The great timeline of events in the sky.
As most of you (who are designers) probably know, Creative Suite 4 is well on it’s way to being released, right when we’re getting a real grasp on Creative Suite 3. For those who aren’t designers, Creative Suite is Adobe’s software package that includes InDesign, Illustrator, and the ever-popular Photoshop. You should probably also know, and be surprised to learn, that Photoshop is not the primary design tool. It’s used to edit photography for the most part, to create artwork, and sometimes for web design. Likewise, Illustrator is used to illustrate. InDesign, however is the beautiful tool that’s used in most ad layouts, multiple-page documents, and so forth. Have you ever seen an ad somewhere that was low quality and the type is all “jaggy”? It’s because someone was using images and most likely photoshop to create it. That’s a dirty, dirty method. If you’re thinking to yourself, “But Josh, I love using it for my church bulletin!” don’t fret too much. It’s not going to look pretty, but you’re not being paid to do it. And if you are being paid to do it, consider investing in your design software education. It doesn’t take a degree to do design, but knowing when and how to use the software appropriately is a good thing. I highly recommend it.
Back to my rant about Creative Suite 4. What’s most frustrating is having to constantly relearn or learn anew the way that the programs function. For example learning that cmd+f is the paste in place command in Illustrator, but cmd+shft+v is for InDesign. Or likewise with the handy “step and repeat” function that copies your last move while creating a new object. What really has me nervous, however, are the toolbars. I wasn’t terribly fond of the new toolbar organization for a long time, and now that I’m finally used to it, I’m a bit scared that they’ll go all Windows Vista on me and completely reorganize everything again. Needless to say, intuitive is not the word for the last change they made. I’ve come to appreciate it, but not without some pain and confusion when things disappear and/or reset themselves at their own discretion. There’s also the pain of buyer’s remorse. A good example being the iPod nano I purchased for $249 (it’s the product RED version, hence the price) when the iPod touch drops to $199 a month later. The only thing dulling the pain is the knowledge that I’ve contributed a bit of cash to ending AIDS.
Deep down on the inside, all I’m really hoping for is better union between the suite. Their functionality as a group is lacking at best, and infuriating regularly. I find myself saying things like, “What do you mean you can’t?!?!?!…. but… it’s the same…. BAH”. In the mean time, here are some of my favorite photoshop fixes that I’m hoping work well:
Non-destrictive adjustment palettes: This means editing your images without losing photographic information much, much easier. Most laymen won’t know the difference except by seeing the images side-by-side, but it’s a great time-saver and resource.
Content Aware Scaling: This allows you to easily (well… more easily) edit photos to adjust for size constraints. A two-column width photo can be adjusted to fit into a one or three-column layout area by intuitively adjusting the perspective. Hopefully it works as well as it sounds.
Overall it doesn’t appear to be a huge change in things, and for the most part it doesn’t appear to be worth a full upgrade for slight improvements to ease-of-use. We’ll see.
