[Satchmo]

FWIW, looks like CS4 is coming out soon.

I believe I read somewhere it's 64-bit for Vista and 32-bit for Mac (for now, 64-bit to follow)
Here's their invite to some online launch presentation.

[709]

That CS4 logo is beyond fugly.

[bassplayinMacFiend]

Originally Posted by 709 That CS4 logo is beyond fugly.

Oh man, who the heck thought that was a good logo? It's like crap on a stick, without the stick.

Thinking about it, the 'S' looks like a hook, as in, "We've got you hooked on Adobe CS, so pays the money and gets the upgrade."

[jdcfsu]

I got the email yesterday. I'm not exactly thrilled. I upgraded to CS3 hoping for the features that are now being promised in CS4. I feel stuck with Photoshop though because its the only design tool I know how to use really well.

[Fahrenheit]

The fact that there is no good opposition makes me sad. GIMP is just awfully ugly and bad.

Edit: Wo, was that some sort of pseudo-limerick?

[jdcfsu]

Originally Posted by Farenheit The fact that there is no good opposition makes me sad. GIMP is just awfully ugly and bad.

Exactly. It was easy to switch to Coda from Dreamweaver, but for some reason nothing stands up to Photoshop. Pixelmator is nice, but it's not worth learning different nuances and keyboard shortcuts for.

[709]

According to a leaked screenshot on Amazon (courtesy of AI) the release date will be November 1st. A little earlier than I expected, but that's cool. I barely managed to skip over CS3, so this will be a nice upgrade for me.

Although...the Platform specs say "Leopard, Mac OS X Intel."

Surely they can't be dropping PPC support this soon for their core DP apps. Video apps like After Effects, sure, but InDesign? That doesn't make sense to me at all.

[jdcfsu]

Originally Posted by 709 Surely they can't be dropping PPC support this soon for their core DP apps. Video apps like After Effects, sure, but InDesign? That doesn't make sense to me at all.

No I believe they are. I remember this being an announced deal before CS3 came out.

[709]

Seriously? If so that's pretty ballsy. There's a lot of G4 and G5 owners out there that'll be storming Adobe's doors looking for a UB for Photoshop and Illustrator at the very least. I know that's the case for AE CS4, but never did I imagine that they'd go whole-hog Intel for everything.

If that's indeed the case I expect to see a lot of people upgrading to CS3 in that 'purchase window' where you'd get the CS4 upgrade as well. I know that's what I'll be doing.

[jdcfsu]

I can't find where I read that, but I did come across a Gruber article for 06 on why Soundbooth was Intel Only. In the article he quotes an Adobe developer who basically says that with OS X running on Intel chips, it's a lot easier to only develop for one chipset. I'm not sure if that's why they made the decision (given that my memory is correct), nor is it exactly a good reason, but it's at least a reason.

[Moogs]

Premiere Pro, Encore and Sounbooth are Intel only. It's been that way since they were first released for Mac. Adobe wasn't going to build those for a dying platform (PPC). Not sure if AE is or not since it was PPC before / isn't "new" like the other three.

All the other goodies (Photoshop, Illustrator, DW, etc) will still run on PPC just fine (natively). Anyone who says otherwise is getting suckered into some chicken little BS. Also AFAIK, nothing on Mac will be 64-bit other than Lightroom 2, for now. I'm sure plenty of people will get their panties in a twist for no good reason over that one; especially the people who have absolutely no use in their regular workflow for 64 bit apps and have 3GB of RAM in their machine total.

Trust me guys... Adobe didn't pull the plug on PPC. It will probably happen eventually but not this time. As for when CS4 is on shelves, it's public knowledge the 23rd is the announce date for everything, so the math is pretty easy from there. I will answer what questions I can at that time.

[709]

Originally Posted by Moogs Premiere Pro, Encore and Sounbooth are Intel only. It's been that way since they were first released for Mac. Adobe wasn't going to build those for a dying platform (PPC). Not sure if AE is or not since it was PPC before / isn't "new" like the other three.

It was announced last month that After Effects CS4 will be Intel only, and that makes sense given that the other apps in the Production Suite are Intel. The idea of their bread-and-butter apps going Intel so soon is what surprised me. Glad to hear it's not true.

Speaking of the Production Suite, Apple better get it's shit together with DVD Studio Pro or I'm going to be forced to move to Encore. DVDSP hasn't seen an update in close to 3 1/2 years and I've already had to turn down two Blu-ray DVD design/authoring projects. I'm not used to turning down jobs.

[psmith2.0]

Can't believe there's been no talk of this yet. Unveiled this morning, at least the product breakdowns and info (not sure if that "event" has happened).

Anyway, check out Adobe's site or Macworld.com for the nitty-gritty!

[709]

I missed the presentation this morning, but only because Adobe updated their site with all the CS4 goodies before it started.

