Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator CS4
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Now on to Adobe Illustrator, a program that I have not used before but liked a lot of its features such as the simple to use tools. Illustrator is similar to CorelDRAW in that it is a vector drawing program but with many more features and more in depth tools.
Illustrator is not a program you can simply pick up and use with little instruction or tutorials and get the hang of in a day or so, it will take weeks of use to fully realize the potential of this program. I have been playing around with Illustrator in a few pet projects of mine to see what it’s like and what the new features really amount to and it is impressive.
Illustrator has some new tools and features that I really cannot say if it is worth upgrading to from the previous release but they are impressive. Multiple Artboards is not like new pages or documents as it creates different sized drawings into a single project using specific tools.
Working with one project and being able to have different sizes and orientations for drawings means no messing with reorienting things when getting ready to publish. You can also quickly and easily move things into other programs like Flash using these Artboards for simple creation between the programs.
In my example with the pictures I am using you could create a pieced together robot such as the large white one and cut and draw the various sections and pieces using Illustrator. Then when you have sections that would work together such as a foot you can copy these sections into a new artboard for later use in a Flash animation of this robot walking.
The various pieces you draw would make up different parts of a set of drawings you can easily create and keep as one file within the same document for easy working with the set of drawings. You can also publish your project using a PDF document in one simple process instead of having to piece things together in Acrobat.
I know I have not even scratched the surface of this new feature nor have I worked much with Illustrator but this looks to be a great feature that many have been wanting. One thing I have noticed about using Adobe products for a few years now, they really do listen to users and try hard to get suggestions and customer wants into their products.
Other new features include the Blob brush for creating varied type strokes with easily editable sizes that merge to like colored areas. You can also select single objects and merge or edit with only those objects for a tool that adds a creative aspect that is intuitive and works well.
Two different applications that the Blob brush tool would wrk well that I have played with is coloring in a drawing with a color and merging the strokes into the surrounding colors. Another use is drawing letters or parts of a logo and being able to merge to one part of the drawing and not others so your editing the part you want and not selecting or adding to others.
Other features added to Adobe Illustrator are transparency with gradients, clipping masks that totally hide objects and changing gradients directly on the objects instead of in the palettes. These other additions work well and make for a few extras that are an added boost to the CS4 lineup but may not be worth the upgrade themselves.
The Artboards themselves make the new Creative Suite 4 version of Illustrator a nice feature and for many who create multipart projects a must for this version. The other features also make it nice but the use of Artboards and the integration between programs in the suite will probably make this upgrade a must for previous Adobe Creative Suite users.
The Web Premium Creative Suite 4 is definitely worth the cost for anyone needing a web design suite of software with everything you need. If you’re considering the upgrade from a previous version I think this is one upgrade that you will not want to miss with the added features and integration.
Adobe Web Premium Creative Suite 4 is well worth the cost for web designers and web based illustrators wanting to create projects and individual pieces with easy to use programs. While I have not used all of this suite from Adobe I can easily see why Adobe is the industry leader in web and image design and creation.