If you’re in a rush here is the meat of what I gathered from picking through these previews:

Photoshop CS4 will..

• use the graphics card more aggressively, allowing for smooth zooming, canvas rotation, and other cool 3D effects with good performance
• have the same UI enhancements as the rest of the creative suit: tabs, frames, etc.
• include intelligent scaling, like the kind we’ve ooo’d and ahhh’d about for the past year
• be more flexible because of non-destructive editing via new adjustment options
• may possibly have multi-touch support
• have better masking.

Previews & Feature Lists

Camera Town Preview
This is one of the best previews I could find. Really comprehensive, but long. Looks to be straight from the horse’s mouth.

Pop Photo Hands On
A nice down-to-earth look at some helpful features.

Macworld previews the content-aware scaling
Macworld talks about how cool this feature is. Does anybody remember that this technology was developed a year or more ago, and bought by Adobe?

MacNN Multi Touch
MacNN lets us know that Photoshop will support multi-touch with certain hardware. Cool. Useable?

ZDNet Photoshp CS4 First Look
The ZDNet flavor of Photoshop CS4 preview. Nice, but could use some screenshots.

Videos

Sneak preview from Photoshop World Orlando

New 3D Effects

Content Aware Scaling (yawn)

Smooth zooming & rotating

Lets start with the obvious:

User Interface Changes

Section Summary:

1. New Splash Screen (of course)
2. No Microsoft Toolbar saves pixels
3. Document Tabs!
4. Document Frames
5. More accessible workspace presets
6. Some tools moved around on the tool panel

Adobe Illustrator CS4 starts flaunting its new look right from the start - the splash screen is still simplistic, but now features some shiny transparency effects on the “Ai”.

The next interface change may have you wondering if there is something wrong with your view settings. No, everything is working fine. Illustrator is overriding the Microsoft Windows Title Bar - the minimize, maximize and close buttons are integrated right into the main window (similar to Google Chrome). This not so subtle tweak actually saves quite a few pixels, which, it turns out, you’re going to need!

One of the best changes to the user interface in Illustrator CS4 is document tabs. If you have more than one Illustrator document open at a time, they automatically form tabs ala Firefox. If you want, these tabs can be separated from the main Illustrator window by grabbing the tab and dragging outward. You’re probably already an expert at managing tabs, and after a few minutes in Illustrator CS4 you’ll wonder how you put up with all that minimizing and restoring of documents. Tabbed documents save a lot of clicks.

If you look closely at the screenshot below, you’ll also notice that there is no ‘Filter’ menu - only an ‘Effects’ menu. I speculate that Adobe did away with the redundancy of the filter menu because of increases in effect performance and changes to the appearance panel.

CS4 has more document management tricks up its sleeve - frames. These frames are accessed via a little icon to the right of the menu bar called “Arrange Documents”. Click and you’ll find a drop down list of frame presets for two, three, four and more open documents. These presets are useful for comparing two documents side by side (especially on that new 30″ cinema display, right?). The “Arrange Documents” menu contains many presets for arranging open documents - stack side by side, on top of each other, in a grid, etc.

First Look: Adobe Illustrator CS4 Document Management from Go Media on Vimeo.

The paradox of new software is that it must balance conflicting interests: more power and improved usability. That is probably why the most recent versions of Illustrator keep re-thinking panel (they’re only palettes in Photoshop) management. Well, CS4 is no exception. The brains at Adobe have made workspace presets more accessible by putting a drop-down menu right above the panels. They’ve also done a lot of the leg work to convince us that custom workspaces can save time. These presets are easily accessible and fill the dock with customized panels for typography, web, painting, etc. The presets from Adobe also include application specific layouts such as “Like Photoshop”.

The Illustrator’s toolbox has been slightly shuffled in Illustrator CS4. The eraser tool is given a more prominent place in a group of often used tools - it now sits along with the pen, text, shape, and brush tools. This means that the scissors and knife tool have also moved (they’re only accessible in the flyout of the eraser). The slice tools use to sleep in the fly out menu from the crop tool. Now, they have their own spot on the toolbar.

Finally, while having little effect on your workflow, Adobe moved their logo and link from the tool box to the menu bar. These are the kind of little tweaks I really enjoy - they make CS4 feel more polished, refined and purposeful.

