees--with the enhanced Vanishing Point, which also lets you measure in perspective; wrap graphics, images, and text around multiple planes; and output 2D planes as 3D models.
Video and Animation Design - Movie Paint
Enhance video directly within Photoshop Extended. Now you can paint, add text, and clone over multiple frames of an imported video sequence.
Smooth animation workflow
Easily create animations from a series of still images or video frames with a new Animation palette that enables onion skinning. Broad video format support, including QuickTime Import QuickTime movies and most AVI and MPEG files, and output video and animations to MOV, AVI, MPEG-4, FLV, 3G, FLC, H.264 (iPod), and DV Stream.
Video layers
Create and edit images for video with maximum quality and a broader range of color models. Edit and enhance grayscale, RGB, CMYK, and LAB models at 8-, 16-, and 32-bit depths with color management.
2D and 3D measurement tools
Extract quantitative information from images with new measurement tools. Easily calibrate or set the scale of an image, and then use any of the Photoshop Extended selection tools to define and calculate distance, perimeter, area, and other measurements. Record data points in a measurement log and export data, including histogram data, to a spreadsheet for further analysis.
Scale Marker
Show scale in images destined for presentation or publication using the Scale Marker, which lets you easily add a scale graphic to any image.
Count tool
Easily and accurately count objects or features in scientific images with the Count tool, which eliminates the need to perform manual calculations or rely on visual assessments of changes from image to image.
History palette and Edit History log
Undo and redo any set of editing steps in an open image with the History palette, and automatically track all editing steps within your files with the Edit History log. Export steps to a text file or save them as part of image metadata for easier documentation of your work, file audits, and more.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Jump from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software to Photoshop CS3 Extended in one click for advanced editing of your digital images. Lightroom (sold separately) offers an efficient, powerful way to import, manage, and present large volumes of digital images.
Black-and-white conversion
Easily convert color images to rich black-and-white and adjust tonal values and tints with a new tool. Experiment with the included black-and-white presets, or create and save your own custom presets to achieve the best results.
Improved printing experience
Experience better control over print quality with color management, a larger print preview window, and more controls in one place so you can print in fewer steps. Improved printing controls, co-developed by Adobe and HP, make printing easier and more predictable, and streamline setup options via integration with select printers from HP, Epson, and Canon.
Adobe Device Central CS3
Visually emulate how your dynamic content will render on mobile devices using the built-in Adobe Device Central CS3.
Zoomify export for high-resolution web display
Take advantage of Adobe Flash and Zoomify technology to export high-resolution images to the web for viewing through Adobe Flash Player software. Flash Player displays your images quickly and efficiently, letting viewers zoom in on details with minimal delay.
Smart Filters
Add, adjust, and remove filters from an image without having to resave the image or start over to preserve quality. Nondestructive Smart Filters allow you to visualize changes without altering original pixel data.
Smart Objects
Perform nondestructive scaling, rotating, and warping of raster and vector graphics with Smart Objects. Even preserve the editability of vector data from Adobe Illustrator software.
Enhanced 32-bit high dynamic range (HDR) support
Create and edit 32-bit images and combine multiple exposures into a single, 32-bit image that preserves the full range of a scene--from the deepest shadows to the brightest highlights. New image-processing and alignment algorithms deliver superior results. And with Photoshop CS3 Extended, you can even edit 32-bit images using brushes, filters, blending modes, transformations, selections, tools, aspect ratios, and more.
More powerful cloning and healing tools
Experience greater control when retouching images with cloning tools and the Healing Brush. Clone images over time; see source pixels under your tool or brush for more precise positioning; preview changes to source content live; and set multiple source points, scale, and rotate in the new Clone Source palette.
Rich painting and drawing toolset
Create or modify images with a wide assortment of professional, fully customizable paint settings, artistic brushes, and drawing tools.
Improved Photomerge technology
Take advantage of refined Photomerge technology, which uses new layer-alignment and layer-blending capabilities to let you automatically stitch horizontal or vertical photos into seamless panoramas.
Quick Selection and Refine Edge tools
Make selections in a snap. Loosely draw on an image area, and the Quick Selection tool automatically completes the selection for you. Then preview and fine-tune your selections with the Refine Edge tool.
Flexible layers
Composite images, text, and effects on hundreds of layers for extraordinarily sophisticated results. Organize layers with up to five levels of nesting, and save them in different combinations as layer comps.
Pricing
Adobe Photoshop CS3 is available for an estimated street price of US$649 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended is available for an estimated street price of US$999, directly from Adobe or through Adobe Authorized Resellers. To order directly from Adobe, visit the Adobe Store at www.adobe.com. Licensed owners of Photoshop CS2, Photoshop CS, or Photoshop 7.x can upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS3 for US$199, or upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended for US$349.
Exclusive 15% Discount On All Topaz Plugins - Use Coupon Code PHOTOSHOPSUPPORT - Includes Bundles And Upgrades

