Adobe Creative Suite 4
By Tim Anderson
A new version of Adobe’s design suite always sends tremors through the worlds of Web, video and print. Tim Anderson finds out what is new and what’s been improved.
HardCopy Issue: 42 | Found In: Design & Media | Published: 01/11/2008 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010
Only three years have passed since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, bringing together Adobe’s Photoshop and Acrobat with Macromedia’s Flash and Dreamweaver and giving Adobe new strength as a Web company. Adobe’s challenge has been how to integrate these two product lines. It did the obvious things such as adding the Macromedia products it wanted to keep to the Creative Suite product bundle and implementing technical integrations such as including the Flash video player within the Adobe PDF Reader. Creative Suite 3 was the first release to fully combine the two lines, while the new Creative Suite 4 offers deeper integration and a common look and feel across all the products.
That said there is a bigger picture which involves Adobe building its own presentation platform around Flash. According to Adobe, Flash is installed on 800 million devices and delivers 80 per cent of video on the Web. There are caveats: some of that 800 million is old versions of Flash, and reach on devices like mobile phones is much less consistent than on PCs. Nevertheless they are impressive figures, and Adobe is exploiting that ubiquity to make Flash the primary vehicle for delivering rich content on the Web and the primary runtime for Internet-connected applications, both within Web pages and – through the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) – on the desktop.
Adobe is even dipping its toes into application hosting with an online word-processor called Buzzword, built with Flash, and a document collaboration site called Acrobat.com. In this context, Creative Suite is the media authoring tool (but not the programming tool) for the Adobe platform.
Adobe’s tools may tip increasingly towards Flash and the Web, but print remains important. PDF is a de-facto standard for prepress (the process of preparing a document for print and delivering it to the printer) and prepress features are significantly improved in CS4. Adobe’s desktop publishing tool InDesign has come from behind to overtake Quark as the professional tool of choice, while Photoshop remains vital for print as well as Web design.
Making sense of the editions
Adobe offers six CS4 editions which are priced so that, if you want more than one of the individual products, it probably pays to get one of the suites instead. The suites are targeted towards different professional roles.
If you work primarily with print then Design Standard has the basics including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. Design Premium adds the Extended version of Photoshop together with the main Web tools, namely Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash.
If your work is primarily for the Web then the Web Standard edition has the essentials including Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks while Web Premium adds Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat and Soundbooth.
If you work primarily in video and multimedia production then Production Premium has Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, OnLocation and Encore.
Finally, Master Collection is the easiest to understand: you get the lot.
What's new in Flash Player 10
Although it is a free runtime, Adobe’s Flash Player is a core component in CS4 and much of the content developed with the suite will end up as a Flash SWF. The player has made huge strides in the past year, starting with support for H.264 high-resolution video in Flash 9 update 3. The Web is now firmly established as a video broadcasting medium, and most of it is delivered through Flash. The BBC, for example, recently announced that Flash will be used for both online and download versions of its popular iPlayer service.
The BBC is using Adobe Flash for its iPlayer service.
Flash Player 10 builds on the previous version by adding several new capabilities. First, it incorporates a new graphical effects language called Pixel Bender (formerly known as Hydra), which allows filters to be applied to both still and moving images in real time. Pixel Bender effects are just-in-time compiled for fast performance.
Second, a new 3D API makes it easier to create 3D effects and animations. The ability to rotate an object in three dimensions has many applications, such as allowing users to inspect a product in an advertisement, or providing different perspectives on engineering parts.
Third, there is a new text layout engine in Flash, intended to enable advanced text components. The result is that Flash can more easily support both typographic effects and richly-formatted documents, such as those using multiple columns or text flowed around images. It is an interesting development since it encroaches on the territory of both HTML and PDF, and fits with other developments such as the ability to export documents from InDesign to Flash via XFL. Fourth, an extended sound API gives Flash the ability to generate and process audio, extending its value as a multimedia player and making it more powerful for game development.
Other changes include more use of hardware acceleration, support for the Speex audio codec used in voice over IP applications, improved APIs for file upload and download, and an enhanced drawing API.
The Flash player is cross-platform, but all platforms are not quite equal. Performance seems best on Windows. Nevertheless, Adobe has delivered Flash 10 simultaneously for the three desktop platforms that matter: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
How does it compare to Microsoft’s new Silverlight 2.0 plug-in? Silverlight supports multiple programming languages, thanks to the inclusion of the .NET runtime, and compares favourably as an application runtime. When it comes to design and multimedia though, Flash has the upper hand. It also supports Linux now, whereas Silverlight’s Linux support is a long way from release, and unlike Silverlight 2.0, Flash 10 runs on PowerPC Macs as well as Intel. Perhaps most important, the deep integration between Flash and the CS4 authoring tools gives Adobe a great advantage in the design community, although Microsoft is addressing this with its Expression range which integrates nicely with Silverlight.
