CS4 Love

Posted on | October 9, 2008 | No Comments

Adobe launched their pre-release of Creative Suite 4 on Sept. 23 and a day later I saw videos from PhotoshopUserTV and Layers Magazine TV, along with the quick demonstrations from Adobe’s website — I fell in love and decided to take the plunge and pre-order. Hopefully the wait on the actual release won’t be too long (predicted to be about a month).

One item that helped tip the scale is a new feature within InDesign called Smart Guides. But seriously, all the new updates and improvements Adobe has made to each piece of software is pure genius.

For InDesign, other changes include: spread rotation, page transitions for export to SWF and PDF (slick presentations with page curling — now I don’t HAVE to use PowerPoint), conditional text and cross-referencing (something that I believe was used in FrameMaker), just to name a few.

For Photoshop: a new adjustment panel, smoother zooming/rotation (no longer do you have to be at 25 or 50% to see decent image quality), content aware scaling, and the clone/burn/dodge tools get a serious update. These are only a start to the changes made.

For Illustrator: multiple artboards within the same document, transparency in gradients plus new gradient editing tools and the blob brush tool (which will definitely come in handy for someone like me who still doesn’t care too much for the PEN tool).

For Dreamweaver: the two biggest that I’ll probably take advantage of is HTML data sets and Live View.

Check them out and decide for yourself.

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