Enter our exclusive discount coupon code PHOTOSHOPSUPPORT during the checkout process at Topaz Labs for an instant 15% discount on any Topaz product, including bundles and upgrades.
Topaz Labs Photoshop plug-ins are specifically designed to expand a photographer's creative toolbox by harnessing powerful image technology developments. Photographers everywhere are now taking advantage of the creative exposure effects, artistic simplification, unique edge manipulation, and top-of-the-line noise reduction offered in Topaz products. The Topaz Photoshop Plugins Bundle is a super powerful Photoshop plugins package that includes the following Topaz products:

Topaz Adjust
Deliver stunning and dynamic images with this uniquely powerful plug-in that features HDR-like abilities and enhances exposure, color and detail.
Topaz Detail
A three-level detail adjustment plug-in that specializes in micro-contrast enhancements and sharpening with no artifacts.
Topaz ReMask
The fastest and most effective masking and extraction program with one-click mask refining.
Topaz DeNoise
Highest-quality noise reduction plug-in that removes the most noise and color noise while preserving the most image detail.
Topaz Simplify
Provides creative simplification, art effects, and line accentuation for easy one-of-a-kind art.
Topaz Clean
Take control of the detail depth of your images with extensive smoothing, texture control and edge enhancement tools.
Topaz DeJPEG
Drastically improves the quality of web images and other compressed photos.
Learn more about the Topaz Photoshop Plugins Bundle. Download a free trial version.
Exclusive onOne Software 15% Instant Discount Coupon