It is important to note that Creative Suite 4 is a demanding application and it is not worth attempting to run it on an inadequate system. The official minimum for non-video work is a 2GHz processor with 1Gb RAM but you can expect applications like Flash to be frustratingly slow. For work with high-definition video, Adobe recommends at least a dual 2.8GHz processor and 7200 RPM striped disk array storage. The graphics card also makes a big difference and at a minimum must support 1280 by 900 resolution and OpenGL 2.0.
Creative Suite for the Web
There are far too many changes to cover them all in an article such as this, so let’s concentrate on the more important, depending on your role in using Adobe Creative Suite. We’ll start with the Web designer before moving on to print and media production although some products, such as Photoshop, obviously cater for multiple roles.
Dreamweaver CS4 has several new features which address a tricky problem. Web authoring tools generally have a design view which provides a what-you- see-is-almost-what-you-get view as you edit the page, complemented by a code view which lets you edit the raw HTML and JavaScript. However the trend towards dynamic content makes this approach inadequate. As soon as you add JavaScript that manipulates the DOM (Document Object Model) then the page that the browser actually renders starts diverging from what is in the original HTML.
The solution in Dreamweaver CS4 is called Live View and Live Code. Adobe has embedded the open source WebKit HTML rendering library within Dreamweaver, enabling you to preview a Web page, complete with running scripts and objects, without having to use an external browser. WebKit is the same library used by Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome, and has a high reputation for standards compliance. Select Live View and the embedded browser replaces Design View with the running page so that you can test dynamic as well as static features.
Live Code is even more impressive. Available while Live View is running, this lets you see the current state of the DOM, as modified by JavaScript. For example, say you have used a collapsible panel from Adobe’s Spry JavaScript library. When you hover the mouse over the panel heading, its CSS style property changes, and when you click the heading, the display property of the panel style switches between ‘block’ and ‘none’. Live code shows you these changes as they occur. Even better, you can press F6 to freeze JavaScript, enabling you to properly inspect the dynamically modified code.
Another strong feature is the Code Navigator. Most Web designers have had the experience of staring at some text or element in a CSS-styled page and trying to figure out why it looks the way it does. The Code Navigator is a floating window that reveals all the styles that apply to a particular element, with Alt-click access to the style definition.
Other new features in Dreamweaver include a new look and feel with the standard CS4 tabbed document interface; dynamic links to Photoshop so that images prompt to update when changed at source; and support for version control through Subversion.
New 3D capabilities in Flash let you create objects that the user can rotate and inspect.
Moving on to Adobe Flash CS4, this also has a cleaner and more refined IDE, sporting tabbed documents and the standard CS4 look and feel. One of Adobe’s goals was to simplify animation, which it does through a feature called object-based animation. Instead of working directly with the Timeline, you can select an object, choose Create Motion Tween, and drag the object to create an animation. The new Motion Editor lets you modify animations by editing curves and applying effects. The result is that designers can achieve more without having to edit the Timeline or manually create keyframes. It is a more intuitive approach, easier for beginners and a powerful, time-saving tool for experts.
The new Flash Motion Editor lets you edit animations by modifying curves.
Flash also has much improved 3D support. Two new tools, the 3D rotation tool and the 3D translation tool, let you add 3D effects by clicking and dragging with the mouse. A 3D cursor shows whether you are editing the X, Y or Z axis as you work. There is also a new Bone tool, which is a method of animating objects by turning them into an articulated structure of bones.
In this version, Flash can open XML as well as the old FLA binary format. The new format is called XFL and stores assets such as images and video as well as the Flash document itself. Unfortunately you cannot yet save Flash to XFL using the Flash IDE, but InDesign and After Effects can export XFL. The idea is that you can begin a project in one of these other tools, export it and then add final effects and edits from within Flash. Sadly it is currently one-way only. Flash 10 can also import SWC components developed using Flex Builder, the developer-centric tool for creating Flash applications, and publish directly to Adobe AIR as well as to Web pages.
Fireworks CS4 is also significantly updated. The new CS4-style user interface is great to work with and now has strong CSS support, advanced typography using the new Adobe text engine, and export to PDF or Adobe AIR for prototyping. New Smart Guides are handy for automatically aligning objects as you work.
