Available for pre-order today the new Adobe Creative Suite boasts a ton of new features across all platforms, however in this post I’ll only highlight a couple…
Now when you zoom the canvas it’s as smooth as butter and when you get close enough you can see the pixel grid. Useless to designers who work outside of the realm of screen res, but now digital designers can be accurate right down to the pixel. And lord knows, love is in the details.
But I think the more interesting of these new functions is what Photoshop is calling Content Aware Scaling. Normally when you scale an image horizontally or vertically, each pixel is literally stretched so that the final image is distorted. This relatively new technology, which Adobe actually bought from another development, does something completely different. Something that actually makes the scale tool useful. When stretching an image, a very complex algorithm carefully selects which pixels to stretch and which not to stretch. Meaning, that you can stretch a photo without it actually looking distorted. See below.
As smart as this tool is, it’s still not perfect. But I’m sure we can find some humor in applying it to such images like close cropped portraits. Below is a very informative video published by the software company that originally developed it.
written by Greg Washington
The pixel grid will be great- they must’ve gotten that idea from Flash :) The best part about the new Flash CS4 is the stage is now rendered with the flash player itself.. WYSIWYG yeah!
The things I’ll be most interested to hear about, which I’m pretty sure I’m not going to hear about, are any new ways that the product line addresses designing for web layout. The dichotomy between Photoshop and Browsers remains strong enough to regularly frustrate me. The way text is handled, widths, reoccurring elements across multiple templates, etc. PLEASE, Adobe, hear the cry of the web designer and give us a product that increases our productivity!
I don’t disagree… but you should definitely look into Smart Objects. They are objects you can create in Illustrator or Photoshop, similar to Movie Clips in Flash, where you can have multiple instances of them in various layers or documents, and when you change the Master Smart Object every instance of it is changed as well.
It appears that Adobe Creative Suite 4 works for Windows 7 Beta. You are prompted with a warning at the beginning of the install telling your that your OS may not be supported. However, there is a Continue anyway button and it appears to work.