Adobe is launching the latest version of its media design bundle, and DigitalJournal.com got an exclusive look into the new features and options. Creative Suite 4 adds some cool tools for publishers, graphic artists and everyday designers.
Digital Journal – When any news about Adobe‘s landmark product hits the wires, Creative Suite fans suddenly perk up their ears. After all, everyone from publishers to graphic artists to filmmakers are using the media design program’s tools in order to create their magazines, artwork, video clips and more.
Creative Suite 4 will be available in October for an unspecified price, and before the launch DigitalJournal.com was treated to an intense briefing on the new features bound to make CS4 a design winner.
Adobe specialist Colin Smith walked us through some add-ons to InDesign, a flagship program for magazine publishers. “Cross media is the big nirvana for publishers who want to move assets from print to Web to different devices,” Smith said. He showed off a technique to export a file and turn it into a Flash document, available to be outputted into PDFs, for example.
This Flash file could also sport a page-like curl at the top right, giving it the look of a real magazine. Smith noted some publishers pay companies massive fees to convert their magazines into this digital format, but CS4’s InDesign will accomplish this replica easily.
Smart align guides are also useful for layout artists. If photos in a row are out of place, the designer can ask InDesign to align the bottom portion of each photo. The program also senses the gap between each photo and aligns the space perfectly.
Then there’s the preflight feature. It analyzes a file to see if it’s suitable to print, pointing out any kind of layout or graphic errors. While it was available for CS3, you had to hit the button to activate it. But CS4 now lets you run tests on the file during the work day. A small button displays green if everything is OK, and red means something is wrong. It’s an ideal tool for layout artists who might not remember to hit the preflight button every other hour.
In the Adobe Bridge area, photo enthusiasts now have more flexibility. With a RAW file, they can “paint” on an image to reduce brightness, using a brushstroke tool to paint the portions that need adjusting. It’s much easier than de-brightening the entire image, Smith noted.
He also demonstrated a fascinating option. Say you have an image you’d like to scale down into a banner pic. But bringing down the top half also squishes the photo subjects of, say, three surfers on a beach. In Photoshop, you can now select the subjects to isolate them from your background resizing. The Content-Aware Scale enables you to mess around with the landscape of a beach while maintaining the proportions of the photo subjects. A great tool for all graphic designers who want to save time and effort.
Photoshop is also upping its 3D strengths. Smith demonstrated new tools to rotate and orbit a 3D image using a widget at the bottom to rotate how and where the image should move. Users can also paint directly on 3D models, a feature many CS fans requested, Smith said.
Want to create stunning vector artwork in Illustrator? CS4 has added the blob brush, Smith pointed out. This brush is good for people who don’t use the pen tool. You can paint broad strokes over someone’s face, for example, which acts as a fill, not a stroke. Another click of a button and the face is gone but the artwork created by the blob brush remains, offering a fine rendering of a photo with all the artistry and none of the photography.
Adobe Flash in CS4 also sees some improvements. An eye-popper of a feature is dubbed the “bone tool” and it allows you to “create simulated armature movement,” Smith described. So if you have an image of a guy from the waist up, use the bone tool on the arm to allow that arm to swing normally. Add it to legs to give you control over the limb’s movement, and you suddenly have a Flash file of a moving human, all by using one tool.
Premiere Pro has also been tweaked to allow for tapeless editing. Clicking on the media pulls up thumbnails to give the user quick access to those clips. The program also supports Blu-ray pop-up menus, a sign of the times for high-def lovers.
And here’s a remarkable feature for journalists, especially. In the new version of SoundBooth, Adobe allows you to find metadata on sound files because the program can transcribe the audio to text. Sporting 85 per cent accuracy on all words, Smith said, the audio transcription offers you the option to search for certain words in someone’s speech or interview. Journalists will appreciate all the time they’d save after recording an interview, because finding a subject’s views on the economy, for instance, is now easily searchable.
In the beginning of the briefing, Adobe outlined a lofty goal: to revolutionize how the world engages with ideas and information. While abstract, the manifesto isn’t completely off target. Adobe’s release of Creative Suite 4 signals another arrow in a designer’s quiver, and once again CS4 has hit the mark beautifully.
