Creative Suite 5 — What’s New

• Email
• Print
• Decrease
• Increase
• 

Launched on 12 April, Creative Suite 5 contains the usual software bouquet and also integrates the web analytic tools of Adobe’s September 2009 acquisition -- Omniture. Brand new is Flash Catalyst, with the ability to design interactive content without writing code. The Adobe CS5 product family also enables the creation of content and applications for the new releases of Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2, which are optimized for high performance on mobile screens. The complete Creative Suite 5 line up includes 15 products, associated technologies and integration with new Adobe CS Live Services — complimentary for a limited time.

• 
• Edge Detection uses adaptive selection technology to create selections along different edge types — such as a simple line, like the countours of a face, or a more complex edge, such as hair

This is a set of five online services, CS Live Services that currently include Adobe BrowserLab, Adobe CS Review, Acrobat.com, Adobe Story and SiteCatalyst NetAverages from Omniture. Adobe CS Review enables online design reviews directly from Creative Suite 5 applications, while Adobe BrowserLab is a tool for testing web site content across different browsers and operating systems. NetAverages provides web usage data. Adobe Story is a collaborative scriptwriting tool that improves video production and post-production workflows in CS5 Production Premium. Access to Acrobat.com services, such as Adobe ConnectNow Web conferencing is also part of CS Live Sevices.

A bit about the workhorse tools in the Design, Production and Web bundles. Each bundle comes in either standard or premium editions.

Design Premium
InDesign CS5 page layouts can be delivered on a variety of wireless devices from laptops to mobile phones. Enhanced support for industry standard EPUB file format enables delivery of eBooks to reading devices such as the Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble nook and tablets, including Apple iPad, with greater control over content ordering and styling. New production features include Document Installed Fonts, PDF export in the background and support for Adobe Bridge inside InDesign CS5 through an easy access panel.

Illustrator with more brushstrokes
Now users can control stroke width at any point along a path, align dashes to corners and path ends, add accurately placed arrowheads directly from the stroke panel and control how brushes stretch along a path. Painting with vectors now resembles real-world brush strokes with the new Bristle Brush that offers control of very detailed bristle characteristics such as size, length, thickness and stiffness, as well as brush shape, bristle density and paint opacity, for simulated life-like blending.

Illustrator CS5 is being introduced following Ideas digital sketchbook for the Apple iPad and iPhone, announced earlier this month. Illustrator now has an animation panel for flash so that Illustrator and PhotoShop files using flash can be viewed in different browsers on different operating systems. Always handy to make sure our websites are as uniform as possible across different browsers. This is one problem I am sad to say plagues our own websites, and hopefully CS5 will correct that. Lastly Flash Catalyst has been added so that there is no need for designers to go to coders for writing code they need to embed in their Illustrator and Photoshop files.

Production Premium
The Production Premium improvements and new additions centre around video editing and graphics not something very close to our printing and publishing industry but more for media production houses. Both Première Pro and After Effects are now 64-bit applications for both the Windows and Mac OS. Additionally the NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Adobe Mercury Playback Engine which allows Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 users to open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD sequences in real time and play back complex projects without rendering.

Web Premium
Web Premium has a new addition with Flash Catalyst along with already present Flash Builder and Flash professional. There is a better hand off between Flash Professional and Flash Builder to make it easier to build flash applications with the least amount of coding. Flash Catalyst as already mentioned can take designs from PhotoShop and Illustrator. For example, image objects in PhotoShop files can be easily transformed into 3D objects and their texture and orientation changed with ease. Dreamweaver now has Browser Lab where we can preview our web pages live in different combinations of browsers and operating systems. It allows different browser views to be placed along side each other in a side-by-side or overlaid on top of each other with varying transparencies so that the relative changes are more visible.

In addition, Dreamweaver CS5 now supports popular content management systems Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, allowing designers to get accurate views of dynamic Web content from within the product. Omniture provides analytics for the web for better monetization.

More mobile platforms
Using Flash Professional CS5, designers and developers can create, test and deliver web content across a wide range of mobile platforms and devices such as smart phones, tablets, net books, smart books and other consumer electronics. Users can look forward to deploying content in the browser with Flash Player 10.1 and as a standalone application with AIR 2 when those planned products become available. In addition, users can now build AIR applications using the new Packager for iPhone tool preview, a component of Flash Professional CS5, which can be deployed on the iPhone and iPad (subject to Apple’s requirements and approval) with future device support planned for Android, BlackBerry and Palm webOS.

• 
• Using CS5’s new refine edge tool we selected and removed Mirja Martenen from the foreground and then expanded the selection and used the content aware fill tool

PhotoShop — the Refined Edge
The workhorse application in the whole suite as always is Photoshop. New to this edition is the Minibridge which allows easy access and navigation for image assets. A new refined edge selection technology in Photoshop CS5 makes complex image selection possible by precisely detecting and masking the trickiest types of edges, such as hair and foliage, while eliminating background colour contamination. Once a selection is made, the image element can be removed to a layer and the Content-Aware Fill command replaces the missing pixels in a quarter of the time it used to take manually, matching lighting, tone and noise so it looks like the deleted content never existed.

For photographers, Photoshop CS5 now offers next-generation high dynamic range (HDR) capabilities. When combining multiple exposures into a single HDR image, Photoshop CS5 preserves the full tonal range of a scene with speed and accuracy. The new HDR Pro offers improved ghost artefact removal and greater tone mapping and adjustment control. With HDR toning, users can emulate the striking look of an HDR image with any single-exposure image.

Puppet Warp gives users the power to precisely reposition or warp any image element, such as straightening a bent arm in a photo or manipulating the landscape to generate a new perspective.

3D and motion
With new Adobe Repoussé technology, users can easily create 3D logos and artwork from any text layer, shape or mask, as well as twist, rotate and extrude designs for different looks. To mirror the realism and appearance of 3D objects, a new materials library offers a breadth of rich options, including chrome, glass and cork. Users can also enhance the appearance of 3D objects by quickly creating shadows with the new shadow catcher. For motion content, tools including paint, text and clone can be used directly over multiple frames of a video sequence with ease using single-key shortcuts.

Pricing and availability
Adobe Creative Suite 5 products are scheduled to ship within 30 days, with availability through Adobe Authorized Resellers, the Adobe Store and Adobe Direct Sales. On the Adobe International store CS5 is still only a pre-order and the English language version is expected to ship only in mid-May 2010. The CS5 Master Collection is available for US$ 3,159 exclusive of tax. Upgrades – from CS4 Master Collection, US$ 1,093; from CS3 Master Collection, US$ 1,458. Upgrades from earlier suites and versions are US$ 1,579. For more information on the upgrade eligibility and pricing please refer to http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/upgradeinfo/.

• Email
• Print
• Decrease
• Increase
•