Adobe's Creative Suite for graphic designers has been so successful that the company has gathered almost all of its programs into themed suites and released new versions all at the same time.

There are now Production (video) and Web packages of Creative Suite to join the Design package, with Web and Design available in Standard and Premium editions. Some programs such as Photoshop CS3 are found across all packages, while you can get Dreamweaver and Flash in CS3 Design as well as CS3 Web. Oh, and there are now two different editions of Photoshop. Confused? Take it up with Adobe.

Here we take a brief look at Creative Suite 3 Design Premium edition. This includes CS3 versions of Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash and Bridge, plus the inconsistently named Acrobat 8 Professional.

Photoshop CS3 has some nice new features, such as smart filters that let you work with filter effects non-destructively in a similar way to which you currently work with adjustment layers. There's a Quick Selection tool that does the job of the Magic Wand but properly this time, and a very useful Refine Edge dialogue for growing and shrinking selections in a controlled manner.

Fans of Vanishing Point will like the new ability to work on more than one dimensional surface at a time, although it's actually quite tricky indeed to get the positions just right. The program can also align and blend multiple layers automatically, which is helpful for obtaining one good overall photo image from several source shots, but we found that any success was highly dependent on starting off with near-identical shots in the first place.

Creative Suite 3 Design Premium comes with the Extended version of Photoshop CS3, which provides some clever support for 3D graphic formats. You can map textures to objects in separate layers without ever having to learn a 3D modelling program, and still manipulate the objects in 3D space directly within Photoshop. Adobe has also thrown in a whole bunch of special measuring tools for scientific use and a Movie Paint rotoscoping tool for video work, although neither may be of much use to jobbing graphic designers.

The bad news is that ImageReady has been killed off. If you enjoyed the ability to set up different states with different layer effects for different image slices, be warned that you can't do this any more: not in Photoshop, nor in Dreamweaver. You can apparently do it in Adobe Fireworks CS3, but this is not included with CS3 Design Premium.

Illustrator CS3 has a few interesting touches but no killer feature this time round. The new Eraser tool is clever, and the isolation mode for nailing down parts of complex artwork can be useful. You can automatically generate colour harmonies and play with them interactively with your artwork through a Live Color dialogue. Otherwise, the upgrade is all about little improvements: better Flash format export, a crop tool, and so on.

By contrast, InDesign CS3 is a good upgrade with plenty of practical new features. The Pages panel now provides page thumbnails, for example, and Quick Apply now lets you explore program commands as well as saved styles. You get a much better interface for placing text and pictures, especially when placing multiple files at once, thanks to thumbnail cursors.

InDesign files can be placed as graphics into other InDesign layouts, and you can use the Find/Change window with comprehensive Grep and object functions. Annoyingly, you still can't run multiple Find/Change routines simultaneously but you can at least save each routine for easy recall. The Transparency palette has been replaced with a more capable Effects panel, and you can now apply transparency to a text frame while keeping the text itself opaque.

GoLive has been shunted out of Creative Suite and replaced by Dreamweaver CS3. This is arguably a better program in terms of functionality and is certainly much more popular, but this will come as scant consolation for dedicated GoLive users. Adobe has continued GoLive development, but existing users who want a copy of the much-improved new version 9 will have to buy it on top of Creative Suite 3.

To be fair, Dreamweaver CS3 is a fine Web design package, and surprisingly easy to learn too. It tackles CSS in a serious but very accessible way, and previously challenging tasks such as Spry effects can be set up with just a few clicks. Apart from that, we're not sure that existing Dreamweaver users will feel there's enough here to warrant an upgrade just yet.

Flash CS3 has received another slight interface overhaul and now supports Photoshop and Illustrator import much better. Graphic designers will like the addition of the conventional Bezier Pen tool and Shape tools. Animators and interface designers will appreciate the ActionScript 3.0 Debugger.

As a nice touch, Adobe has provided a program called Device Central to help people creating graphics and interfaces for mobile devices. The program simply lets you preview your work in a range of emulated mobile environments, complete with skins of the handsets themselves.

Bridge CS3 is a major improvement on the sluggish and brain-dead original that was introduced with Creative Suite 2. It runs faster and is better integrated with Adobe Camera Raw for importing camera images, and features bits and pieces from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, such as the Loupe. However, at the end of the day, Bridge is still just a file browser. It previews images, videos and animations, but it can't show you pages inside an InDesign document, for example, or let you manage PDF reviews, or preview layers within Adobe format files, and so on.

Acrobat 8 Professional was released last year and is included in the Suite for completeness. This is not the place for a review of such a wide-ranging program, except to say that we wish Adobe would stop mucking about with the menus and interface. It is getting progressively harder to find the right tools and panels with each new release of Acrobat, and version 8 is a bit of a struggle at times.

Apart from a workflow overview guide, there is no printed documentation in the Creative Suite 3 box and the location of the PDF manuals remained a mystery for days after installation. Thankfully, Adobe has canned the awful Help viewer that plagued Creative Suite 2, replacing it with something lightweight that actually works as expected. The box includes a generous DVD of headache-inducing video tutorials which left us wishing that American trainers would talk less and stop flitting their mice pointers all over the place.

Looking at the interface, Adobe has inched Creative Suite 3 a little nearer to the holy grail of integration that it has always cheekily claimed for itself. The pop-out docking palette system previously seen in GoLive CS2 and InDesign CS2 has been adapted to work throughout the Suite. In many ways it has been improved too, albeit with the major drawback that CS3 palettes can only be docked to your main display. If you currently use dual displays when working in InDesign, for example an external monitor connected to a notebook, and are accustomed to docking the palettes on the second display, Adobe has effectively disabled the feature for you. Adobe does not regard this as a problem, so don't expect to see it fixed.

More of the programs support Illustrator's colour swatches file format, which is very helpful for maintaining consistency across workflows. Given that you still need to export and import the files between programs, however, it's still a far cry from being seamless. And try as it might, Adobe is still struggling to keep its Web program interfaces in sync, with the ex-Macromedia products Dreamweaver and Flash still looking and feeling different from the other programs in the Suite.

Overall, Creative Suite 3 is a great product but not an irresistable upgrade. The new features tend to fall into the "want to have" rather than the "must have" category, and Creative Suite 3's UK price is an astonishing example of corporate piss-taking within a captive market. The Suite costs $1,799 in the US and £1,655 in the UK. Even if you were to add 25 percent to the US price to cover taxes and so on, the Suite should still only cost in the region of £1,150 on British soil.

Adobe has gambled that UK buyers are happy to pay an extra £500 more than their American counterparts and too stupid to question the policy. Perhaps Adobe is right to think we're all wealthy morons over here, but we do wonder if the company is beginning to lose the plot.

Make no mistake, the Design Premium edition of Adobe Creative Suite 3 is a fine piece of software. But for most current owners of version 2, it's hardly an essential upgrade and will upset GoLive and ImageReady users. Also beware of Adobe's cynical approach to UK pricing.