D. JonesAdobe Creative Suite 5 Is...AWESOME!
April 14th 2010 08:04
Photoshop CS5 brings a number of high-profile features for photographers, artists, and the broader designer market that uses the software. Adobe CS5 has a much clearer focus on outputting pages not just to print but also to portable devices such as smartphones, even if Apple has stolen much of its thunder by banning Flash from the iPhone and iPad. It's just one of numerous changes among the Creative Suite 5 packages Adobe has unveiled at a Monday event, but it's one of Adobe's highest-profile programs. Highlighted below are the features generating the most fanfare:
Automatic lens corrections, based on Adobe's close measurements of various camera bodies and lenses, can ease the removal of barrel and pincushion distortion, vignetting that darkens corners, and chromatic aberration that produces colored fringes along edges. This automates a previously manual chore. People can create their own basic profiles and, showing the wonders of crowdsourcing, share them on the Net.
Photoshop CS5 can automatically correct lens distortions, straightening the lines in this fisheye shot, and fix chromatic aberration and vignetting.
Credit: Adobe Systems
Revamped support for high-dynamic range (HDR) photography will let people combine a range of images at different exposures, and this time, produce the desired look out of the composite. Adobe believes it's surpassed the prevailing tool for the job, HDRsoft's Photomatix. Photoshop CS5's HDR Pro feature can be used for an unassuming look that fixes blown-out highlights and crushed blacks, or it can be used to generate the eerie but controversial otherworldly look some HDR aficionados enjoy. For those who want the effect but didn't take bracketed photos at different exposures, a HDR toning command applies the look to a single image.
Credit: Adobe Systems
Content-aware (this is the feature EVERYONE is going bonkers about, I have to admit, I'm blown away too!) fill lets a person delete a region of a photo, an unwanted object, for example, and let Photoshop fill in the resulting blank patch even if it's a complicated background. Content-aware fill can also flesh out the blank patches left around the edges when images are stitched into a panorama. It's common knowledge that photo-editing tools can be used to alter reality, but this automates the process even more. An advanced selection tool will let people more easily isolate subjects from their backgrounds, even with that most notorious of complicated edges, hair. Photoshop users spend lots of tedious hours at this, often buying plug-ins to help, so any improvement in automation is significant. Watch the short (about a minute) video on content-aware!
Credit: Adobe Systems
Puppet warp (THIS is MY favorite!) lets people move elements of a scene around with free-form adjustments based on control points and anchor points. Adobe demonstrated it moving an elephant's trunk from the ground to its mouth, and to level a horizon line bowed by lens distortion, but a more likely use case is making models look skinny and curvaceous (One comment was that we will start seeing "Monty Python-esque pictures soon!) Watch the short (about a minute) video on puppet warp!
What else is in the Creative Suite? There's Premiere Pro for video editing, After Effects for video effects, Illustrator for vector graphics, InDesign for page layout design, DreamWeaver for Web site creation, Flash Pro for writing Flash applications, the new Flash Catalyst for converting graphical mockups into Flash apps, and Acrobat for handling PDF files. Illustrator has new abilities to incorporate perspective into 3D designs. Premiere Pro gets the new GPU- and multicore-accelerated playback engine called Mercury for higher-performance video, including better multilayer composite integration. After Effects gets the roto brush for isolating backgrounds or elements across a series of frames, and both video tools are 64-bit to take advantage of lots of memory. But alas, for Adobe, Flash Pro's fancy new feature, the ability to bring Flash software for the iPhone, appears to be in jeopardy with new Apple license terms (See other posts for details on THAT issue!)
Last but not least, there is another feature that I think is great and is getting completely glossed over by the OTHER features (they ARE cool but I was really impressed by this one as well!) for enterprising ONLINE (Adobe doesn't like the word "website" anymore!) businesses called Business Catalyst. What is Business Catalyst? BC is a hosted application for building and managing online businesses. With this unified platform and no back-end coding, you can build everything from amazing websites to powerful online stores, beautiful brochure-ware sites to lead generation mini-sites.
It's a sprawling collection that spans multiple DVDs. Adobe packages it in any number of specific subsets for various specialties. The list price for the software, which will be released within 30 days, will be US $2,599 for Master Collection CS5, $1,899 for CS5 Design Premium edition, $1,799 for CS5 Web Premium edition, $1,699 for CS5 Production Premium edition and $1,299 for CS5 Design standard edition (NOT cheap!)
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