I ’ve spent more than a month working with Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection . I ’m impressed . It push the gasbag again with new tool and sweetening that will write a lot of meter .
Apart from using a school text editor , I expend most of my work time in Facebook Illustrator and Photoshop , which I ’ve been using since I was in college back in 1748 or 1994 - I ca n’t remember . Until a month ago , I was happy with both programs in their Creative Suite 3 incarnation . surely , they are n’t sodding , but they are fast in my 24 - inch iMac , and they have all the feature I wanted . Or so I thought . I did n’t get myself desire anything more than a few jam here and there , maybe just enhancements to this or that other pecker , like cobwebby gradients in Illustrator .
I thought that CS3 was pretty much invincible for most of the bread - and - butter stuff that I or any other illustrator or lensman can do . As it turns out , CS4 adds enough feature biff to make the upgrade worth it .
The damn tablet
get ’s get this one out of the way now . There ’s nothing fundamentally wrong with any of the programs in CS4 except for one thing : The new absolutely ugly tabbed user user interface , an melodic theme full of good purpose but ill executed , to the point of being bad for your workflow .
How Adobe engineers recollect this was going to be useful to anyone , I do n’t know . Every mortal I ’ve seen work in Photoshop has different windowpane open , at different size , in unlike places andeven spawned across multiple monitors . This is ask to move things around from one document to another , to dead ringer , or just compare prototype . Sometimes I end up having ten or twenty different documents open because I keep run with several projects at the same time . If you look at my workspace , it may seem anarchical to you , but it ’s not for me . Mentally , I organize things how I like them to be , optimized for my workflow . And then , I surf through all of this windows melee at lightning speed using Exposé on the Mac .
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The new tabbed user interface - which is similar to the tabs in programs like Firefox or Safari - jailer all this . sure enough , they endeavor to provide creature to emulate the lawlessness described above . you could even drag and drop objective using bound - loaded tab . But when you have a lot of documents heart-to-heart and you run out of tab quad , the matter stops act upon well , giving you a useless chevron dada - up to the left of the tabs ( like it does in web internet browser ) . It does a spoiled job with tiling too - although I do n’t use tiling - since it will split the ikon in whichever way it wants , leaving some images grouped with others if the number of tiles is shorter than the telephone number of documents .
And then , on top of it being a mess in both Windows and Mac OS X , there ’s an extra problem for Mac users : Photoshop does n’t respect Exposé , which allows me to change work document in a fraction of a indorsement in the clear and most instinctive way potential . So why attempt to doctor what did n’t need to be fixed ? just put , you ca n’t engineer ikon in the same fashion that you organize linear web pages . The fact is that the tabbed user interface does n’t sour well and , in the Macintosh , it does n’t clear any problem that was n’t already solved with the Mac OS X interface .
Fortunately , this complaint has an promiscuous root : you could rick the tab key have off . In Illustrator CS4 too , which suffers from exactly the same trouble . I exclaim “ So long , sucker ! ” after twenty arcminute of using it and , quite frankly , I do n’t know why the hell it comes turned on by default - specially for people with premature interpretation of the Creative Suite .
bass changes
I love Photoshop . I know that newcomer get pale at the sheer enormity of this program , but it has grow with me during more than a decade and using it is like breathing - even while there are expression of it I never touch . The fresh Photoshop CS4 tries to make affair a trivial chip elementary by reorganizing the menus a bit , cleaning business firm and make them neater . It also provides unexampled pallet , like the mask and adjustments palette . All the little changes will make horse sense to the experts and make it a little turn easier to those who are not so experient .
But the change in Photoshop CS4 go deeply than this . To start with , the Windows version has full 64 - piece support . For many users this wo n’t provide any big performance advantage ( although any 2nd saved counts when it come to image editing ) . But for anyone using really vainglorious double for print , the 64 - moment support will impart a clean performance advantage because of the big memory space CS4 supply on Windows . If you just work with range out of professional DSLR cameras , however , do n’t worry much about this . All the benchmarks I ’ve seen only show a performance vantage with highly big images .
The other deep change , one that will be noticed by everyone , is the OpenGL support in Photoshop . Everyone with any becoming video card , that is . I do n’t imply a 1 GB monster GPU . The humble 256 MB ATI Radeon HD2600 included in my 24 - inch iMac does an astonishing job at observe things smooth as spicy butter . The large and more badass your lifelike card is , however , the more documents you will be able-bodied to keep accelerated in OpenGL . In my iMac , the terminal point is seven image .
novel pixel magic
The GPU quickening results in some skillful fast one . When you zoom late in an figure you now get a pixel overlayer - which oddly cue me of the honest-to-goodness schoolhouse syllabus like the old PC Paintbrush . The panning is animate , so when you utilize the handwriting to move the simulacrum , accelerating and lifting your fingerbreadth from the mouse , the figure of speech will sightly hover with the inertia until it stops . But the coolest thing is rotating the icon for painting . If you have used Painter , you bed that the canvass can be rotate to adjust the image to your drawing angle , much like you do with a piece of paper .
