Chris Zammit01 October 2008, 1:33 PM
After reading our Top 5 new features in CS4 story, APC's art director Chris Zammit made his own list of the CS4 features most likely to excite design & production professionals.
With CS4, Adobe has added more functionality, usability and user-friendly functions than in any previous version. Hell, they’ve even began to make their products a bit more intuitive. With over 20 software products crammed into six different versions, it would take a year's worth of testing and a novel-sized review to cover everything. But, here are the top ten most revolutionary additions to CS4 that I believe will actually be used on a daily basis.
1. Live pre-flight — InDesign
In the publishing industry, there are a million and one things you have to check before you can send a page off to print. InDesign now has a live pre-flight system that actively checks documents for a wide variety of ‘errors’ that are pre-determined by the user into a pre-flight profile. Alerts can be given for anything from incorrect images sizes, low image resolutions and it can even alert you when you have overspilled text on a page and point you to where you can find it via a simple pre-flight panel.
2. Content-aware scaling - Photoshop
Before
After
The differences between print and Web formats have always caused compatibility issues when transferring images from one to the other. In the past if you wanted to use a horizontal image vertically, you either had to savagely crop it or go into Photoshop and do hours of tedious cutting and blending. Now, Photoshop allows you to recompose a photo as you resize it without distorting the image. This preserves vital areas (such as people)as the image adapts to new dimensions.
3. Web design in InDesign
Design your interactive material using InDesign and then export it directly to Flash in SWF format without having to go into Flash. You can now make Interactive PDFs straight from Indesign. The Flash features are easy-to-use with a simple button panel, animated transition thumbnails, and a new page curl effect to give a feeling of interactivity to your finished product.
4. Amazingly simple animations - Flash
With the new Bones tool, it’s now possible to animate a simple illustration in real time as well as create more naturally animated interactions between linked objects.
5. Find code in Dreamweaver Live View
The new code navigator makes finding relevant lines of code a simple one-step process. No more tedious searches.
6. Video post-production
Move content among After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Soundbooth and Encore with unparalleled efficiency. Expanded Dynamic Link enables you to link content between components so you can see updates instantly without rendering.
7. Transcribe audio in video
You can now make video visible online to Google searches. Spoken words in audio are transcribed and turned into searchable metadata. So now you can attract more people to your website with video content that shows up on Google.
8. Share my screen
Jump online and show or share your screen with up to 2 other people at a time. It's a browser-based mini-meeting in which you can let your boss or client see your Indesign document on their screen without the need for them to have Indesign. You can discuss a layout and make changes to it in real-time, just as if you were in the same room. You can also give the others control of your computer temporarily for Live collaboration on a document.
9. Set cross references - InDesign
Cross-reference text so that if you change it in one place in your document it will change automatically in the other spot. For example, if you change a story title on your contents page, it will change the corresponding headline and the matching text style in the publication if they are cross-referenced.
10. The Adjustment Panels
Photoshop has tobe the most awkward program to navigate your way around. To make common adjustments to images, the user is forced to go to varying menus. CS4 has introduced an Adjustment Panel that puts all the commonly used image adjustment tools in the one place. To top it all of, Photoshop also takes care of making the associated layers so as to protect your original images metadata. The corrections that are made are non destructive and sit in the Layers Panel. You can then go into those corrections and make more specialized changes, making your workflow even faster.