Design Scross Media with Adobe Creative Suite 4

Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 delivers tightly integrated software and services that measurably improve productivity and enable you to produce richly expressive work in print, web, interactive, video, audio, and mobile.

Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, and mobile design

Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Design Premium software is the ultimate toolkit for today's designer. Express yourself in exciting new ways and deliver rich creative experiences across print, web, and mobile media.

Adobe’s Adam Pratt — engineer, author, teacher, and all-around creative — talks about cross-media design with Design Premium.

What do Creative Suite 4 and New Jersey Transit have in common? Adobe’s Lynn Grillo explains.

Explore new creative territory

Create rich, compelling content and achieve results you never thought possible. Run with your ideas using new animation, video, and 3D design tools within a comprehensive, integrated design environment.

Take advantage of simplified workflows

Deliver your ideas efficiently to more audiences in more places. New, simpler ways of working let you do more in less time, use existing skills to try new creative possibilities, and deliver high-quality cross-media campaigns.

Collaborate near and far

Work interactively with clients and colleagues, sharing screens and hosting live reviews across the hall or around the world. Learn from an extensive community of Adobe experts tutorials by accessing technical content online — directly from inside your design software.

Scale Photos to size

Online photo sites: Take a look at the way photos are displayed in the site where you plan to upload the images. Obviously if the image is displayed at 600 pixels on Face Book, with no "enlarge" tab, then sending a folder full of 3200 pixel shots is a total waste. And remember that all online images should be 72 pixels per inch. In many situations people think if they upload higher resolution photos, they'll be better. That's almost never the case. For people who have to pay for through-put, or bandwidth, these photos cost nearly 4-times as much to upload for no appreciable improvement in image quality.

Email: If you are attaching images to email, they shouldn't be much larger than 700 pixels wide. Any more than this is not useful for the end user. I have a friend who can't seem to understand this concept -- and simply drags digital images directly into email without regards to the size. When they arrive, they are so big you can only see a portion of the image in the window and you're forced to scroll around just to find a face.

Easy Utilities: Here's just one example of a simple utility you can employ to take the guess-work out of scaling photos. This one is called "Drop Pic" which is a Mac product -- but there are many for both Mac and Windows that you can download. There are also online services where you upload the large photo, and download the scaled photo and get a good job. Mac users should check out DroPic! (DroPic.sit)

Quick, easy photo tips...

In the world of photos online, there are several rules you can learn to make your photos better, provide a better visual experience for your viewers, and save time/money/bandwidth. All you need are the most basic of editing tools, and a few minutes. These tips are not meant for pros or veteran Photoshop users. Although many times these tricks work for higher-end images, I'm posting these as "quick" fixes that any novice can successfully use. These work in Elements, Photoshop or basically any layers-based editing programs. They also apply to the free, downloadable open source editors that work with and support PSD files. The top three things to do to photos before uploading or emailing are

Crop
Scale
Adjust

Ruthless Cropping: For many photos taken with digital cameras, the focus, impact and intention can be improved many times over by simple cropping. It's the least used, most misunderstood technique known -- in fact most people just skip it.

For those of you who take photos then upload them to MySpace, FaceBook, or any of the other picture hosting web sites out there -- DO NOT simply drag a folder of images in for upload. Not only will it gobble up tons and tons of bandwidth (that you may have to pay for) but it just doesn't do your photos any justice.

In such situations, the photos require the receiving server to perform operations on the image -- they sometimes do this "on-the-fly" meaning, you are cooking bandwidth while the server does its work -- which you could have done locally before initiating the upload. Additionally, their server optimization operations may not do the job quite as nicely as you can using Photoshop Elements or other image editing software.



CROPPING helps you focus on the subject, allowing the subject to be larger in the image, requiring less 'processing' while cutting out unnecessary image.