New Tools

Section Summary

1. Blob Brush
2. Artboard Tool
3. Updated Gradient Panel
4. Appearance Panel Overhaul
5. New Document Options

Blob Brush Tool
The first new tool I noticed was the Blob Brush Tool. If you’ve ever worked in flash or frequently expand brushes, you’ll probably appreciate this new tool. Here’s how it works: it organically draws a shape instead of a path. As you draw with the brush, the path is expanded every time you raise your wacom pen (or mouse). Then, as you add more brush strokes, overlapping sections are automatically added together to form one shape. Here’s a video of the brush tool in action to see what I mean:

First Look: Adobe Illustrator CS4 Blob Brush Tool from Go Media on Vimeo.

When the blob brush tool is double clicked, brush options are available. I was happy to see that Wacom tablets will be fully supported with blob brushes. Depending on how the final product turns out, Wacom artists may be able to ditch the Photoshop + Autotracing routine and stay in Illustrator the whole time by using blob brushes.

Artboard tool

While this could technically fall under “changed” features, it is cool enough to warrant its recognition as a whole new feature. The artboard tool is an evolution of the crop area tool from Illustrator CS3. However, instead of using cumbersome hotkeys to create multiple crop areas, CS4 re-thinks the whole concept of an artboard. In CS4, using the artboard tool will create a new artboard by default and give it a number automatically. Clicking on the white space of any artboard with the Selection Tool will activate it. These new artboards are way better than the nearly invisible crop areas of CS3, and make it much easier to manage projects-in-progress! Adobe makes it clear that these new artboards mean business - Artboards can have their own rulers! Just right click on the active artboard and tick “show artboard rulers”. Artboards are always editable - you can resize and move them around until you’re satisfied.

Most importantly, this tool is very well integrated into the Export window. Finally, you can export multiple artboards (crop areas) to separate files in one step!

Last, we’ve got artboards within artboards. if you think this is getting ridiculous - so do I. While I can hardly imagine the need for nested artboards (on top of the document-taming tab tools in CS4), Adobe must have found a need for this feature. To enable it, simply hold shift while dragging with the artboard tool inside of an existing artboard. Check out the video for a short demonstration of the new artboards in CS4.

First Look: Adobe Illustrator CS4 Artboard tools from Go Media on Vimeo.

Updated Gradient Panel

Adobe finally addressed one of my biggest complaints about Illustrator: the inability to form a gradient from color to transparency. Now, Gradients have opacity options - Finally! This option lets you select any of the colors on the gradient slider and choose its opacity. For even more control, you can now double click on the color slider and access the full range of color picking tools.

The gradient panel now has a handy button to quickly “reverse” the gradient - another one of those little refinements that will save you tiny bits of time and effort. The angle tool on the gradient now has a slider so you can now dial in the correct gradient angle a little faster. Finally, Radial gradients now have a ’roundness’ option. No more stretching gradients and applying clipping masks - now you can just define the roundness of the radial gradient.

If these updates weren’t enough, Adobe has iced the gradient cake with the Gradient Annotator. The Gradient Annotator allows you to adjust gradients intuitively - right from the shape itself. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, just take a look at the screenshot and video below to see what I mean. This tool won’t enable dazzling new effects, but it will make it easier to get gradients just right the first time.

First Look: Adobe Illustrator CS4 Gradient Tools from Go Media on Vimeo.

Appearance Panel Overhaul
Admittedly, I rarely (if ever) use the appearance panel, so I may miss a few things here. Anyway, here it goes: Changes to an objects’ appearance can now be hidden / shown via Adobe’s signature ‘eye’ to toggle visibility. Also, the appearance panel now gives you access to raster effects previously only accessible in the “effects” menu.

EDITED: Teri from Adobe sent me this nice email about why I should be using the Appearance panel. Definitely got me thinking…

Adam,

In your review of Illustrator CS4, you wrote that you “rarely (if ever) use the Appearance panel”.

If you don’t, you are missing a lot of power! The Appearance panel is the only way to add multiple strokes or fills to a single object, or to add strokes or fills to groups. It is also how you change the options on previously applied live effects, or target an effect to just the fill or just the stroke instead of to the whole object. It is a whole tool kit for constructing and modifying complex graphic styles.

