Adobe has announced benchmarking results from an independent research study conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting and commissioned by Adobe. According to the report
(http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/productivity/), features in Adobe Creative Suite 4 software can dramatically increase productivity, efficiency and return on investment.

Research shows that every unnecessary click has the ability to slow down users' productivity. Routine operations across Adobe Creative Suite 4 can be accomplished more quickly now than with previous versions, dramatically improving the user experience and saving hours every month, the study claims.

More than 100 benchmark tests focusing on design, print, digital imaging, web and interactive design, and video production were conducted. Tests covered workflow-related productivity measures as well as market-specific design and publishing activities. Key findings for design professionals include:

* Users can identify and eliminate production-level errors more than twice as fast in CS4 than in previous versions by activating the Live Preflight feature in InDesign software.

* Multiple artboards in Illustrator CS4 can help users save almost one-third the time previously needed to make changes to common parameters, like fonts and color, in projects composed of numerous design pieces.

* New Smart Guides provide positioning hints including alignment with borders, spacing and angle rotation when one is creating or modifying objects on a page. Creation of a new object and aligning it with two other objects now takes less than half the time it took with CS3.

Key findings for digital imaging professionals include:

* Making simple, non-destructive adjustments to an image is more than twice as fast using Adjustment Panels with Photoshop CS4 than with previous versions.

* Adobe Bridge CS4 increases efficiency in managing a wide variety of files and metadata. The new Review mode can help users review and select images for use twice as fast than with previous releases of the application.

* Open GL support in Photoshop CS4 helps speed up image-navigation features including zooming and panning. Benchmark tests showed that in one month it can save users one hour and 40 minutes compared with CS3.

Key findings for web design professionals include:

* New commands such as Live Preview and Live Code are designed to eliminate time-consuming tasks that can shave hours off of Web development projects each month compared with CS3. Using Live Code versus checking code in the browser to preview a Web page now takes 68 percent less time than CS3.

* With Flash CS4 and a more streamlined process for creating Motion tweens, Web professionals can create simple animations in one-third of the time than with previous releases.

* Photoshop Smart Objects in Dreamweaver CS4 allows users to place native, multi-layered Photoshop files in a web page without needing to update images already placed. With three Photoshop round-trips, CS4 users take 33.98 seconds to complete the project, less than half the time it took in previous versions.

Key findings for video professionals include:

* CS4 users who leverage the new Speech to Text feature in Adobe Premiere Pro to search for a specific spoken phrase in a 10-minute video can achieve results in 16.46 seconds. Users of previous versions would have taken almost a minute and a half to get the same results.

* Navigating to a specific layer or effect in a complex After Effects project containing thousands of layers previously may have taken nearly two minutes versus the previous version. With Quicksearch in After Effects CS4, searches now take 80 percent less time.

* Working with Adobe OnLocation in CS4 revolutionizes tapeless video capture by uploading footage directly to the hard drive of a computer for immediate editing, which eliminates time spent ingesting video from tape. It now takes less than a minute with CS4 versus more than 11 minutes with previous versions of Creative Suite.