KEY POINTS:
I went to an Adobe launch the other day, for Creative Suite 4. It was set in a dark underground (literally) bar in Auckland.
Once upon a time Adobe reps used to tote PC and Apple laptops everywhere for different software, but already 18 months ago Adobe's PC demos were being run off MacBook Pros with Parallels and Windows installed on them. So I guess their biceps appreciate the break.
Anyway, apart from the slightly off-putting location in a bar so dark I could hardly see people's faces, with the crowd drinking all around me and music playing, there was only time for Adobe to run through one or two features of each product.
Looking through the suite (which I've been using in Beta) there don't seem to be that many new features. With the last couple of Adobe releases is the great ability that you can turn on a 'What's new in' feature under Window>Workspace, enabling you to spot the newbies at a glance because they all get highlighted in the menus.
I'd been using Photoshop, especially, in preparing images for my own mac.nz site for a few weeks and amongst the Photoshop features I used regularly, there were few obvious differences.
Once the Adobe launch started off in the aforesaid bar, of course, everyone was soon going "Wow, that's cool!" and the biggest excitement in Photoshop CS4 is so-called Content Aware Scaling. Now, as anyone with any digital imaging experience knows, making an image smaller is no sweat. Making an image bigger is a different story. Basically, the advice is "don't re-shoot it bigger".
That's because making an image smaller just deletes some pixels - you lose detail but hey, the picture's going to be viewed small anyway.
Making it bigger drags existing pixels apart, with new pixels being extrapolated to fill the gaps - not pretty at all, beyond a few percentage points.
But Content Aware Scaling protects detailed objects - say boats on the water - and when you drag the image bigger, the extrapolation works on the water between the boats where detail isn't so crucial. While not scaling the boats at all, merely moving them about in proportion to the scale direction. This really is clever. Useful? I guess that's up to you to decide. Anyway, it turned out my Beta was an early version and the feature wasn't there for me to try, so I can't even decide for myself.
But you can get a cool, free demo of this at Lynda.Com, the Mac video-based training people.
The non-destructive corrections right there in the new Adjustments panel are cool - no more toggling dialogues boxes on and off - and you quickly figure out Shift-Tab to make this big new right-hand-side panel appear/disappear.
Other big ticket items include new 3D controls which, to me at this early stage, are still pretty baffling.
There are many little refinements added to Photoshop, like better Dodge and Burn, enhanced selection, smoother pan and zoom, better motion graphics control, smarter Smart Objects - oh yeah, and the Clone Stamp has a neat little preview built into the control point, making it much easier to use.
But of course, there's much more to CS4 than just Photoshop (I use "just" advisedly - Photoshop is awesome). The CS4 apps let you use tabs a là Safari, Firefox etc. And Mac users really should know what this means by now - I train far too many people who haven't been using tabbed browsing.
With any new Adobe release or update, the place I always look is Device Central, the application that lets you see how content would appear on various smart phones, PDAs etc. I looked there first to check out the iPhone and iPod touch profiles - which still aren't there. Oh yeah, iPhone 2x does not support Flash - but they do support images and video, so where are the profiles, Adobe? Not in my Beta.
The best new features from other components of CS4 were multiple pages (or artboards) in Illustrator, multitrack support for real mixing in the sound app Soundtrack, and video effects program After Effects now supports Photoshop layers and has a nifty Cartoon effect (a much easier alternative to rotoscaping).
Animations are way easier to create in Flash, InDesign has live preflighting and a customisable Links panel and Indesign's exporting of documents for online has been improved.
But for me, the biggest 'wow' of all was reserved for Premiere. In fact, this was so amazing, I'm still wondering if I really saw it. An interview with a guy, shot on video, was transcribed automatically into text. When you clicked on a word in the displayed text, the video jumped to that frame.
Freakin' unbelievable! In fact, Soundbooth has this 'speech search' also. But I didn't get to ask if it would work with antipodean accents, as it wasn't a conducive environment for asking important questions.
Premiere also lets you do whole projects before rendering, supports HD based cameras and has a few more tricks, like Blu-Ray support.
If your business is focussed on more than one Adobe product, the case for upgrading could be pretty compelling. If your business is focused on one component, I suggest you evaluate the new features in more detail.
- Mark Webster mac.nz
