In an announcement we already knew was coming, Adobe has unveiled the feature list of its CS4 products. The fourth version of the suite furthers the integration between all the individual products it contains and tightens up the interface for each one of them. It also brings along a lot of new features and improvements to existing ones.

For Mac users, at least, the interface now fits in nicely with Leopard. The tabbed window support in most of the CS4 applications is a welcome change. Switching between applications is now greatly enhanced, with consistent file format support across applications. Adobe has also changed the icons of the applications. What previously used to be white text on a coloured square is now black text on a coloured square! Yes, we know, totally revolutionary, right?

As for the Mac specific features, the applications now support Multi-touch guestures such as pinching and panning on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. You can also drag the entire application to a second monitor, something that was a tedious process involving moving each palette (which would then refuse to dock at the edges) individually to the secondary monitor in CS3. That tame little introduction out of the way, let us now take a look at the meatier offerings of each member of CS4 in more detail.

Photoshop CS4

With CS4, Adobe has pushed Photoshop’s 3D support even further. There is greater interactivity in terms of painting, cloning, and adjusting lighting, meshes, and other 3D elements.

Photoshop also finally gets its act together with regard to non-destructive adjustments. While Mac OS X has native support for non-destructive editing via OpenGL, Photoshop’s Carbon architecture could not implement them. Adobe has therefore created their own non-destructive editing features and they are really good. You can fine tune levels, hue/saturation, and colour among other things without even thinking twice. Also new to Photoshop CS4 is the Masks panel which allows tuning of your vector or pixel masks to your liking. 

Another great new addition to this version of Photoshop is content aware scaling. Every once in a while, you come across an image that needs to be stretched a bit to fit the width of the document. What follows is a series of cutting and pasting, merging, and cloning, so as to avoid giving the impression that the image is stretched. What content aware scaling does is that when you expand the image, it automatically fills in gaps like sand, sky, etc., the ones that do not have complex colouring, while leaving distinct objects in their proper form.

It also brings along smoother panning and zooming (much like Preview’s Core Animation effects), better canvas rotation that lets you tilt your canvas to see better (painters will love this), improves upon its RAW support, furthers the Lightroom integration, and sports a boatload of other changes.

Several under the hood improvements now allow Photoshop to utilize your graphics chip’s processing abilities as well. Also, on Windows, Photoshop gets the 64-bit treatment (and the Mac version doesn’t). Although I’ll reserve my final judgement until I’ve had a chance to actually put it through its paces, Photoshop CS4 definitely seems like a worthy upgrade right now, based on its feature set.

InDesign CS4

With InDesign CS3, Adobe had fixed up most of the issues with their page layout application. Now, with CS4, they’re bringing in several new features.

The biggest feature of InDesign CS4 is Live Preflight. You no longer have to go through the dialog box just to come back out of it and edit again. The error information is right there in the status bar, as well as a palette by itself. 

Another big change is the customisable links panel. The interface has been enhanced to include live previews of the images and it can show a whole lot of metadata with a single click. Then there are smart guides. The guides are drawn live as you move your objects across the spread now. Last, but not the least, is the Smart text reflow panel, which allows you to quickly overset text, adding pages on the fly as necessary.

And with the new Flash support in Acrobat Reader 9, PDF documents can now incorporate page transitions such as flipping animations without any additional data baggage. CS4 also has enhanced flash support for incorporating flash in PDFs.

Dreamweaver CS4

Some say it’s the ultimate web development tool, others say it is just a bloated piece of obsolete junk. Whether or not you like Dreamwaver though, this new version definitely brings along some features that might catch your attention.

Live Preview has finally been added to Dreamweaver. The rendering engine of live preview is not yet known and there’s no information out yet about whether or not it can be changed. In any case, this should save you a lot of trips to your browser.

InContext Editing is a stunning new feature, one that developers will just love. Although Adobe claims that it’s a prerelease, I’m excited about it anyway. It allows a developer to designate certain areas of a document for editing by the client. The client can only mess around in the area the developer has chosen for him, thus preventing him from messing up a perfectly good presentation.

Dreamweaver CS4 brings along some long awaited CSS improvements, both in terms of UI as well as standardisation of code. It has greater integration with Photoshop and allows you to live edit PSDs and Smart Objects from within the application itself. Some other features include Subversion integration, HTML Data sets, and code hinting for AJAX and JavaScript frameworks. 

Flash CS4

Adobe seems to be bringing 3D everywhere. I’m not an expert at Flash (and yes, the implication that I am an expert at everything else is intentional), so I can’t tell what’s good and what’s not in definitive terms, but I’ll try anyway. 

Brand new in Flash CS4 is Object-based animation. This allows you to apply animation effects directly to the object instead of keyframes, eliminating the need to create extra timelines for them. Another interesting feature is the Bones tool. As scary as it may sound, it’s actually well named and could prove to be quite useful. It allows you to split an object and animate each part separately, even while they’re connected, in a manner similar to how the joints allow you to move a your hand about.

Other new features include a Motion Editor, Metadata support, and a way to turn symbols into design tools with the new deco and spray brushes. Flash CS4 also brings support for H.264 video compression into Adobe Media Encoder—finally!

Illustrator CS4

Adobe is turning Illustrator into a direct production tool. The biggest feature in this version is support for multiple artboards. With this addition, you can now display the same graphic across multiple artboards, up to a hundred of them. You can then print them individually or export them all at once.

Other than that, this release doesn’t bring anything groundbreaking to the vector drawing application. Other new features include trasparency controls in gradients, a new tool called the ‘Blob brush’ which allows you to ‘paint’ smooth vector shapes, and an enhancement in graphic styles.

In conclusion

At $1800 ($600 for an upgrade license) for the Design Premium and $2500 ($900 for upgrade) for the Master Collection, is CS4 a worthy upgrade? With regard to Photoshop, InDesign, and Dreamweaver, the changes have been spectacular. The improved UI is also something that will fasten and enhance the workflow and make working a little more fun. So, if those three applications are important enough to reside in your Dock, I’d say it’s a worthy upgrade for you.

You can, of course, visit Adobe’s official website for more information and pricing details on all these applications. Adobe Creative Suite 4 is set to ship on 1 November 2008.

In Software on 24 Sep, 2008| |