Enter our exclusive discount coupon code - PSSPPT06 - during the checkout process at onOne Software for an instant 15% discount on any onOne product. This includes Genuine Fractals and their amazing Photoshop Plug-In Suite.
OnOne’s new Plug-In Suite solves six of the most frequent problems photographers will encounter in Photoshop. This suite has been granted American Photos Magazine’s Editor’s Choice award for Top Image Editing Software. The Plugin Suite includes:
Genuine Fractals Pro is renowned by both photographers and printers for its finesse at increasing images to more than ten times their original size while maintaining the sharpness and detail you started with. Think of this as the industry standard for image resizing.
Mask Pro is used to remove the tough stuff — such as hair, smoke and glass — while retaining the fine detail. You choose what colors to keep, then paint away what you don’t need.
PhotoTools Pro packs hundreds of high-calibre photographic effects into one user-friendly plug-in. It’s fast and easy to use. Gives your photos that pro quality look.
PhotoFrame Pro lets you enhance your pictures with hundreds of such design effects, or simply drop your image into a pre-fab layout in Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture.
FocalPoint helps to control focus and minimize visual noise. Draw the eye to specific points in your images by using selective focus, depth-of-field and vignette effects.
PhotoTune lets you can compare images side-by-side and easily color correct and enhance them. PhotoTune optimizes the dynamic range, color and sharpness of your image without the need to know all the complicated controls in Photoshop like levels and curves.
Simply enter our exclusive discount coupon code - PSSPPT06 - during the checkout process at onOne Software for an instant 15% discount on any onOne product.
Nik Software 15% Instant Discount - Exclusive 15% Coupon
Enter our exclusive discount coupon code - NIKPSS - during the checkout process at Nik Software for an instant 15% discount on any Nik Software product. This exclusive discount coupon code can be applied to all the latest Nik Software Photoshop plugins, including Silver Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Viveza, Sharpener Pro, and Dfine.
Color Efex Pro
52 photographic filters with over 250 effects for professional quality images. Completely Original. Completely Indispensable.
Nik Software Color Efex Pro filters are the leading photographic filters for digital photography. The award-winning Color Efex Pro filters are widely used by many of today's professional photographers around the world to save time and get professional level results. Whether you choose the Complete Edition, Select Edition, or Standard Edition, you’ll get traditional and stylizing filters that offer virtually endless possibilities to enhance and transform images quickly and easily.
Patented U Point technology provides the ultimate control to selectively apply enhancements without the need for any complicated masks, layers or selections. Control color, light and tonality in your images and create unique enhancements with professional results. With 52 filters and over 250 effects found in Color Efex Pro, you can perform high quality retouching, color correction, and endless creative enhancements to your photographs. Download a free Trial version.
Viveza
The most powerful tool to selectively control color and light in photographic images without the need for complicated selections or layer masks.
Two of the most important factors in creating great photography are color and light. Mastering the art of selectively correcting or enhancing each of these is now possible for every photographer without the need for complicated masks or selections, or expert-level knowledge of Photoshop. Integrating award-winning U Point technology, Viveza is the most powerful and precise tool available to control light and color in photographic images.
U Point powered Color Control Points, placed directly on colors or objects in an image (such as sky, skin, grass, etc.), reveal easy-to-use controls that photographers can use to quickly adjust brightness, contrast or color in a fraction of the time needed by other tools. With Viveza you’ll spend more time shooting photographs and save hours of image editing. Download a free Trial version.
Silver Efex Pro
Complete power and control to create professional quality black and white images in one convenient tool.

Silver Efex Pro from Nik Software is the most powerful tool for creating professional quality black and white images from your photographs. For the first time, all the advanced power and control required for professional results have been brought together in one convenient tool.
Featuring Nik Software’s patented U Point technology to selectively control the tonality and contrast of the image, Silver Efex Pro includes advanced imaging algorithms to protect against unwanted artifacts, a comprehensive collection of emulated black and white film types, a variable toning selector for adding traditional toning techniques, over 20 one-click preset styles, and a state-of-the-art grain reproduction engine that help produce the highest quality black and white images possible from your color images while providing more freedom to experiment. Download a free Trial version to use Silver Efex Pro.
Enter our exclusive discount coupon code - NIKPSS - during the checkout process at Nik Software for an instant 15% discount.This exclusive discount coupon code can be applied to all the latest Nik Software Photoshop plugins, including Silver Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Viveza, Sharpener Pro, and Dfine.
Photoshop Masking Plugin Fluid Mask - Exclusive Instant Discount

The 4 1/2 out of 5 star review of Fluid Mask at MacWorld begins by saying that this 'Photoshop plug-in takes the pain out of extracting backgrounds,' and goes on to recommend the latest version, stating that 'Fluid Mask is a very effective tool for separating objects from their backgrounds. It offers a variety of useful features for tackling almost any difficult image, from wispy hair to complex foliage. Online video tutorials and live training sessions help ease the learning curve.'
Our friends at Vertus, the makers of Fluid Mask Photoshop Plugin, have set up a special exclusive discount for PhotoshopSupport.com. Go to our Fluid Mask page for a special, exclusive discount link.
Fluid Mask is designed for photographers, image editors, graphic designers and all those who take digital image editing seriously. In a streamlined interface and workflow, Fluid Mask instantly shows key edges in the image and provides comprehensive easy to use tools that work with difficult-to-see edges and tricky areas like trees & lattices. Fluid Mask will also preserve all-important edge information for a professional quality cut out. Go to our Fluid Mask page for more info.
lynda.com Online Training Library - View Free Video Clips
Subscriptions to the lynda.com Online Training Library provide anytime access to tens of thousands of video tutorials covering Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, web design, digital imaging, 3D, digital video, animation, and many other topics. View free video clips.
For less than a dollar a day, members have the opportunity to stay current and keep skills sharp, learn innovative and productive techniques, and gain confidence and marketability - all at their own pace.Premium subscriptions include instructors’ exercise files so that members can follow along with the exact examples onscreen. Customers learn at their own pace and may stop, rewind, and replay segments as often as necessary. View some free video clips (high resolution).

