I had the opportunity to attend the launch event for the all new Adobe Creative Suite 4 today… man, it totally freaked me out! I would have never expected an upgrade as big as this - CS4 is a quantum leap from where CS3 left off.

Here’s an outline of my favorite new features:

• Illustrator
  • Multiple “artboards” (pages) - it’s about freekin time! Freehand users can finally migrate across. This artboard functionality is super-cool - in a single Illustrator document, you can have an entire campaigns artwork layed out over the entire stage, e.g. an A2 poster, a flyer, a sticker, a CD, a web banner, etc.
  • The gradient tool has been totally upgraded - rather than using the gradient panel, the gradient slider control appears right on top of the object you’re applying the gradient to. You can change the gradient, add colors, move it around and change the style right there. Very nice
  • Blob drawing (Flash’s method of painting and creating shapes) has been incorporated.
• Photoshop
  • More sophisticated 3d object controls
  • Content-aware scaling - you can stretch out or compress an image without objects distorting (and people getting fatter / thinner).
  • Photoshop can now make use of your GPU (the processor built on to your graphics card) which speeds things up hugely. This enables slick, smooth zooming and panning (reminiscent of Microsoft Seadragon) and general speedy rendering and processing.
  • A new panel specially for custom and preset Adjustments.
• Flash
  • Tweening and animation has been totally reimagined. No more creating multiple keyframes for tweens, and no more guide layers to tween objects along paths. Creating a tween is a single-click process, and moving an object creates a bezier curve that it completely editable for creating complex motion paths. There’s also a handy “Animation Presets” panel to quickly create common animations, like ball bouncing, zooming out, etc.
  • There is also a Motion Editor panel that allows you to fine-tune motion easing.
  • For those of you who are familiar with creating animation in After Effects, Adobe have basically canned Flash’s method of animation in favor of After Effects methods and tools.
  • This also means 3D! Objects now have X, Y and Z positioning, so you can animate objects using 3D techniques. Divide a scene into a foreground and background to give the illusion of depth, or create more complex animations with objects flying in within a 3D space. Hectic. Only problem is that THIS functionality required Flash Player 10 to play. Sucky.
  • You can import an After Effects composition into Flash in order to add interactivity to a scene / animation. Freekin brilliant!
  • A new Bones tool allows you to join multiple objects together by creating a skeleton which can be animated really easily. This makes character animation such a breeze.
• Premier
  • Managing loads and loads of video clips is a total mission, particularly when you need to find a particular clip. Premier now includes a transcribe tool that… wait for it - scans video clips, performs voice recognition and transcribes the voice, to be used as meta data allow for quick easy searching. Seriously sophisticated stuff.
• Integration between the products totally rocks… a few examples:
  • Create an After Effects comp directly from Premier - edit the comp in After Effects and the clip immediately updates itself in Premier without rendering.
  • In Dreamweaver, drag a PSD onto the stage and you’re able to Save For Web and create a JPEG (or GIF / PNG / etc.) right then and there. Later, if you edit the original PSD in Photoshop, the JPEG created from it in Dreamweaver updates itself.
  • Open a video file in Photoshop and edit individual frames… *gasp*
• All of the applications now feature a consistent appearance with the following features:
  • A “breadcrumb” trail detailing where you are within an object “nest”.
  • Tabbed file editing (much like tabbed browsing in modern web browsers)
  • Stack modes allowing easy rearranging of assets within the workspace

Sincere apologies if I’ve gotten some of the terminology completely wrong, but I’ve done my best.

There really is so much more, but let me stop waffling on and on and leave the detail up to the professionals. Check out the following sites for much more detail:

• the Adobe website
• Adobe TV
• Adobe unveils CS4 suite (Macworld)
• Photoshop & Illustrator CS4 Video
• A whole whack of other videos available on YouTube