One of the best ways to figure out the power of the Appearance panel is to open it up in conjunction with the built-in Graphic Styles libraries, draw a few simple objects, and go through the various styles, applying them to your sample object, expanding the various little triangles on the Fill and Stroke rows in the Appearance panel, double-clicking on the effects used in the style, and in general seeing how the “recipe” for that style is constructed. Soon you will be on your way to constructing your own complex styles.

You might also enjoy looking over some of the demo files on my web site, especially the ones in the “Folder Full of Style Demos”.

http://tpettit.best.vwh.net/adobe/index.html

Whats new with…Ctrl+N?

Adobe gives a nod to print designers in the updated new document dialog. In Illustrator CS4 you’ll be able to define the number of artboards and how they’ll be arranged. These controls will make it much easier to set up documents for multipage print projects. Custom bleed settings are also possible with Illustrator CS4. Check out the screenshot below - new features have been highlighted.

What do you think?

My gut reaction is that Illustrator CS4 will be an enjoyable upgrade. I like that Adobe has kept the glint and glamor to a minimum (few fancy new tools with little practicality) and instead made important workflow improvements. When I have four color variations of a logo to export, the new multiple artboard features are going to be nice.

So what is your reaction to the new features? Has Adobe used this year wisely? Let us know what you think in the comments and check out the CS4 poll at the bottom of the page.

‘Till next time!

Think about it: What if every time you wanted to jam to your Summer 2001 Playlist you had to re-construct it from your mess of mp3s in a folder called “downloads”? Well, you don’t, because iTunes doesn’t organize your tunes by folder, it organizes them by metadata: artist, album, genre, playlist.

Adobe bridge does the same thing - digital asset management. Basically it’s a supercharged file explorer. Adobe bridge is made to handle every digital file that any Adobe software could create. Besides the basic PSD, AI, EPS and INDD, this also includes RAW Camera files for photographers, Premier files for the video guys, and Audition files for recording engineers. But since this is a graphic design blog, we’re going to focus on managing vector and raster design files.

Why use Adobe Bridge?

Well, if you frequently find yourself hunting around for a design resource you KNOW is somewhere under C:\mystuff\downloads 2007\design stuff\ and then have to open every EPS file to find the right flourish - Adobe Bridge can come to the rescue and speed up your work flow. Especially if you’re designing on a Windows machine, Adobe Bridge will help you spend less time hunting around for the right file, and more time designing.

Note: For Mac users, many of the cooler features of bridge are part of OSX, and where OSX doesn’t cut it, here is a free EPS preview plug-in for quick look.

Pros:

1. Thumbnails and previews of every kind of Adobe file! Vector, PSD, etc
2. Powerful ways to get to your stuff using metadata and smart search
3. Tight Integration with CS3

Cons:

1. Eats RAM for breakfast
2. Teaching the old dog new tricks - to get any real benefit from Adobe Bridge you’re going to have to change your workflow and habits.

What it does (and doesn’t do)

Does:

Adobe Bridge can show thumbnails and previews of every kind of Adobe file - finally you can preview vector files without opening them! Additionally, Bridge reads and writes detailed metadata such as Keywords, Ratings, aspect ratio, file properties and more, has intuitive searching that behaves just like iTunes Smart Playlists. You can even save “Collections” which are essentially playlists of design files built from your keywords and other metadata. Adobe Bridge can also stack and group files, which is useful when you have saved five different variations of a design, or have a group of similar photographs. Adobe Bridge can save a lot of time by batch renaming files. Finally, Adobe Bridge can control and sync color settings across all Adobe CS3 Apps.

Don’t:

Design anything. Nope - you won’t find a pen tool or a marquee selection tool anywhere in Adobe Bridge.

Navigating the UI

Here is Adobe Bridge doing what it does best - helping you do the impossible: browse those EPS and AI files with hi-res previews. Now lets break down the interface.

There are seven panels in Adobe Bridge:

1.Content
2.Favorites
3.Folders
4.Preview
5.Filter*
6.Metadata
7.Keywords

Typically either the Content panel or the preview panel takes up most of the view.

*Hidden here in the filter menu is a tiny, and very useful, button. It flattens the view. So, if you have a folder with subfolders - for example: Stock Vector\ Go Media Stock Vector \Set1,Set2,Set3, etc - then clicking this button will show the contents of all subfolders in one view!