In the "Crop" examples below, you've eliminated over a third of the unnecessary pixels -- which take bandwidth.
See:
Example #1: cropping for focus, and
Example #2: cropping for drama

Photoshop CS3 Non Destructive (Smart) filters

The most-wanted feature is probably non destructive filters. Most of the Photoshop CS3 filters can now be applied in a similar way to Adjustment layers. Apply the filters and they can be removed or reedited at any time, this is not just a plus fin the case of change happy clients, but it also preserves the pixels and allows for a cleaner piece of work. 3rd party filters are not supported as non destructive at this point in time. This feature is huge because it now allows for a complete non-destructive workflow for the first time in Photoshop’s 16 year history.

To apply a Smart Filter, the layer must first be converted to a Smart Object. Not a big deal really, we have had almost 2 years to get used to Smart Objects. It’s as simple as right clicking and choosing Convert to Smart object from the Layers palette to make the conversion. (Photo:istockphoto)

Remember the Fade command? Very useful but only available immediately after applying a filter. There are now options to adjust the opacity and Blending modes to the filters at any time. We can now apply a mask to the filters (Smart Filter Mask). My head is still spinning trying to imagine the possibilities!

Filters can be toggled on and off. You can click and drag to rearrange their stacking order or Alt/Option drag to another layer to apply the same filter settings (Make sure it’s a Smart Object first). There is a now an “Open as Smart Object” command in the edit menu, this will help with your smart object workflow.

If all this seems too much, you can still apply and use filters in the same way you always have with standard layers.

Tip: Shadow Highlight is still not an adjustment layer. Apply is as a Smart Filter and enjoy all the re-editable functionality of an adjustment layer with this popular adjustment.

Tip: Double click on a Filter slot to re-apply a filter such as clouds.

CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4

The 14th version of this established graphics suite has significant and practical new features.

As the centerpiece of Corel's Graphics Suite X4, CorelDraw X4 ships with significant new features that, while not flashy, are practical, and substantial enough for professionals to find the upgrade worthwhile. Even the interface has been redesigned to present a clean, intuitive workspace.

CorelDraw is the well-established "other" vector drawing program, covering the same ground as Adobe Illustrator does. You can use it to create illustrations for signs, logos, and technical and industrial designs, and for specialized printing like engraving. Draw also works for designing multipage publications. The growing ranks of people who double as the designated designer in multitasking work environments will appreciate the extensive set of easy-to-modify templates and the intuitive help screens. Draw X4 ships with a substantial library of royalty-free artwork, including 1000 high-resolution photos suitable for commercial projects. And Draw X4 meshes smoothly with Windows Vista Instant Search to sort quickly through images on your computer or network from within Draw's Open Drawing dialog box.

More Improvements

Among the more substantial enhancements is a connection to the WhatTheFont Web site: Within the app, you can paste in bitmap captures of type to identify fonts-helpful, for example, for a designer who is asked to duplicate a print brochure's unidentified fonts. Also, you can now preview type flow around images instantly. Publishers who generate data-driven output can use the print/merge features to generate customized publications--so a product press kit, say, could have customized fields that generate a personalized kit for each reviewer.

Draw has always had an advantage over products in Adobe's design suite in that it is both a full-fledged vector drawing program (like Illustrator) and a solid desktop publishing package (like InDesign). Desktop publishing features in X4 now let you create and edit independent layers on each page of multipage documents, as well as implement master layers throughout a publication for repeating elements (such as page numbers or headers). Illustrators who convert bitmap files to Draw's vector format will spot changes in the bitmap trace feature that allow, for example, combining of colors to simplify trace results. Users who found the trace feature in CorelDraw X3 unpredictable will notice improvements here.

The other significant application in Corel's Graphics Suite X4 is Photo-Paint. Almost abandoned in version X3 of the suite, this bitmap-editing application has some new features, including support for the RAW camera format and interactive histograms for previewing image adjustments. But while CorelDraw is a professional alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Photo-Paint is not a professional photo editing app.

Illustrators and designers who don't use Adobe products (a niche community) will find the improvements in CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 worth the upgrade.

-- David Karlins