Courtesy of Design Tools Monthly

UPGRADE: Illustrator CS3

Illustrator CS3 shows major improvements, including:

• Universal Binary, now 20%–50% faster, and multi-processor aware.

• When creating a new document, Document Profiles let you choose a tool set and palette setup that's more appropriate for Web, print or video.

• Several new features are borrowed from FreeHand, which should make it easier for FreeHand users to migrate to Illustrator: an Eraser tool lets you drag across paths to literally erase portions of objects; and you can now align and distribute multiple anchor points.

• Mousing over a path highlights points on the path.

• A Brush tool lets you "paint" to create new shapes.

• Live Color is a revolutionary new feature that lets you create a harmonious color scheme from any color in your artwork, then apply that scheme to an entire drawing (or to a complex object). As you change the color scheme (by dragging dots around a color wheel), the object changes colors as well. Color schemes can also be saved as presets to apply to other objects.

• The Live Color feature can also intelligently reduce the number of colors in an object -- all the way down to grayscale.

• A new Isolation Mode lets you work on only a selected group of objects, while all others are temporarily frozen.

• Integration with Flash is improved: because Flash's object tools now behave like Illustrator's, any objects you create in Illustrator behave identically in Flash (paths, anchor points, gradients, layers, etc.). Also, Illustrator's Symbols now behave like Flash symbols, you can define and control text objects for Flash, and you can export directly to SWF format.

• You can now use spot colors in ALL effects, and import Photoshop duotones as well.

• A new Crop tool lets you reduce the size of the illustration.

• A new Control Panel replaces the Control Bar, with many more options that are more efficiently placed.

Price: $599; upgrades $199.Adobe Systems Inc.
www.adobe.com

UPGRADE: Photoshop CS3

Photoshop CS3 now comes in two versions: regular and Extended. The Extended version is intended for technical fields such as medicine, architecture, film and television, manufacturing and engineering. It adds 3D modeling capabilities, texture editing, advanced video features including cloning and healing on video layers, and scientific image analysis. For a description of its features, see http://blogs.adobe.com/
jnack/2007/03/
whats_unique_to.html.

Both versions of Photoshop CS3 add many new features, including:

• Speed: more than 40% faster than CS2 on Intel Macs.

• Smart Filters let you apply, adjust, add and remove filter effects nondestructively, to re-editable selections.

• Auto-alignment of objects when compositing. Really!

• Auto-blending of edges when compositing or making a panorama; it also smoothes lighting differences along overlapping edges.

• Quickly select an object edge by brushing around it with the Quick Selection tool.

• Export full-resolution images in the Zoomify format for use on Web pages. Zoomify lets users zoom in extremely close, using Adobe's Flash Player, regardless of Internet connection speed.

• Camera Raw is vastly improved, and now supports JPEG and TIFF formats -- so you can use one tool to manage and adjust all your images. Now, you can batch-change every image from your camera, including noise, color temperature, exposure, tint, fill light, etc.

• Camera Raw also: is faster; has a nondestructive Clone and Heal tool; adds a Fill Light and Vibrance control; has an advanced grayscale conversion control; and shares Photoshop Lightroom's conversion settings.

• Camera Raw and Photoshop Lightroom share conversion settings, so that changes in one are reflected in the other.

• New Vanishing Point controls for multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes -- great for packaging.

• Vastly improved B/W conversion, with an intuitive new Channel Mixer.

• You can now save presets for more tools, such as Curves, B/W Conversion and Channel Mixer.

• Vastly improved Curves interface, with an integrated histogram and simultaneous display of multiple color channels.

• Cloning and Healing tools now have preview overlays and multiple source points.

• The Print dialog box is dramatically simplified and more intuitive.

• Zoom up to 3200%.

• Save for Web automatically converts images to the sRGB color space.

Price: $649, upgrades $199; Extended $999, upgrades $349.

UPGRADE: InDesign CS3

Adobe made many small efficiency improvements to InDesign CS3, along with a few new "wow!" features:

• A Transparency setting no longer applies only to an entire object. Instead, you can vary the transparency of a box's stroke, fill, text, and picture separately.

• 10 of Photoshop's Bevel and Emboss Effects are available to objects in InDesign. And, you can apply them separately to an object's stroke and fill.

• Feathering is vastly improved by Directional Feather and Gradient Feather options.

• The new Multi-file Place lets you load your cursor with a folder full of placeable items (pictures, text, PDFs, etc.), then place them one after another onto the page. The cursor shows a preview of each one as it comes to the front of the queue, and you can skip backward or forward among the items to place the one you want.

• You can now place a page from an existing InDesign document into a picture frame in a different InDesign document -- similar to placing a PDF. There is no live updating, so it's not quite the same as what QuarkXPress does. Instead, it's just like placing a picture: you can manually update the link at any time, and when you print or Package your document, you're alerted if the placed file has changed and you must update the link.

• You can customize the Control Panel and Menus to include various items or not.

• The Pages panel now shows full-color previews of each page.

• Double-click an image frame to switch between selecting the frame and its content.

• If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use it to scroll up and down long Panels (such as Styles).

• You can save Styles for Tables and table Cells. Similar to Paragraph or Character Styles, Table Styles let you save any combination of attributes applied to a Table or a Cell, and then apply those to other Tables and Cells. Also, if you change the Style, then Tables and Cells based on it will reflect the change.

• Tables that are linked to external data (such as an Excel spreadsheet), now maintain the formatting of body rows when the external file is updated. Header rows still must be reformatted when updated.

• Find/Change almost anything, including object attributes, special characters, etc., use Grep to create complex find/change routines, and save any search to reuse in the future.

• Bullets and numbering have been greatly improved.

• In long documents, you can place variables in the headers and footers, to easily create directories, etc.

• Export a page in XHTML format: a welcome improvement over "Package for GoLive".

• Lock items on Master pages and synchronize Master pages across documents.

• Master Page items are indicated by a dotted outline on document pages, to help identify them.

• Align items to a selection.

• Wrap text "toward" or "away from" a page's spine.

• It's a Universal Binary, running natively on PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.

• Styles can be organized into groups in the Styles palette.

• Nested styles can be looped, so that they repeat until the end of a paragraph.

• To fit a frame to a picture or the text within the frame, just double-click an anchor point. Or, to fit it in one dimension, double-click one edge of the frame.

• Set frame attributes on an empty frame, so that when content is imported, it takes on those attributes.

Price: $699 US; upgrades $199 US.