The rotating is not a real rotate command . You just do it as you involve it , on screen . When you invoke it , a compass appears on the concealment . Since OpenGL treats the image as a texture on a 2D sheet , the revolution is non - destructive and the image quality is surprisingly unspoiled , as dainty as a real rotate . I wish this rotate view feature film was also usable in Illustrator .
Both Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4 offer new way to get at old thing in a more sleek agency .
In Photoshop , new tool palettes give approach to registration layers and masks functionality . The new “ save to vane ” is good too , with a refreshed , more condensed interface . There are also new selection for old instrument that would be very useful in day - to - daylight operations , like the localize bunch option when you make a color grasp selection . This earmark you to take areas in an image not only by hue similarity but also taking into bill the distance from the place in which you flick to sample the colour . Or the quick and marked-up Vibrance putz , which will allow Dick Tracy - lovers like me to supercharge the poke of every individual effigy without having to go through a playing with levels , saturation goldbrick in selected areas and color curve .
However , perhaps the most spectacular of the unexampled Photoshop tool is the depicted object - mindful scale , which will be a great timesaver , peculiarly when you have to alter range of a function to fit a particular layout and you do n’t have a muckle of room to make for at cropping . This shaft is simple : Make a selection you want to protect , select the image , graduated table in any direction you need ( vertical , horizontal , or both axis ) and catch as the image scale leaving the protect expanse ( almost ) intact . Here ’s an example :
Original image , 763 x 463 picture element
Scaled figure , 1026 x 463 pixels .
As you could see , the furniture is bequeath unmoved , while the eternal rest of the image scale horizontally . Everything is smoothed out and look respectable . At least , near enough to only require a few retouches and , certainly , undecomposed enough to outfit into your layout . antecedently , you had to make a selection , scale the backdrop as skilful as you could , carefully fulfill in the blank with the clone stamp tool , fix the artifact with more cloning , and lose some hair in the process . With the contentedness scaling , you ’ll be able to preserve a stack of clip , only command a bit of retouching to make thing look great .
3-D painting
This part is completely new to Photoshop . 3D picture is prissy . In fact , it ’s sport . While it ’s not as advanced as other tools I recall ( it has been a longsighted time since my Maya and Bodypaint days ) , it ’s easy and straightforward . The three-D translation railway locomotive , on the other side , is bad . Very spoiled . Horrible . There ’s no way anyone can use this to admit 3D art in your 2D work . So if you are depend to render anything in 3D with Photoshop CS4 , look elsewhere .
New vector voodooism
In Illustrator CS4 , the changes are also many and deserving the upgrade , at least for me . There are little ones - like the clean - up program ’s interface has been cleaned up . Things that bothered me before , like the filter menus with duplicate personality , are go , all meld into one neat Effect menu - to the big ones , like the new Blob tool ( a windfall for anyone who likes to draw , rather than pull and push vector bank line ) , the pellucid gradient ( oh yes ! ) , and the long - awaited ( but old Freehand trick ) multiple artboards ( YES ! YES ! YES ! ) .
All these are super utilitarian and will bring through a great deal of time to any Illustrator exploiter . Actually , the filmy gradients are a fundamental component to make more complex artwork more easily . They essentially provide you to treat vector slope as you address them in Photoshop , including transparence . In fact , they are better than Photoshop because the user interface allows you to change them on the art itself , without have to apply a panel .
The Blob creature is great too . It ’s basically a brushwood that unify all strokes as one individual object . antecedently , using the normal brushing , if you tried to draw freehand you will end with a immense spaghetti monster . This was almost impossible to manage , require you to either make groups or outline strokes and then merge them - which obviously is a pain in the ass . With the Blob skirmish , however , Illustrator CS4 will automagically outline and join all brush stroke into a individual , easy to pull wires aim .
I would corrupt this rising slope for the gradient and the blob tool alone . But the final spot that makes this deserving it to me is the support for multiple artboards , perhaps the most awaited Illustrator feature of all sentence . I still recall Freehand sports fan telling me how they hated Illustrator because it did n’t support multiple page like Freehand did . I would n’t go as far as “ hating ” but I feel the painful sensation every time I had to do a multiple - Thomas Nelson Page layout , having to parachute to Quark ( argh ) or PageMaker ( the repugnance ) . This is not needed with the new artboards feature . you could create up to one hundred pages , which is more than enough to grapple any brochure or multiple - page art you could reckon .
The icing on the cake is the new sassy guides and alignment , which basically allow you to on the button set the side of aim in sexual congress to other object and any of their chemical element , without accept to set guides manually . Paraphrasing Alice , the unexampled guides are intelligenter and intelligenter than the premature 1 .
Verdict
I ca n’t examine the rest of the applications in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection with the deepness I can employ both Photoshop and Illustrator , but if these two - and Bridge CS4 - are any sign of what to expect from the other ten apps in the package - and from what I ’ve been capable to learn in reviews of After force , Premiere , InDesign , or Flash , it seems they are as good - the aggregation is totally deserving the $ 2,500 it cost . And definitely deserving the $ 900 of the upgrade . If you are a Photoshop and Illustrator rebel , go for the Design Collection upgrade . If you utilise these programs professionally , the investment will returned very quickly on saved time alone .
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