Did You Know You Could Create An Entire Website In Photoshop?
SiteGrinder Photoshop Plugin - Create Websites Instantly

There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, SiteGrinder turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, SiteGrinder is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks. Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download.

Photoshop CS4 Essential Skills - By Mark Galer And Philip Andrews

Brimming with beautiful pictures, Photoshop CS4 Essential Skills guides you through a project-based, progressive curriculum so that you can build all the essential skills to enhance photographs creatively and professionally with Photoshop CS4. If you are an aspiring professional or a student learning photography, digital imaging, or design graphics, you'll be amazed at the stunning results you can achieve. A DVD is included free.
The Essential Skills Photography Series from Focal Press uniquely offers a structured learning experience for photographers of all ages, with both the underlying theory and loads of invaluable 'how to' and real-life practice projects - all from the most talented photography practitioners/educators in the world.
Read 2 free sample chapters:
Skin Retouching Tips In Photoshop CS4
Transforming Smart Objects In Photoshop CS4
Find more Photoshop CS4 tutorials on our Photoshop CS4 Tutorials Page.

Read 2 free sample chapters from the Adobe Photoshop CS3 version:
Adjusting Exposure in Adobe Camera Raw CS3
Photoshop CS3 Tutorial High Dynamic Range

Find More Adobe Photoshop Books at Amazon.com
Find all the latest bestselling Photoshop books at discount prices at Amazon.com.
The Photoshop Blog offers the latest Photoshop and Digital Photography news and software updates, tips and tutorials, and random thoughts from graphic artist, digital photographer and Photoshop expert Jennifer Apple. Also includes Photoshop CS3 news!

Could this be Adobe’s best upgrade yet? And does Adobe Creative Suite 3 have a role to play in your private practice or other small business? The bulk of this review focuses on the new Dreamweaver CS3, while the other Creative Suite components are covered in summary.

The Structure of this Review

Each individual component of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 — including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Acrobat, Illustrator, and more — could easily occupy an entire in-depth review all of its own. My aim here isn’t to try and cover every fine detail of each component, but rather to give a flavour of each one, and of the value of the package as a whole. The version I’m reviewing here is Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium for the Mac, but it also comes in several other flavours, some with more components and some with fewer; I’ll cover this in the last section, on system requirements and pricing.

And speaking of pricing… It’s no secret that private practitioners and other small business owners often balk at pricey software suites from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. Paying several hundred pounds — or over two thousand, in the case of the most expensive version of Creative Suite 3 — can seem distinctly hard to justify, especially if you work on your own and your weekly revenues are also measured in the hundreds. I’ll have a bit to say about that, too, and if you’re already pretty convinced that expensive software cannot be for you (and thus this review won’t seem worth reading anyway), I’d encourage you to skip ahead now and at least skim through the section about return on investment before heading off to greener pastures.

So, here we go. Because their web presence figures so strongly in the business models of most private practitioners or other small business owners who may be reading this, I’ll turn first to Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.

Dreamweaver CS3

Newly flying the Adobe flag, Dreamweaver was incorporated into the Creative Suite after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia in late 2005 (see our earlier review of GoLive CS2 and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8), and this difference of pedigree shows: Dreamweaver hasn’t benefited from the same interface makeover that graces other components of the suite. While Photoshop and others sport a slick new look, Dreamweaver retains the same interface it’s had for years. It also retains many of the same bugs it’s had for years, primarily on the visual editing end of things, but a few new additions at least partly make up for that.

