Product ReviewsPSUs
Illustrator CS3 brings several new ways of working, along with the new interface sported by the entire CS3 suite. A series of new document profiles allow you to choose your artwork size to suit the job in hand: category groups for print, web, video and mobile devices now complement the standard RGB and CMYK workspaces. These spaces are customised for each medium - the video presets, for instance, now open with checkerboard backgrounds to indicate transparency, as well as built-in guides showing the Picture Safe and Title Safe areas; print presets automatically open in CMYK; and so on. Working with colour The biggest single feature in Illustrator CS3 is Live Color, which both simplifies and greatly extends the task of choosing complementary colours. The new Color Guide panel loads swatches from a huge range of preset combinations, following the standard colour harmony rules. Modes such as Complementary, Analogous, High Contrast, Compound and Triad make it easy to choose and explore colours that are more likely to go together than mere trial and error could produce.
The Color Guide can work like a Swatches panel on the fly; selecting a colour from your artwork and adding it to the panel will produce an instant series of swatches showing various tints of that colour - both adding and subtracting luminosity from it. You can choose how many steps are displayed through a separate options panel and add colours to the standard Swatches panel if you wish. On a basic level, this makes it far easier to build tints than was previously possible. However, this sampled colour also determines the remainder of the colours in the harmony group, according to the harmony rules you set. You can also choose from a vast range of preset colour combinations, grouped under such headings as Art History, Earthtone, Kids Stuff, Skintones and Corporate, as well as the more obvious Mac and Windows system and web colours. The Color Books section includes Pantone, Trumatch and Process colour ranges. The Live Color dialog brings the colour-choosing process to life, with a colour chooser that interactively affects all the colours in selected artwork. The colours used are shown as circles on a standard colour wheel, and if you open existing artwork, each colour will be shown here. You can drag each colour independently, or rotate the entire selection: it's similar to working with the Hue/Saturation dialog in Photoshop, applying global colour changes to all the colours in the artwork. The colour wheel can also be shown as a segmented wheel, reducing the number of colours displayed. If you choose a preset harmony range, just these colours will be displayed in this mode. In addition, you can choose to display just bars of the colours used in the artwork. A novel Randomize button here will swap the colours around between objects, producing instant variations on a theme. You can also choose to randomly change saturation and brightness, or tweak them yourself using standard HSB, RGB or CMYK sliders. If you choose a different colour model, such as one of the many preset modes, the artwork will be remapped to use those colours instead. It's an intelligent process, reducing the number of colours in your artwork to produce a best fit to the new scheme. Once chosen, the number of control handles will reduce dramatically, enabling far simpler colour modification. There are two significant advantages to this way of working. First, if you create a colour model for product packaging, say, then it's easy to churn out as many variations on that model as you like by simply dragging the colour markers around. The second, most important advantage is that Live Color is a modal dialog. This means you can make as many changes to the colour as you like and always have the option to cancel, which will return you to the original state of the artwork. New tools Illustrator CS3 brings us a new tool in the form of an Eraser. It's been common to painting programs since the days of MacPaint, but this is the first time it's been properly implemented in a vector environment. It operates exactly as you'd expect: erasing a portion of artwork (which doesn't have to be selected) will smoothly remove the erased area, creating additional anchor points in the remaining
Since the Eraser works on unselected artwork, there would be the potential for disaster if everything beneath the cursor were erased by the process - so this is where another new working method comes in: the ability to isolate groups of objects within the workspace. Clicking on the new Isolate button on the Control panel at the top of the screen will make all unselected artwork inactive, bleaching it out to show that it can't be selected. You can also simply double-click on a group to isolate it, and then double-click anywhere outside the group to exit Isolation mode. Talking of new tools, if artwork created for one medium needs to be repurposed for another, a new Crop Area tool will limit the bounds to the region you specify. All standard print, web and video proportions and sizes are available here as presets. Control panel The Control panel itself has been rethought, providing far more context-sensitive feedback on the state of the current object. You can set fill, stroke colour and weight, and opacity directly from the panel, obviating the need for their palettes to be visible; the location, width and height of individual objects are also displayed here. When multiple anchor points are selected, the Control panel now displays a variety of options for manipulating those points. You can choose to remove them, join end points, or cut the path at selected points; convert corner points to smooth, and vice versa; and hide or display the Bézier control handles for all selected points. A series of Alignment buttons now also appears in the Control panel - a process previously determined only by the confusing Average dialog. Now, selected points can be aligned left, right, top, bottom and centre with a single click, or distributed along either axis. Selecting anchor points within complex artwork has always been rather a hit-and-miss affair in Illustrator. Now there's an option to make anchor points appear automatically when the cursor is moved over them. A new Preferences pane controls how close you need to be to activate a point, and how the activation is displayed. Integration with Flash Now that Adobe has brought Flash firmly within the CS3 suite, it's natural that Illustrator should have been updated to work more smoothly with it. Vector artwork now retains its integrity when opened in Flash, with all objects, paths and names maintained throughout both programs. You can port text created in Illustrator to Flash as static text, which is treated like regular artwork. However, changing this to Dynamic Text allows it to be altered by scripting in Flash; choosing Input Text enables user-editable text fields. The ability to specify the antialiasing method, selectability and character embedding is set in the Flash Text panel. Illustrator has long had the ability to work with Symbols, in which you can edit multiple instances of a design element by changing just one example. Now, when the document is imported into Flash, the changes are correctly interpreted and incorporated into the Flash project. When Illustrator was battling it out with FreeHand, upgrades tended to incorporate esoteric new features that showed off impressive but little-used new technologies. With the competition seen off, Illustrator CS3 is a major overhaul of the application: each new feature brings an entirely warranted new ease of use, enhancing the user experience to an unsurpassed degree. Some components have been overlooked in this upgrade, though. The 3D feature, introduced in CS, remains untouched: it badly needs an overhaul to bring it up even to the level of competence it had in Adobe Dimensions. And the graphing tools haven't been updated since their debut in Illustrator 3 - there's still no simple way to draw a 3D pie chart, for example. In summary Although many areas haven't been addressed, Illustrator CS3 is a strong upgrade that will, literally, make life easier for most of its users. Always a clumsy beast in the hands of new users, Illustrator is fast becoming more useable, more intuitive and more powerful. This is the most significant new version in a decade. Read reviews of the other applications in Creative Suite 3
By Steve Caplin
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