Organizing with Adobe Bridge

Stars
As another of the many comparisons to iTunes, star ratings in Adobe Bridge work just like you’d expect - they rate your design files just like iTunes rates your tunes. You’ve got 6 levels of rating: 0 through 5 stars. You can star files quickly without leaving the keyboard by using ctrl+1-5 while having a file selected. Another cool shortcut is ctrl+ , and ctrl+. to raise and lower the rating of an existing file.

Labels
Labels are similar to stars, except they don’t have a rank and are associated with a specific meaning and a color. You can use Adobe’s default labels or define exactly what you want each one to mean. Labels can be very useful for managing Client folders and designating files as “proof”, “revision” or “final”. You’ve got 5 spaces to create custom labels - go get organizing!

To customize your labels, hit ctrl+K to get to preferences, and then choose “labels” in the side panel.
Once you decide what labels will work best for you, speed up the labeling process by using ctrl+ 6-9 to apply your first 4 new custom labels. Strangely, the last label does not have a shortcut key.

You don’t have to stop at your files when labeling - labels work on folders too! I’ve used this feature to speed up browsing. I can mark a folder as “Final”, and not even have to open it up and examine the AI files inside.

Keywords
Keywords are a really powerful organizational feature inside of Bridge, but it will take a little effort on your part to really get any benefit from them. Keywords are like genres in iTunes since they describe the contents of the selected file with broad categories. They can be anything from “Birthday” to “Grunge” or “Cleveland”. Keywords can be nested in Bridge, making them even more powerful. Check out the screenshot of my keywords panel to see what I mean.

Here’s a trick on how to quickly get your keyword panel set up: stick your cursor in the search box at the bottom and type out your level 1 keywords separated by a semicolon. In my case it would look like this: Color ; Design Ingredients ; Events ; Objects ; People ; Places ; Source ; Style. When you’re done typing hit the plus (+) sign to the right to add your keywords. Use the same process to add sub keywords, only this time hit the button with the plus sign and the arrow.

Keywords are best used in conjunction with the filter panel. At first, the filter panel and the Keyword panel seem so similar that it could be confusing. (The Keyword panel writes keyword metadata to files. The Filter panel well, filters, by the clicked keyword and shows only matching files).

Smart Search
Again, I really like Bridge’s search feature because it feels like familiar old iTunes. Ctrl+F brings up the search box. You can define criteria from any piece of metadata, and then qualifies the search with familiar restraints such as “contains”, “does not contain”, and “starts with”. You can add as many criteria as you like and define how they interact; the search can return a query matching all criteria, or any criteria.

Collections
Collections are Playlists without the head banging. If you have a search that you find yourself doing over and over, just save it as a collection. A collection is a virtual folder that will execute the search when double clicked - pretty cool if you’ve made good use of star ratings, labels and keywords!

Stacks
Stacks are folders on the go - or for the sake of maintaining the analogy - albums. You can right click any number of similar files and choose Stack > Group as Stack. You can see what stacks look like in the screen shot - and notice the number in the upper left hand corner showing how many files are in the stack.

Tooling around in Bridge

Live Trace multiple files at once right from bridge
A useful tool, especially if you need to select from a bunch of different sketches to live trace at once. The only downside is that Illustrator needs to be running - but if you’re like us it’s always running in the background anyway.

Here’s how to do it:
Select the raster or PSD file that you want to live trace
Point to Tools > Illustrator > Live Trace

Place design ingredients into Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign right from bridge.
Select files that you want to drop into your design and point to File > Place. It’s an easy - and fast - way to put Flourishes and stock images into a file in a few clicks. Bridge will handle any number of files in different formats.

Syncing Color Management Across all Adobe Apps
Point to Edit > Creative Suite Color Settings. Select a color setting from the list, and click Apply. Now you can be sure that you’ve got the same settings in each program.

Bonus Round
Organizing and Rating Color Profiles
Here is a little Easter egg to wrap up the post: if you’ve spent any time on Adobe Kuler and downloaded a few color profiles, you might just find this tip handy. Adobe Bridge can preview color profiles and organize them using star ratings, labels, and keywords. Finally a way to find “Granny Smith Apple” when I need it!

Well, thanks for reading and I hope you found a reason to dust off Bridge for a spin. If you have any questions or frustrations about Bridge, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to find the answer! Of course if you have tips of your own, please, do share!

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