There have been a number of improvements in Camera RAW technology in the new CS4 suite, which will allow you to non-destructively do many more things to RAW images. Creating dynamic vignettes, adjusting the new Vibrance feature so you can desaturate or boost certain types of colors in completely new ways, and dynamically airbrushing things are just a few examples of the greater RAW abilities now available. Other improvements in non-destructive adjustments occur inside Photoshop in the way you create adjustment layers. Now they’ve created a much simpler panel on the right hand side that makes implementing adjustment layers much more streamlined.
Perhaps the flashiest feature in the new version of Photoshop is one that got added at the last possible minute. This super sexy new feature is called Content Aware Scaling. It’s designed for anyone who’s ever needed to get photos or other still assets into a different aspect ratio and/or perspective. (Think of squeezing a picture to make it a narrow column for a newspaper sidebar or stretching out a picture to make a web banner.) Basically, this feature analyzes the image in the background while you adjust it and intelligently recomposes the scene to preserve the most visually interesting areas. Content-Aware Scaling can be set to automatically recognize skin tones to keep people from being squeezed out of the shot, and, for those who want fine-grained control, paintable alpha channels and adjustable selection tools let you define the most important areas (and the aggressiveness of the processing) before you begin scaling.
While there were some limits to how well it worked if you defined a large area as an alpha channel (such as a crowd of people), the overall performance was very impressive. I look forward to finding new ways to fit into my creative pursuits.
Just like Premiere Pro, Photoshop now has the ability to use the 64-bit operating systems like XP x64 and Vista x64.
A final improvement is the ability to use GPU strength on your video card to power real time zooming and other processor intensive tasks. In the past, if you were working with high resolution pictures at 33.6% or 50% zoom ratios (or any zoom ratio that was not 100%), physical edges and clarity of type looked kind of pixelated. To be completely certain that things looked sharp, you had to zoom in on an area of your image until it was at 100%. Well, in CS4, by allowing the intense zoom computations to be handled by the GPU, you can actually have sharp, in-focus text and edges at any zoom ratio you choose. This definitely makes it easier to see what you’re doing with confidence.
Illustrator's new Blob Brush tool will allow people who want to paint freehand create really impressive types of vector art..
Illustrator CS4
Illustrator is always the wildcard in the Production Premium package. It’s never one that you immediately think of for production work, but it does so many necessary little things, like creating bugs for television shows or rescalable logos for websites and print content. Further, when CS3 was released, the integration between Flash and Illustrator grew increasingly tighter. With the improvements in Flash CS4, the integration between it and Illustrator is even more of a timesaver than ever before.
The new improvements are largely designed to give you more power and control over your designs. While Illustrator users will no doubt appreciate these improvements, I would say the majority of these improvements make it easier for Photoshop and video people to use Illustrator.
The first example of this is the Blob Brush tool. This allows you to paint on your illustration with similar ease to using the paintbrush tool in Photoshop, with Illustrator converting the brush strokes to vector-paths behind the scenes. This allows you to create much more organic artwork and can be especially useful for creating borders and natural fade-offs for edges.
Additionally, they’ve added the new Isloation Mode, which easily allows you to choose just one object and isolate it from its background so you can work on it without screwing up any other elements. This essentially works like double clicking a layer in Photoshop and selecting only the actual content of that layer as a selection. You can readily do this by simply clicking inside of your picture and clicking repeatedly on certain objects until you drill down to the exact item you want to adjust.
Finally, they’ve added the ability to work on more than one artboard in Illustrator at once and then save it as a single Illustrator CS4 file. This can make it very easy to create a single design and then populate it on things like pens, coffee cups, collectible license plates, and movie posters. If you ever want to really create a lot of memorabilia to go with your film, the Multiple Artboard feature will definitely be your friend!
