Adobe gets creative again
By Tim Anderson
Tim Anderson finds out what’s new in Adobe Creative Suite 5 for those working with the Web and in print.
HardCopy Issue: 48 | Found In: Design & Media | Published: 01/05/2010 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010
Adobe’s Creative Suite is the core of its business and the dominant tool in both the Web and print design community. It is also the authoring tool for Flash Player, deployed almost everywhere except on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The new version 10.1 of the Flash runtime targets mobile as well as desktop devices, with Android the first to be supported, and makes greater use of hardware acceleration for video. The previous version, Creative Suite 4 (CS4), was released towards the end of 2008.
Major high-level themes of Creative Suite 5 (CS5) are more powerful tools for Flash design and development, including the ability to compile to a native application for the Apple iPhone, 64-bit support in the applications where it matters most, and integration with online services. At the product level there is a completely new application called Flash Catalyst, and a ton of new features in familiar faces such as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. Sometimes it is small details that count, like the fact that headings can now span multiple columns in InDesign, saving the need to create a separate frame.
The Flash runtime is pervasive throughout the suite, even more so than in CS4. InDesign, for example, primarily a print design tool, now has new features for interactive content using Flash. This is not only about Adobe supporting its platform; it is also a recognition that most content now has an online life, even if supplementary to print. The eBook market is growing, with the launch of Apple’s iPad gadget a further driver, and Adobe’s ePub format, supported by InDesign, is the nearest thing to an eBook standard. InDesign can also export to Flash, with the player’s Text Layout Framework doing a good job of preserving typography. Flash has become a universal runtime or viewer for almost all CS5 content.
A new tool for Flash
The addition of Flash Catalyst means there are now three Flash-specific tools in Creative Suite, the others being Flash Professional and Flash Builder. This is because Flash plays several roles: a player for rich interactive designs, a video runtime, and a platform for applications driven by ActionScript.
A new tool for Flash is the Catalyst Interaction Designer.
Flash Professional is the original authoring tool, based around a timeline with scenes and layers. The new CS5 version supports the Flash Player 10 Text Layout Framework, enabling advanced typography and better fidelity when importing content from applications such as InDesign. There’s also a new physics engine called Spring for Bones which lets you easily add inertia and bounce to animations.
Flash Builder (formerly Flex Builder) is a developer tool based on the open source Eclipse IDE and the Flex XML framework. You define a layout using Flex, helped by a simple visual design tool, and use the code-centric IDE for editing and debugging ActionScript. This edition has new, richer components supporting skinning and styling, as well as a much improved data access framework.
With CS5, Adobe has improved integration between Flash Professional and Flash Builder, in that you can now choose to edit an ActionScript class in Flash Builder while working in Flash Professional. However, you still need the internal Action editor for embedded code. Integrating these tools is proving to be a slow process, but this is a small improvement.
The new Flash Catalyst, like Flash Builder, is an authoring tool for MXML (the Flex framework language), but aimed at designers rather than developers. Adobe calls it an Interaction Designer. You can import assets from Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks, and transform them into Flex components. For example, you can take an image of a button and convert it to an actual Flex button. If it is not quite right, you can further edit it in the source application without losing your Catalyst work. Further, you can add interaction and state transitions without writing code.
Since Flash Catalyst creates Flex code, you can export a project to Flash Builder and complete it by adding code there. Unfortunately you cannot then bring it back into Catalyst, though round-tripping is a long-term goal.
Dreamweaver gets PHP
Adobe’s Web authoring tool has been overshadowed by the company’s commitment to Flash. Another factor is that fewer Web pages are authored individually today as most Web sites use some kind of content management system. This means Dreamweaver is more likely to be used to author templates or snippets of content, rather than complete sites.
In response, Dreamweaver CS5 has much improved support for the most popular server-side language, namely PHP. It will automatically detect the many included files and scripts that make up a typical PHP page and render it in Live View. There is also code-hinting for PHP as you type, complete with a link to the online manual. Great stuff for PHP users, although there is still a tension between design and development as Dreamweaver cannot debug PHP in the way that you can with – say – Eclipse or Zend Studio.
Photoshop magic
The status of Photoshop is such that it has passed into the language, as in “a photoshopped image”, and the CS5 version will further cement its popularity. The big news for Mac users is that Photoshop 64-bit has now arrived: previously 64-bit was Windows-only. Next, a welcome new feature called content-aware fill deals with a common problem: you have the perfect picture, except for one detail that spoils it. Content-aware fill, also used by the Spot Healing brush, is a new fill that will replace the selected area with content generated intelligently from the rest of the image. It is not perfect, and works best in situations where there is plenty of background and an obviously different detail to remove; but it could save hours of detailed work.
Now you see him... the new content-aware fill in Photoshop.
Another common task is selecting part of an image in order to remove its background. This is hard to get precisely right, especially with fine details like hair. Refine Radius is a new tool for fine-tuning a mask, automatically adjusting the selection to include these awkward details.
Mixer Brush is an intriguing new painting tool that replicates some of the subtlety and complexity of physical painting. The name Mixer Brush reflects how in real-world painting there are multiple colours on the brush, and colours are also picked up from the painting. You can define the wetness of the canvas, the amount of paint picked up from the canvas, the paint flow rate and more. The Mixer Brush can be used both to give photographs a painted look, or to create new paintings from a blank canvas.
The Photoshop Lens Correction filter has been redesigned in CS5. This filter has three types of correction: geometric, chromatic and vignette. You can now apply a correction settings that automatically matches your lens by selecting a lens profile, or create your own lens profile.
There are two versions of Photoshop: Standard and Extended. The Extended version has 3D tools with lighting and mesh effects. With Extended you can convert 2D artwork into 3D objects and use ray tracing to render light and shadows.
Premier Pro and After Effects
The Production Premium edition of CS5 is for video editing and includes Premier Pro for video production and After Effects for motion graphics. The CS5 versions are 64-bit only, greatly speeding performance thanks to the extra memory available, with support up to 128Gb. Premier has a new hardware-accelerated high definition playback engine called Mercury.
Using the Roto Brush in 64-bit After Effects.
The most eye-catching new feature in After Effects is the Roto Brush. This is used for extracting a moving image, such as a person, in order to place it on a new background, a technique called rotoscoping. The idea is similar to what is commonly done for photographs, except that it must be done for every frame, which is tedious work. The Roto Brush relieves this by a combination of intelligent selection for the initial frame, and then hugging the selected image automatically in subsequent frames.
Creative Suite Live
Alongside the desktop suite, Adobe is adding and improving integration with online services. CS Review is a new service for collaborating on reviews (comments and feedback on work and progress) and integrates with applications such as Premiere Pro and InDesign. Adobe Story is a new online service for script collaboration, and integrates with OnLocation. BrowserLab is a service for testing Web pages against multiple browsers, and integrates with DreamWeaver. Business Catalyst is a service for easy authoring of Web sites for small businesses which also links with DreamWeaver.
Perhaps most significant of all these is Omniture. In October 2009, Adobe acquired this online analytics company, which means it can potentially close the loop between Web design and Web optimisation, showing designers which of their creations are most effective. Expect to see more of this integration in the next Creative Suite rather than this one, but it is an interesting prospect.