Suite never tasted so good: exclusive review of Adobe Creative Suite 3
With an official launch date of March 27 in the US, the Adobe CS3 range including Adobe CS3 Design Premium, Production Premium and Web Premium, has addressed some general user requirements across the suites and some very specific ones within the applications.
Throughout the Creative Suite applications, there is a new interface to address the constant problem of palette blight. Panes are docked at either side of the screen or arranged in vertical stacks called docks but, if you prefer, you can still use them as floating palettes. Clicking on the grey strip at the top of a dock toggles the dock between an expanded and contracted view that shows only an icon for each palette. Panes and palettes can be hidden, as before, using either TAB or SHIFT-TAB but now, much like the hidden dock on Mac OS X, palettes will pop-out as you move to the left or right of the screen—a great enhancement that minimises palette blight while maximising the work area.
For this purpose of this review, I have focused on three of the print workflow applications: Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop CS3.
Illustrator CS3, the thirteenth version of the software, focuses heavily on a new colour environment called Live Color that enables a user to modify a complete colour scheme in selected objects in one action. It will aid designers in selecting sets of colours—warm, cool, complementary, supplementary, etc—and also in the management of colours in sets. A concept can be presented in a set of varying colour schemes very quickly. The new Live Color dialogue hosts a universe of options, including the ability to easily modify artwork to map colours to other tints or shades.
Path editing is also more intuitive. As you select points using the Direct Selection tool, they magnify as the Direct Selection tool is over them and the Control panel displays tools to add and delete points, cut and join paths and convert anchors. Multiple selected anchor points can also now be removed in one action. There is a new Eraser tool making some effects easier to achieve, and an Isolation Mode that works by double-clicking any group in order to enable object editing while temporarily disabling editing of the rest of the artwork. It works with all objects in a group, including Live Paint groups, symbols and objects with envelope distortion applied.
The new Crop Area tool lets you double-click on an object or group to set crops around the selection, then choose File > Save As PDF to create a single-page PDF cropped to that selection. It also has Control palette editing and includes dimensions and units for print, web, video and film. Flash integration is also improved with vectors that copy-and-paste and import reliably, maintaining the integrity of paths, anchor point positions, gradients, clipping masks and symbols as well as preserving the layer and grouping structure.
Transparency a clear winner
InDesign CS3 provides new creative controls, as well as productivity enhancements for repetitive tasks. For instance, the Pages palette now displays thumbnails for faster navigation and management of pages within and between documents.
Transparency has taken a major leap forward with the ability to apply transparency and effects to any part of an object—fill, stroke or content including type. Effects are located in the Effects palette, making the interface more similar to Photoshop, and now include a gradient feather which is essentially a gradient with transparency, bevel and emboss, inner and outer glow, as well as drop and inner shadows that can be saved as Object Styles.
Timesaving improvements include the ability to place multiple files at once with the Multi-File Place command. Choose Place once, select multiple text and graphics files, click Open, and then click the icon to place the files one at a time, using arrow keys to toggle through thumbnails to locate a particular file. New frame-fitting options let you edit settings on a frame to automatically size incoming content, while double-clicking a frame handle fits the frame to its content. Tables and cell styles facilitate fast and consistent table formatting and as well as document-wide table-formatting changes.
Photoshop for professionals
Adobe CS3 Design Premium includes Photoshop CS3 Extended, a new version that combines all features of Photoshop CS3 with additional features and tools for more specialised needs. There are new tools for professionals in film, manu-facturing, architecture, engineering, healthcare and science as well as precise selection tools for image editing. The new Quick Selection tool makes a selection by loosely painting an area and pressing modifier keys to modify the selection. It automatically completes the selection that can then be fine-tuned using the new Refine Edge command.
Non-destructive image editing is a significant new feature that can be applied to any part of an image once it has been converted to Smart Filters, much like the existing Smart Objects for vector artwork. Smart Filters are applied within a Smart Object layer and are non-destructive and fully editable so they can also be scaled, transformed and edited non-destructively.
The new Auto-Align Layers command lets you combine the features of several versions of an image by placing multiple images on separate layers and auto-aligning the layers based on content. Layers are moved, rotated and/or warped to align them, and the Auto-Blend Layers command blends colour and shading. The Vanishing Point Filter has also been enhanced with 3D support.