Dreamweaver CS3 Enhancements

CSS support, for example, which has long been one of Dreamweaver’s strong points, has been beefed up even further. Dreamweaver can check your CSS code and let you know when non-standards compliant browsers (ahem) may have trouble rendering the results correctly, and it can automatically take you to relevant discussions about CSS bugs at the Adobe CSS Advisor site. While I believe standalone CSS applications such as Xyle Scope still have an essential place in the CSS box of tools, Dreamweaver does a top-notch job in this area all by itself. Dreamweaver also now includes more than 30 ready-built and extensively commented layout templates. These basic templates provide 1-, 2-, or 3-column layouts, with and without headers and footers, with fixed or fluid sizes. In effect, even if you don’t know the first thing about CSS, you can now take advantage of Dreamweaver’s templates to create accessible, standards compliant CSS-based pages. Yes, such layouts are widely available for free on the web, but I’ve never seen the underlying CSS documented so thoroughly and usefully.

And for users just dipping into AJAX, Dreamweaver now includes the Spry framework, which makes it possible to implement various kinds of AJAX trickery without touching a line of underlying code. Hierarchical menus? No problem. Collapsible panels? Easy. Spry can also handle significantly more complex AJAX jobs with a bit more work.

But while Dreamweaver’s integration of the Spry framework makes it incredibly easy for those new to the technology to incorporate slick AJAX effects into their sites, it all comes with a bit of a caveat. Spry is very much a work in progress, with updates coming so frequently that Dreamweaver’s Spry was actually out of date before it even shipped — and Dreamweaver does not currently provide any mechanism to update the included Spry framework. On top of that, Adobe makes a point of informing users that once a Spry library is uploaded to a site, Dreamweaver won’t touch it again (to ensure that it doesn’t overwrite any modifications you might have made to it yourself). In other words, once you’ve sprinkled a bit of Spry goodness into your site, you’re completely on your own with regard to updates, fixes for bugs (and there are many), etc. If you’re already an AJAX aficionado, that’s probably OK for you — but then you’re probably not going to be using Dreamweaver CS3’s out of date code libraries in the first place! The people Adobe seems to be targeting with Spry are exactly the people who may find themselves left high and dry — or at the very least, totally reliant on the next major Dreamweaver upgrade — once they’ve been tempted to add a little Spry sparkle to their site.

As for other major new features, Dreamweaver also adds Windows Vista compatibility, and it comes as a Universal Binary for users of Intel-based Macs, which can provide a huge performance boost relative to Dreamweaver 8 running under Rosetta. Dreamweaver also includes sophisticated integration with Photoshop, enabling images to be exported from Photoshop in web-ready form directly to a site, with the original high-quality images automatically accessible back in Photoshop when you choose a web-ready version in Dreamweaver that you’d like to modify. In my experience, however, this capability isn’t quite ready for prime time just yet, functioning significantly better in the forward direction (Photoshop to Dreamweaver) than the backward direction (Dreamweaver back to Photoshop).

Adobe Creative Suite 3

In theory, Dreamweaver’s ability to upload and synchronize with servers is also much improved — you can actually do other work now during an upload — but it’s still so weak as to be useful only for the smallest of sites. There is no indication of progress through an upload, no estimated duration, and no indication of completion (in case you have switched to another application in the interim) or confirmation of results. Adobe’s help forums are home to a large community of users who haven’t been able to get it to work at all. In my experience, stand-alone tools like Yummy! FTP provide vastly faster and more reliable upload and synchronization performance.

