Tim attended the CS5 Launch yesterday in Chicago at Ascend Training and found the Adobe Story from script to metadata was a pretty cool feature. Industry-wise, Adobe’s purchase of Business Catalyst and Omniture could potentially give some CMS and Analytics tools a run for their money too.

Here’s a quick rundown on what’s new with Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Master Collection: a comprehensive toolset for designing across media with Design, Web, and Production Premium packages.

Limited 3D functions were introduced in several CS3 applications but Adobe really upped the ante with CS4.

Animators can now import 3D models into Photoshop, paint textures directly onto them and export PSD files with 3D objects intact for animating in After Effects. The resulting layers in After Effects retain all properties from the Photoshop document except for lighting, which of course can be re-created in After Effects. It’s a bit of a drawback, yes, but hopefully one that animators will be able to overlook in favor of having these new creative options at their fingertips.

Adobe has announced a new version of its flagship product line, Creative Suite 4. The suite boasts more seamless integration between applications as well as a whole slew of new features that will no doubt change our workflow over the coming months.

A few features—AIR integration, Dynamic Link, improved Device Central, and Connect Now, which allows users to share their screen from within an application—are available across multiple applications, while individual apps have seen significant overhauls as well. Hopefully the apps will load faster too, but I’m not going to hold my breath.