Top 10 New Features in Adobe CS3
Author of this post: Tara MacKay | About Blog Authors »Everyone’s favorite software company Adobe recently released Creative Suite 3—a comprehensive update of nearly every industry-standard design app. I watched the launch announcement Webcast with aspirin at the ready. What were they going to do to my precious Photoshop? What programs would they axe due to their purchase of Macromedia? They surely wouldn’t make me give up Dreamweaver in favor of GoLive, would they?
My fears were quickly put to rest. CS3 features some pretty swanky additions and great integration between Adobe products, but all the essentials were mostly left alone. For myself and most other designers, my workflow doesn’t have to change immediately—I can just learn the new features as I go.
But like I said, those new features are pretty swanky. Here are some of my favorites from across the CS3 lineup…
Illustrator’s Live Color and Color Guide. Color theory is one of the fundamentals of great design, but it’s not always easy to put a color harmony into practice. In Illustrator, now it is. Start adding objects to your design and then look to the Color Guide palette for harmony suggestions. Or enter the Live Color dialog to completely change the hues in your art while maintaining the harmony.
Device Central skins. Device Central is a new application in the Adobe lineup that comes bundled with the Creative Suite. It’s used to prepare and test content for mobile devices, like cell phones. The built in “skins” show you how your design will look and operate in a wide range of devices, demystifying this area of interactive design.
Animation in Photoshop. ImageReady, the Web imaging program that has been bundled with Photoshop for years, is now gone in favor of Fireworks. But thankfully some ImageReady features are now built in to Photoshop, especially the Animation palette, so you don’t have to leave your Photoshop comfort zone to whip up a quick animated GIF.
Spry for Ajax. Who for what? Even before you learn what these words mean, you can use Dreamweaver’s new Spry for Ajax features to instantly add dynamic functionality to a Web site… without writing any code by hand. A click of a button adds tabbed panels, form elements, and other widgets and effects that you can easily customize.
InDesign’s new Find/Change. Find/Change is a great feature? Really, it is! No longer is it just a search for basic words. You can search and replace styles, complex text, drawn objects of a specific color, and more, saving you tons of time.
Mac support for Premiere. Premiere has been Windows-only for several years. While many Mac users prefer Final Cut for their video editing, it’s great to have the Premiere option since it integrates closely with After Effects and other Adobe production tools.
After Effects puppetry. Now I’m no After Effects expert, but the new Puppet tool just looks plain cool. It lets you turn any static object or character into an animation—just add joints and pull them around to bring someone to life.
Smart Filters in Photoshop. Filters in Photoshop are now better than ever thanks to Smart Objects. Convert your art to a Smart Object, and any filter you add is easily editable any time. Delete it or change it, just like you would an adjustment layer or layer style.
Dreamweaver image editing. In possibly the biggest example of the new integration between Adobe apps, now you can copy an image from Photoshop (or even part of an image) and paste it directly in Dreamweaver. In a quick dialog, you can optimize the image, and you’re done.
Illustrator drawing… in Flash! Flash has always had vector drawing tools, but they never stacked up to the ones available in Illustrator. Until now. The Pen tool that you know and love (okay, love is a strong word) works like the one in Illustrator, giving you better control over your complex curves. And hey, if you still want to work in Illustrator, you can easily move your art, layers and all, over to Flash when you’re done.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
I think they realesed the CS quite early with less new features.
I personally feel there is not much difference between Phosotshop cs 2 and cs 3.
Ofcourse if you are heavy PS user then you must upgrade to CS3.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
I disagree, they added quite a few new features. The texture for 3d objects, a photomerge tool that accualy works, auto align for masking images just to name a few. With that and the new features in dreamweaver and actionscript 3 in flash, all this combined with integration of the old macromedia programs with adobe suite, I feel they had plenty to release. I could see your complaint if you soley used photoshop alone, but most creative users use 2 or 3 suite products.