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Digital Media Software
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium
5/30/2007
Here are the numbers.
Creative Features
Illustrator CS3 adds a few new features, but nowhere near as many major ones as Photoshop CS3 Extended. Live Color is probably the most major. This is a suite of new color tools that includes a Color Guide palette, which provides you with color scheme suggestions based on a range of selected objects. Like some other tools on the market, this allows you to generate harmonious (or not so harmonious) color schemes for elements on the canvas. Unlike other tools, it can generate these schemes based not just on a single starting color, but on the whole range of colors used in a selection, and apply those changes on the fly.
To further refine color schemes, you can click and drag on handles in the color wheel, which will allow you to modify the colors while preserving the harmonies you've created (or have been created for you). You can also click over to the Assign tab in the palette and manually assign new colors to your objects based on the old colors.
There are 23 predefined color scheme algorithms in Illustrator CS3, including simple complements, triads, tetrads, and more.
Illustrator also gains some refinements to its suite of drawing and editing tools, including:
- Alignment and distribution of points to help bring symmetry to objects without having to create guides or perform manual measurements;
- Path editing tools in the new Control panel when you select any object with the Direct Selection tool;
- Automatically highlighting anchor points; and
- Enhancements to the Eraser tool, which now allows you to use the Eraser just as you would in a raster-based image-editing program like Photoshop.
Flash Integration
Those who use Illustrator in conjunction with Flash will be delighted by new features in Illustrator that help the two apps get along much better. The basic compatibility of Illustrator objects pasted or imported into Flash has been drastically improved. Illustrator objects pasted or imported into Flash used to have al kinds of problems. That's not the case anymore. Even 3D objects in Illustrator will be displayed properly when brought into Flash. No expansion or other types of modification to the 3D objects are required.
Illustrator objects pasted or otherwise imported into Flash now maintain paths, anchor point positions, gradients, and clipping masks properly. And object and layer grouping structures are also maintained.
In addition, Illustrator shapes can be saved as symbols and pasted into Flash CS3 and manipulated as symbols.
And text objects in Illustrator can be used in Flash and defined as "regular," "dynamic," or "input" text.
Illustrator CS3's revamped interface. (Click for larger image.)
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