The second part in a series of articles about Adobe CS4. (Part one)
Earlier this month I attended the Adobe CS4 tour, where I learnt about all of the cool new features in the latest release of this multimedia suite of applications. It’s all very exciting stuff, and I hope to be able to upgrade soon.
So, last week I left you all in the lurch by talking about only two of the 13 applications within the suite. Obviously I’m not going to talk about them all (on a weekly release schedule, I might be finished by the time CS5 is out), but in this part I’ll be talking about Illustrator and Flash.
Illustrator CS4
I don’t use Illustrator often, but it’s a very useful tool when I’m having to make logos. There’s some cool new features though, here’s the ones I think I’d personally use the most:
- New gradient tool — I could never get the gradient in Illustrator.. it was completely lost on me. So I think this is probably the best improvement of the lot. Rather than use that really complicated dialogue box, you can now create your gradient on-screen, a little like in Photoshop. It also has opacity control, which I’m very surprised it didn’t already have
- Blot brush — A brand new paint tool, I think this is one you need to play with before you realise the true value of this tool. It looks interesting, and if it’s as clean a paint tool as the sales blurb suggests, this should be one mighty fine tool
Flash CS4
I’m the first to admit, I haven’t done much Flash work. But the way the web is going, I need to start taking it seriously. And with the release of CS4, I think my life has suddenly been made much easier.
- Object-based animation — Known to the rest of us as “animation suddenly got easier”. Rather than animating using key frames, you can now create a path that the object follows. It’s all very intuitive, and this is another one of those “why wasn’t this done earlier?” features
- Motion editor and presets — Working alongside object-based animation, this cool little feature gives you even more control while animating objects, giving you a choice of presets to save you even more time
- Bones tool — When I first heard of this tool, I wondered what on earth it could be. I mean, bones? But then I saw it. ‘Bones’ is a bit of an odd name for a really funky tool. Objects can be given kinematics physics rules, and can be moved around easily by either the author or the end user. Ideal for moving around characters and just about anything else that has joints
- Adobe Air — As I was saying earlier, the web is going multimedia and offline. Adobe’s answer to this is Adobe Air, and you can create your own Air applications quickly and easily using Adobe Flash. Certainly one to look out for, I think
- Pixel pusher — There were a few times during the demos where the Adobe guys had to say “We’re not cheating here folks, this really is happening!”. Bitmap images and videos can be transformed, skewed, pushed, squeezed, pinched, poked, and prodded. In real time. Without any kind of lag. This is something you have to see to believe