Five amazing new features of Adobe's CS4

In the days leading up to the official announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, the Internet was abound with rumours. Some knew of the new version of Photoshop by its project name "Stonehenge" and what it was likely to contain while Adobe just shrugged its shoulders and told people to wait. One rumour even suggested that CS4 was little more than a minor update that fixed the cracks & blemishes that had started to appear on CS3's tired and worn face.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 is an evolution of some of Adobe's greatest programs. Below are the top five cool new features that CS4 brings to the table, showing you just how Adobe has pushed the envelope.

1. 3D Painting

The word of three-dimensional animation is big. So big that almost every animated feature that exists today is based off  computer animation and no longer relies on the hand-drawn method that dominated the industry so few years ago.

It should then come as no surprise that there is a huge amount of animation tools that to go with all the 3D animating that goes on out there. One area that sees its fair share of competition is 3D painting tools.

You might not realise it but when a 3D model is created, it rarely looks colourful. Designed in a basic clay, it sports one colour plus the detail. The creator then goes on to make the texture for it and while the use of Photoshop is very common, it's not normally as easy as CS4 is about to make it.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 now offers the ability to load up a 3D model and paint on it within Photoshop itself. Animation buffs will be happy to note that you can zoom in and rotate within the power of the graphics processor and as you edit the changes are made. Your painting on the image will be 3D dimensional as the model is treated like a proper 3D object and the ability to paint or draw on it is treated as such.

If you're running an animation house or just an amateur, the extension of Adobe's foray into 3D will pay off big time now that you don't have to go and spend money on another 3D painting program.

2. Voice OCR

Probably one of the more important and unexpected developments seen in the Creative Suite package is found in Adobe's audio tool Soundbooth. Voice OCR (labeled in Soundbooth as "Speech Search") is similar to the OCR used with scanners to take images filled and turn them into text.

Say you've just recorded a chat with someone and you want to go through and find what the person has said but you don't want to go through the hassle of listening to it all over again. This feature scans through the sound (or movie) file and works out what's been said. Adobe has told us that there'll be a profile for Australian voice characteristics and in testing it with the American voice profile, we found that it was usually between 60-70% right.

Even if that's not perfection, that's still a hell of a lot easier to use than listening to the story again and again and even again. And after you've done it, Adobe loads the text into metadata making the information searchable should it ever go online.

3. Inverse Kinematics

Previously only familiar to people working in the film and animation industry, Inverse Kinematics (IK) is a feature new to Flash that aims to make things like character and skeletal animation easier by way of using bones. In 3D, bones are exactly what you'd think they were: a series of interconnecting pieces that work off each other. Similar to the way your hand pivots on your forearm and so onn, bones can be made to work off of each other in such a way that now your animated characters and designs can actually have a proper skeletal structure.

If you've ever had to animate anything in Flash before, you'll know how painful it is working everything frame by frame. This use of bones should change that and make animation fun for anyone to get into.

4. Share My Screen

Taking an older Macromedia technology and turning it into a meeting tool happened a year or two ago when Adobe took Macromedia Breeze and turned it into Adobe Acrobat Connect, a meeting application that allowed people to talk together online with the ability to use a whiteboard, video chat, and screen sharing.

A first for the Adobe suite, now many of the programs found in Creative Suite 4 have a slimmed down version of Acrobat Connect that allows you and two or three other people to talk online while they look at your screen. This means that while you're editing away at that magazine in InDesign or hacking away on an image before creating another Photoshop disaster, you can head online with a couple of people and show them what you're doing.

5. Images to CSS

One of the biggest questions from people creating images and portfolios is “how do I get this to look like a webpage?” It can be a bit of a hassle telling someone that design has very little to do with coding but now that might change thanks to some of the features Adobe is integrating in Creative Suite 4.

The new version of Fireworks, for instance, comes with a new method of slicing up your web design images that will also come with a Cascading Style Sheet exported for you. No more messy work starting on those complicated CSS layouts for your website.

Interestingly, one of the things most people will start to see throughout the Adobe line-up is the heavy shift to Flash-based dependency. Everything now seems to interact with Flash in some way, from video exports using it to InDesign being able to export books complete with page-turning animations all the way to Encore letting you export a DVD with working menus and video in Flash.

Adobe is letting everyone know just how much it values Macromedia's world-renown Flash and its CS4 uses it better than anything else.