Adobe Creative Suite CS4 - Design Premium

 

 
The Interface

The interface has changed with both cosmetic modifications and attempts to boost productivity. The most-used features have been added as buttons on the top menu bar and joined by the new, Arrange Documents button, the Rotate View button and Extras (guides, grids and rulers). At the side fly-out tab you are shown an Adjustments Panel and a Mask Panel (see screen grabs). Setting the adjustments to affect one layer (ie 'clipping') now has its own button, an improvement over the previously fiddly Alt- Clicking the join line in the Layer Palette.

The Masks tab now collects together some of the functionality from the Layers palette, the Refine Edges and the Selective Color Tool. This makes masking more of a one-stopshop. The Extract Filter (and the pattern maker) have been removed from the Filter drop down. The Extract Filter, for example, is now available as an 'extra' on the install CD.

 

Open GL Interface

Under Edit>Preferences>Performance you will find a check box to activate 'Open GL Drawing'. The name of the installed graphics card is also displayed here and a check on the Adobe website for a compatibility list presently shows nine Mac cards, 21 nVidia and 13 ATI cards. With Open GL you no longer have to put up with jaggies at the non-integer magnifications (typified by 33.3% and 67%) and the magnification may be seamlessly ramped up and down. This should have benefits when judging sharpening which has always been a tricky issue, limited to 100% and 200% magnifications – it will bear some intense investigation for a later article! Open GL also brings a cute ability to rotate your image on screen so that it is not aligned with the edges. This is identical to turning your sketching paper on an angle when using real, lead pencils. With an image rotated on screen, holding the Shift key down still constrains the brushes and other tools to the orthogonal directions – that is straight up and down or side to side, but actually on the slant on the image (see screen grab). People doing a lot of tricky masking would find use for this feature.

Drag Brush Adjustment

We assume because of the Open GL, changing the brush size is now very much quicker (instantaneous in fact!). However, the really clever bit is that if you hold Alt-Ctrl and Right Click you see a mimic of you brush and you can drag it larger or smaller. Holding the Shift key as well makes the brush harder or softer. Only time and continued use will tell us if this is better than using the square brackets.

Preview for the Rubber Stamp Tool

This is a very useful feature as you can see what you are likely to get from a cloning operation. It takes just a sentence to describe but has a value far beyond that!

Bird's Eye View

This is a simple but very effective new feature. If you are working at high zoom magnification on an image and wish to move to another part of the image you hold down the H key (which switches you to the Grabber Tool as long as you are not editing text). Then you mouse click which instantly flies you high above the image to give you the entire view. You then drag the rectangular box to the new position, let the mouse click off and instantly you are at the same high zoom magnification on the new area. It does not sound much as this little passage of writing, but is a dream to use!

Flick panning is also possible which makes moving about straightforward – you click the mouse down and flick the image, which keeps moving in the direction of the flick. We were able to throw a 600MB image around like a web image. It is very akin to working an iPhone for those who are up to speed on such things.

Arrange Documents

We agonised for some time about how useful this feature would be if you were designing a wedding album page. It allows you to arrange a bunch of images on-screen in a pre-set layout and includes some asymmetrical arrangements, such as four small views and one large one. However, for album design what you really need is a large, landscape, double-page spread at the bottom and a bunch of smaller satellite images above, for dragging and placing. An ability, therefore, to make your own, bespoke, Arrange Documents layouts would be a real boon. It is the kind of thing that some third-party geeks might even be working on already (anybody out there?).

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