I'm still going through everything, but so far I'm slightly underwhelmed. The upgrade price for the Design Collection is nice, though I may have to go for the Master if Apple doesn't do something with their FCP Suite pretty quickly.

[psmith2.0]

Yeah, I was reading through the Illustrator and Photoshop info and nothing's really beating me over the head.

I'm sure I'll wind up with it at some point, but it's nothing I'm going to jump on today or anything.

In fact, believe it or not, I might just pay $199 and upgrade to CS4 from my Illustrator CS(!) and call it a day. In my home, private "real life", I don't really need Photoshop, and I sure as hell don't look for page layout/design freelance work...I hate that stuff!



If Illustrator was all I had, then...that's all I could use. I'd have to say no to brochures, ads, programs, flyers, catalogs, etc. (anything with more than, say, five words).



I suppose I could always have Apple's iWork (and Pages) around for the occasional wedding invite or "newsletter as a favor" type of project for a friend or relative. But I can't remember the last time I launched, and seriously used, InDesign here at home. Probably about two-and-a-half years ago, a little 8-page catalog thingie I labored over and detested.

These Adobe apps are getting so huge and dense. I can barely remember Illustrator 6.0, 8.0, etc. With each release, it seems Illustrator gets more Photoshop-like, organic/soft-edged functionality, and Photoshop gets more vector-y and precision features. Almost as if they're spending all their time trying to be like the other, more than themselves. At some point down the road, the two will just collide (merge) into one monster.

[Moogs]

Agree DVDSP has been left to languish quite a bit. Well, the Adobe info is all out there now. If anyone has questions I'll answer what I can...

http://www.adobe.com/products/creati...?promoid=DNOWM

Some of my Photoshop favorites:

• Non-modal Adjustment levels (via Adjustments Panel). This is a big workflow improvement and also allows you to generate very precise adjustment layer masks via Color Range, while the adjustment is open. Pretty cool. There's a new Masks panel too to help bring the primary tasks for that workflow into one area.

• Photoshop CS4 Extended has some slick new 3D capabilities, though obviously they stop short of turning Photoshop into a modeler (as they should). The functionality is meant primarily as a means of mapping 2D imagery to a 3D surface, rather than creating custom surfaces, etc. You can now create 3D primitives from 2D images and there are new tools to manipulate both the object and camera in 3D space. There's also a pretty slick new 3D panel that lets you tweak each side of a primitive in terms of its texture, color, etc. And you can also create all kinds of lighting scenarios. The only hang-up is they did a lot of GL-enabled stuff this release so if you have an older graphics card you might be in for an upgrade.

• Document Manipulatation Improvements are awesome. You can now rotate your image preview on the fly, making it much easier to paint or clone around odd shapes (no more twisting your head to make something horizontal for your eye-hand-movement; just spin it a bit!); birds-eye viewing which allows you to quickly jump out to a "fit workspace" size, drag a Navigator-like widget to a new part of the document and release, taking you right back to the zoomed in state on that spot; flick-panning... click, drag and quickly release while zoomed in and you can move from one side of a large document to another very quickly. This will be even more huge one day when we have touch-enabled screens. It's got a very tactile / interactive feel to it.

• Content-Aware-Scaling (Seam Carving): ever want to take two subjects that were sort of far apart in an image and scrunch them together a bit without distorting the subjects themselves? You can do that now. You basically create an alpha channel of the area you do not wish to be distorted, and then scale the document as you would with the traditional transform > scale method and wham-o... you can scrunch everything in the image except the protected regions and when you're done there's very little to no jaggyness anywhere / any evidence you did anything unusual. This will be a fan favorite among artists but I bet within a year some photo-J guy gets busted for using this in an unethical way.

• ACR now has localized / masked tonal and color correction capabilities, so if you want to tweak one small part of an image, you can just brush the corrections right on, leaving everything else unaffected.

Other cool stuff:

• Dreamweaver: now has the same unified UI as the rest of the suite, much to the chagrin of Windows-based users (who had a better UI than we did so didn't see much reason to change). There's also a new Code Navigator function which is quite useful for jumping around to the bits of code you need right away, and a new vertical split view, which people will get a lot of mileage out of. There's plenty of other stuff but these were the two that affected my workflow the most.

• AE: remember those new 3D Photoshop documents I was talking about? You can now import and manipulate them directly into AE comps. Oh yah: you can now keyframe x,y,z values separately from one another Also AE has some much improved memory allocation preferences (boring but important). There's also a new cartoon effect (like those banking commercials where the person talking is a talking cartoon - Schwab ads I think), but I've not tried it.

• Pr: not a whole of new goodies here but a lot of workflow improvements related to metadata, searching, tapeless camera support, video ingest and output improvements (Blu-Ray via Encore), etc. Hoping for next time they create a more flexible project setup dialog and sequence settings, so it works more like FCP. Sort of inflexible still....

• AI has some killer new stuff but I had limited opportunity to play with it. The Blob Brush seems pretty slick to me as does the gradients with transparency.

• InDesign, same deal but the long document automated cross-references is very useful, as are the new dynamic smart guides that help you to align and space stuff on the fly.

[709]

I'm pretty sure you can already manipulate XYZ independently of each other in AE...unless it's a plug-in I'm thinking of.

Seems they're hanging their hat on the new suite's 3D capabilities, but fail to offer a way to create anything more than simple objects. This upgrade might be great for the architect/CAD crowd, but the design crowd isn't going to get a whole lot of value out of it. I kind of wish they would've bought a mid-range modeler like Carrera and bundled that into the mix. I don't know. The whole desktop 3D scene seems kind of dated to me.

You're right about Illustrator though. It looks like a lot of nice improvements went into this one. Definitely a worthy upgrade. Oh, and multiple pages! That certainly took long enough. It's one of the things I missed most about Freehand.

I'm sure I'll become more impressed once the demos come out and I start playing with them, but right now it doesn't feel like a whole "Suite's worth" of improvements. For me it's worth it because I'll be upgrading the Design Premium suite from CS2, but if I was on CS3 I'm not so sure I'd make the jump.

I hope Adobe thought about backwards compatibility for this round, because that's one thing that pissed me off to no end about CS3. I couldn't use CS2 to open InDesign, Flash, etc. files created just one version later. Fucking ridiculous.

[Moogs]

AE: The three axes [could] be manipulated independently prior (of course), but not keyframed independently. They can now. Also I forgot to mention there are some slick improvements to the timeline and nested comping.

Part of the problem is with any CS release, people have such sky-high expectations that it can be a bit of a letdown but I have little doubt people will be happy with this release for most products. For several of the apps, Adobe actually took some people's advice on the "stop adding stuff and streamline workflow" tip, and really focused on that. Photoshop, Illustrator InDesign and Premiere all have pretty big workflow improvements.

I think CS5 and CS6 are likely to be more nuts-and-bolts type releases for Mac users, as Adobe starts hammering away on 64-bitness. Hopefully, if it happens there are only a modicum of new features in those releases, the upgrade prices will be reflective of that. I'll certainly put my $.02 worth in with them on that when the time comes.

Regarding compatibility, that's always been a weak spot of InDesign's but in their defense they always make an effort to be able to open legacy stuff with the new app (or convert it quickly), it's just that opening new stuff with the old app isn't always possible. But honestly there shouldn't be much reason to do that. I think you can save CS3 files to the exchange format and open in CS2, right? So if your service provider has CS2, you just saved to that, rather than CS3 native format right? It's been a while since I sent an ID file out but I think that's how it was supposed to work.

[Xaqtly]

Looks like Photoshop CS4 is not Intel-only, it will run on G5s but not G4s. It's also still only 32 bit because they're still on Carbon, so if you need to use over 4 GB of memory you're out of luck until CS5.

[709]

Originally Posted by Xaqtly Looks like Photoshop CS4 is not Intel-only, it will run on G5s but not G4s.

There's no G4 support in any product at all afaict. I wonder how true that is...

[Moogs]

Check the system requirements re: G4s. At this point you really can't fault Adobe for dropping support (if that's the case; I never looked into it to be honest - haven't used a G4 since 2003 basically). While it's never fun to get that news, it's a completely outdated chipset. They have to drawn a line in the sand somewhere, especially now. As for 32-bit, that's been known for a long time, and there's no guarantee CS5 will be 64-bit finished either. It's going to be a major area of focus based on the information publicly available but don't assume anything (IMHO). I try to be realistic about major code shifts like this with any developer / huge app. I think the odds are with us on that one, but let's just enjoy CS4 goodness for a while, shall we?

[709]

For those of us that are used to running towers the G4 thing isn't a big deal, but for those who are used to laptops it is. Since the transition went directly from G4 to Intel I know quite a few people that haven't yet taken the leap. Intel laptops were only introduced in 2006 after all, and there's a lot of life left in a not-quite 3 year old PowerBook. Apparently not a life with Adobe products though.

All that said, content-aware-scaling just gave me a stiffy:

[Moogs]

Pretty damn cool, eh? I knew folks would be talking about that one first. That and the painting on 3D type stuff. As with most cool features in Ps the trick is to have this feature in mind when you're photographing (pay attention to what's "in the middle") and not to overdo it when scaling. Subtle changes and backgrounds with more or less uniform horizon and random texture work the best. That's not to say other types of images won't work great, but it may take more tweaking of the alpha channel / protected area to get it just right if the middle ground is complex. You can even scale stuff with the protected area having a hard slant to it, depending, so it's pretty amazing any way you carve it.

Here's a nice blog John N. put together to give you an idea of some of the other details that were given a lot of attention during development and testing. Notice there are a few Mac-only goodies in there like 16-bit printing. Truthfully that will be more useful to the average user than having a native 64 bit app. Food for thought.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/09...e_details.html