Creative Suite for print
The three key products for print professionals are InDesign, Photoshop and Acrobat. The changes in these areas are less far-reaching than in the Web products, but still important. InDesign has better long document support, including dynamically updated cross-references. If you are typing directly into InDesign then Smart Text Reflow creates new pages automatically, while Live Preflight within InDesign saves time by identifying problems before exporting a publication.
IDML (InDesign Markup Language) is yet another new XML language (different from XFL for Flash), but one that will be useful for working programmatically with InDesign documents. InDesign can both open and export IDML markup. Smart Guides are intelligent snap-to lines that appear as you work, and there are many other enhancements which make this an attractive though not quite essential upgrade.
Illustrator CS4 is Adobe’s vector graphics tool and gets the usual tabbed document user interface. You can now organise projects into multiple artboards, use transparent gradients, and draw with a Blob Brush which cleverly merges your strokes into a single vector object.
Adobe has divided Photoshop into two editions with a premium version called Extended. The main difference in Extended is its 3D features, based on a new 3D engine. This gives you a new ray-tracing engine and allows you to paint on 3D objects, create 3D animations and combine 2D and 3D images. Extended also supports specialist formats DICOM (for medical applications) and MATLAB (for mathematical visualisation).
Both Photoshop editions are available in native 64-bit code, but for Windows Vista only. Adobe claims that the performance increase for those working with very large images can be as much as a factor of ten. However the move leaves Mac users disappointed. Adobe says this is because code needs porting from Apple’s Carbon framework to Cocoa in order to take advantage of 64-bit on OS X.
As with other CS4 members, the user interface in Photoshop is revamped. It uses a unified application frame with tabbed documents, even on the Mac, though you can manually float windows and take advantage of multiple monitors.
3D features aside, the new capabilities of Photoshop are matters of detail rather than fundamental changes. The engagingly-named Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools imitate techniques used by film and paper developers to brighten or darken selected areas of an image. Improved algorithms in CS4 achieve impressive natural results. A new Masks panel makes it easier to apply effects to selected parts of an image. Content Scaling is a clever feature which resizes an image without distorting the shape of selected areas, such as human figures.
The Content Scaling feature lets you resize an image while preserving the proportions of key elements such as people.
Another bit of digital trickery is the auto-align and auto-blend which help users stitch several images together, for example to create a 360-degree panorama. Canvas Rotation lets you spin an image without distorting pixels, so you can work at different angles without damage. Panning and zooming in Photoshop is faster than before, thanks to greater use of hardware acceleration and the OpenGL API.
Then there is Acrobat 9.0. This came out in advance of Creative Suite 4 but it is still worth noting what a major update this is. Reviews have tended to focus on things like embedded video, the new Web-based collaboration features and the links to Acrobat.com, but version 9.0 also has a lot to offer print professionals with enhanced preflight tools, Pantone colour library support, and verification of PDF standards.
Creative Suite for production
From a media production perspective, the big story in Creative Suite 4 is support for high-definition video. Premiere Pro can import Panasonic and Sony formats, as well as AVCHD from tapeless HD video cameras. Media Encoder, a separate application, can batch encode video to a wide range of formats including Flash, H.264, MPEG-2, Windows Media and QuickTime.
There are new links between Premiere Pro and Photoshop, including import of Photoshop video clips. Speech search is an intriguing feature that converts speech to text keywords that can then be searched so that you can find the moment in the recording when a particular topic is mentioned. Encore CS4 can create Blu-ray as well as DVD discs. OnLocation, for capturing video in real time, now works natively on the Mac as well as Windows.
After Effects gains the ability to search the timeline, which sounds a small feature but can help greatly with project navigation. It also has support for Photoshop 3D layers, and a new Cartoon effect. Imagineer Systems’ Mocha utility, for motion tracking, is now integrated into After Effects.
Soundbooth CS4 now supports multiple audio tracks, a much-requested new feature. It also includes speech search, as in Premiere Pro. Volume matching is a useful feature for equalising the volume of multiple sources when combining them into a soundtrack. Soundbooth now supports a new format, ASND or Adobe Sound. Although a new format is not really welcome news, it does enable better media sharing with Flash, Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Putting it all together
Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 is an impressive piece of work and a strong upgrade. There are a few caveats, though. Adobe’s obsession with Flash makes the suite less useful if you prefer to develop pure HTML and JavaScript Web sites. The size and complexity of the suite is intimidating, and despite some usability improvements it is not a tool you can expect to pick up and use instantly. Certainly, CS4 is a must-have for Flash designers and print professionals, though. The new user interface succeeds in improving appearance and usability, and integration is better. The simultaneous delivery of so many products in one reasonably cohesive bundle is a considerable achievement.