Dreamweaver CS3 Bugs

And unfortunately, as I alluded to above, several longstanding bugs have not yet been fixed. While Dreamweaver has lost its annoying habit of extending a text selection at the end of a sentence to include the period when adding a link to a selection, that unwanted extension still sometimes (not always!) rears its head when the selection comes at the end of a phrase enclosed in parentheses. And if you place the insertion point at the end of a paragraph and select partly into the following paragraph before starting to type, Dreamweaver correctly deletes whatever text you have selected, but it then conjoins the first paragraph with what remains of the second, placing whatever you then type after the end of that new paragraph! Both of these bugs suggest incorrect handling of the underlying tags (the anchor tag and the paragraph tag, respectively) when it comes to making selections in the visual editor — reminiscent of the ancient days of escape-code formatting in word processors, when deleting a particular piece of text could inadvertently leave an orphaned escape code that would turn the rest of your document into bold face or italics.

Dreamweaver Migration for GoLive Users

Finally, speaking of bugs, I have to take a moment to heap some derision on the tool Adobe provides to help GoLive users migrate to Dreamweaver. When Adobe acquired Macromedia, Dreamweaver became Adobe’s flagship visual editor, replacing GoLive, and Adobe made a concerted effort to encourage remaining GoLive users to change to Dreamweaver. So, many GoLive users probably welcomed the inclusion of a tool that shipped with CS3 to convert existing GoLive site files into Dreamweaver site files: they could at last abandon the once-great GoLive that had been languishing for years, and hitch their wagons to the undisputed leader in visual editing. Well, I’ve tried the conversion tool (several times), and wow, is it awful!

The Adobe support forums are full of desperate pleas for help, not to mention a few angry invectives, from GoLive users trying to make the bug-ridden tool work. The last time I checked, they had received scant attention from Adobe, with third party sites like this one turning out to be far better sources of information. In my experience, the biggest problem with the tool is its distinctly poor ability to translate GoLive components into Dreamweaver library items: often the relative links within components were not correctly translated (which they have to be, due to the fact that Dreamweaver’s library folder sits at the main site root, while GoLive’s components sit outside the site root), and likewise the references from site files to components/library items which they contain were often not correctly translated. The upshot? If you have a large site, with more than just a couple of components, expect trouble: if you’re handy with grep, you’ll likely do a much better job handling the conversion yourself with a tool like BBEdit. And if you have a small site, with only a couple of components, you probably didn’t need the conversion tool anyway and could have managed with some simple find and replace. Add to this the fact that the tool is mind-numbingly slow. If you’re a GoLive user and want to convert any significant volume of site assets over to Dreamweaver, plan on hours of anguish before you see the light of day again.

Dreamweaver CS3: The Bottom Line

If you’re already using a visual editing environment like Dreamweaver or GoLive, this update definitely gets a thumbs-up. Particularly if you’re using the latest versions of either Microsoft’s or Apple’s operating systems (and/or the latter’s latest hardware), this update is a must-have. And it’s the best opportunity yet for users of the once-great GoLive to abandon that sinking ship and work on a platform that is actually being improved. (Although GoLive users will still miss a few things that are simple with GoLive but excrutiating on Dreamweaver — like uploading files without template tags and comments, which we mentioned in an earlier review.)

If you’re not already using such an environment, then the main questions are whether you need one (e.g., are you instead using a server-based content management system or blogging platform exclusively?) or want one (e.g., do you prefer a strictly non-WYSIWYG, code-based site creation environment?).

My personal take on this is that if you’re not using a server-based content management system, and you are responsible for creating actual content (as distinct from just creating underlying code), a WYSIWYG environment like Dreamweaver is hard to beat. Do you really want to write articles in a plain text editor like BBEdit? Although text editors have a very important role in the management of any large site, I believe they’re just not as comfortable for writing — i.e., for content creation — as a WYSIWYG environment.

(In some corners of the web, you’ll find heated arguments from developers and coders who say that nobody should ever use a WYSIWYG environment, and who say that only dumb designers who don’t know how to code would ever sully themselves with something like Dreamweaver. The fact is, once a page template has been created, all kinds of people can use Dreamweaver to create and update content, and there is no problem with Dreamweaver creating ‘bad code’, as long as the original template is ‘good code’. It’s a tempest in a teapot, stirred up primarily by those who don’t write in human languages for a living.)

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All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .