11190

Provides: Vector illustration

Format: DVD

Developer: Adobe

Minimum Requirements: G4 PowerPC-based or Mac Intel-based processor, Mac OS X v10.4.8, 512MB RAM, 2.5GB hard disk space, 1,024x768 monitor resolution with 16-bit video card, DVD-ROM drive, Internet or phone connection for product activation, broadband Internet connection for Adobe Stock Photos and other services, QuickTime 7 for multimedia features

Processor Compatibility: Universal

Retail Price: $599.00 complete; upgrades start at $199.00; Also available as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3.

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 13.0.2

It's been about 20 years since Illustrator first appeared as a Postscript vector program. It still is a Postscript vector program, although it has gone through a "few changes" in those intervening years. Over that time, some of the updates have been shoulda-woulda-coulda, and some have had major and/or significant component updates. Adobe Illustrator CS3 (aka Illustrator 13) is one of the later, with some very important new components while also improving the general user interface of the basic program. This is a welcome release.

The visible big change with Illustrator is that it also supports the new Panels that most of the rest of the Suite uses (with the big exception being Acrobat that continues to act like it is a separate entity). The invisible change is that Illustrator is now Universal. And within that change it's also faster than it was—even on the PPC processor. Also, since just about any Mac you purchase nowadays offers it, Illustrator is now programmed to take advantage of parallel processing.

The big new feature in AI is Live Color. Live Color has to be one of the best color management systems to appear within any program in, well, ever. To detail all of the features of Live Color would require a full review all by itself. For respect to other aspects of Illustrator, I will try to focus on key features that best display the power and advantages of this new feature. Just please be aware that I'm not covering all of Live Color, just the basics. Also be aware that "with great power comes great responsibility," and one of the problems with Live Color is how to use it. Live Color is a bit overwhelming to use because it's so, so complex. There's lots to the feature, and Adobe is in the unique problem that they've created so many tutorials on how to use Illustrator that it might be a bit difficult to find those on Live Color. If you go to the Adobe Design Center, you will find over 200 video tutorials on Illustrator, and I did see that numbers 28, 29 and 30 all have good information on LC. Keep on digging, there may be more.

Let's say a client has provided you with a photograph of a new product, and they wish for you to make a new brochure with (say) four colors. The first part is easy; open the provided image in photoshop, and, in Illustrator, click on the eyedropper tool, mouse-down anywhere in Illustrator and then drag over to your image. If you release the mouse button now, you will have sampled the color and it will show up in the "Fill" at the bottom of the Tools bar. Now you can drag out a box with that color and start Live Color. But now there's an issue: how does one find Live Color in Illustrator?

Curiously, Adobe hid it—at least by name. Following a marketing name tradition of "Live," Illustrator 12 had Live Trace and Live Paint which could easily be found from the Object menu as seen below:

However, if you select an object and try to find any reference to Live Color, you won't find it. From the Edit menu you find both "Edit Colors" and "Recolor Artwork..." as seen below.

The same name of Edit Colors can also be found with the icon button in the new Color Guide Panel.

And in the newly enhanced Control Panel, Live Color goes back to the "Recolor Artwork" name seen earlier, even though it has the same icon as above.

Anyhow, now that you know the secret handshake to access Live Color (or whatever Adobe wants to call it), you can now bring up the LC window as seen below with my sample color block below. [Note that the NAME of this palette is called Live Color. Go figure...]

There are two main tabs in Live Color (seen just above the color wheel): Edit and Assign. Live Color will probably open to Assign, click on the Edit tab.

One of the first things you should do is set what color mode you want/need to work in from the Mode selector on the bottom. It should be the same color mode as your document, but it doesn't have to be.

Next is the opportunity to select what colors you can and/or want to work with. Fortunately the dynamics of colors are fairly straightforward and mathematical. In the color wheel, complimentary colors are opposite of each other, while triad colors split the color wheel in thirds. Live Color provides 23 different default "calculated" color harmonies, and you can see some of these 23 below. Note that each variation starts from the same original color.

Once you've selected your option, you can see the dynamic on the color wheel, as seen below. The original default color is identified with the double-circled circle. If you click on the icon of a folder with a plus (+) on it (this is the New Color Group icon) you can save that group and give it a name.

At this point, the client walks in and says these colors are too dark. No problem, you can lighten all the colors at once and equally. By dragging the slider just below the color wheel, all of the colors of that group lighten. By the way, to the right of the lighten/darken slider are three icons: the left will add another color on the wheel, the middle one will remove a color selector on the wheel, and the chain, if on, will let you move any color and the distance between any other color will stay the same—they will all rotate together. If the chain is "broken," you can move one color independent from the other(s).

And as you name groups in Live Color, they will show up in the Swatches Panel.

Then, the client comes in again and says that they think that instead of the lime green the base color, should be yellow. Because you are using one of the harmonious color rules, if you change one, than the others will not be synced up with the others. So, what you need to do is make each object active, open up Live Color, and spin the wheel (as it where) by mousing down on the larger circle and rotating it to yellow to change all of the colors at one time while maintaining the same hue balance between each. By the way, if you click on a color group and make any change on that color group, when you click the OK button for Live Color, you have the opportunity to change the colors of that group to the new colors.

Now, separate but very related to all this, you may have heard of Adobe's Kuler website. This site allows you to create, save, search, and play with various color groups. If you click on the Create tab of Kuler, you find an environment that is not all that different from Live Color. If you are registered with Kuler (a free option), you can download any of the pre-made color sets and this can be opened in Illustrator (and Photoshop and InDesign) and used as a Color Swatch Group.

I could go on and on about all of the features of Live Color, but I do want to maintain space for other Illustrator features. Like I said, this is a complete, deep, and rich environment to work in.

But there's more to this environment; meet the Color Guide. Mentioned briefly above, the Color Guide is sort of a "slimmed down" version of Live Color with different and overlapping abilities, extra strengths, and some curious shortcomings.

First off, the colors across the top region are your group. The group is based on the leftmost color, which can be changed by clicking on any square in the Color Guide or by clicking on any Swatch color. If you click on a color in your document, that color will show up in the small square on the far upper left. If you click on that square, the color will then pop into the leftmost color of your color group. Below, you see two different sets of colors based on different colors but both using the same color harmony. This is determined by the dropdown menu on the far right side. If you press this you get the same Popup menu as seen above in Live Color's color harmonies.

The block of colors below the basic set of colors is the Variations region. Right down the (vertical) middle are the same colors, as seen in the Active Colors on the top. The default set of variations has variations of tint on the left and shades on the right. There are three different sets of Variations as seen below.

At any time, you can click on one of these variations and it will become the base color for the basic set of colors across the top and will follow the color harmony rule that you've already established. If you want to follow Pantone colors, you can go to the pre-defined swatch groups (such as Pantone colors), which can be accessed via the dropdown menu on the bottom left. From the bottom right, you can click on the Save Swatch icon. This will take the base colors on the top in the Swatch Panel just as you can from the Live Color Panel. By the way, the option seen above to "Color Guide Options..." lets you select the number of columns in variations from 3 to 20—that's 3 to 20 on each side of the middle column.

All of the discussion I've presented on Live Color has been focused on creating color sets before you start your drawing. However, perhaps that's not how you work. That's okay as well. If you prefer to make/create all of your colors as you work, you can still use Live Color. After you've brought your image to a point where you want to see if Live Color can do anything for you, make all of the objects in your drawing active and then start up Live Color. Below, I created 9 boxes and arbitrarily filled them with colors. Then, after making the set active, I brought up Live Color and you can see that Live Color picked up each color and created a set called "Artwork Colors." Just as in any group of colors, I can alter one or all of the colors and still have all of the global controls as in any other Live Color group.

For me, the most important feature missing in both Live Color and Color guide is that there is no back button. Part of "playing" with colors (or any artistic experiment) on a computer is pushing the envelope and stepping backwards to where you last liked what you did. Yes, you can save (and save and save) your groups into the Swatch panel, but that can get cumbersome even if it is easy to delete all that you don't want. However, a history option for both Live Color and the Color guide is really really needed.

An additional, albeit more subtle, addition would be the placement somewhere of which color harmony rule you were using. Currently, if you are using "Adjacent Colors," there is no way to have that verified unless you remember what you did. If you press the dropdown menu to revisit the color harmonies, there is no check mark or highlighted accent to verify or confirm what is selected. As part of any improvement here, I'd also like some sort of key control to change the harmonies. This would be similar to Shift + + or Shift + - to change Blending Modes in Photoshop. The manual task of selecting into a drop down menu to change the harmony breaks the visual lock I want to maintain on the colors.

By the way, if you are in Live Paint (introduced in CS2) and have any color group (new in CS3) active, you can skip through the color you are about to paint with by tapping the left and right arrow keys to select which color in the group you are about to apply. Below, you see the colors to the left and right of the current selection from the selected Group. I would have been a bit happier to see larger swatches, and it would also have been nice to see the full Group as opposed to only the selected color and the one on either side, but these are small quibbles to how it was before when you had to stop and re-select each color one-at-a-time as you painted with Live Paint.

The other big news in Illustrator is better interaction with Flash. I'm one of those who strongly feel that the main reason Adobe purchased Macromedia was Flash. Dreamweaver and Fireworks were gravy, and Freehand has already been given last rights. (By the way, Illustrator can now import Freehand 10 and 11 files.) Likewise, getting Adobe programs (read Illustrator) to "play nice" with Flash was high on the importance list. Now, in this first step in making the two programs play better together, surprisingly big steps have been taken.

[Reader alert: I am barely a Flash user so my comments here are mostly passing on listed features. The rest of this review are functions and/or features I use and have tested.]

For one thing, it's important for appreciating how big any advancements are is that Illustrator and Flash use different rendering models for creating vectors. Despite that, you can now take Illustrator files directly into Flash. What you can't do (yet) is to take Flash files into Illustrator. However, Flash can now maintain vector gradients, Illustrator structures (Groups, Layers, Text, etc.), and clipping masks. Unfortunately, complex drawings may be converted into bitmapped images.

I have a strong feeling that it's time for me to learn Flash, as I think some amazingly cool features will be coming in CS4.

Before I run out of space, there are other new features in Illustrator. There are, for example, two new "tools" in the Tool Bar: the Crop Area and Eraser Tool.

The Crop Area Tool establishes the boundaries of the artwork on the art board, or perhaps more specifically stated, it defines the art board. And for any given document, you can have multiple art boards defined. The Crop Area Tool is found amongst the Tools and shares the location with the Slice and Slice Select Tool.

You use the Crop Area Tool just as you would in (say) Photoshop by marqueeing out a region. As seen below, I've marqueed out five different crop regions on the same image. This is done by pressing on the Option key to either create (more than one) or view multiple crop regions.

By clicking on any one of these regions with the Option key concurrently pressed and then re-saving the document, you have defined which crop region will be presented. As seen below, on the left I'm showing the crop region of region #1 (all four squares), and on the right I'm showing the crop region of #2 (the red square). There are a number of preset sizes that one can select, including standard page sizes, video, and the many portable sizes found in the Device Central.

The full significance of this can be seen if you look at the thumbnails of this document in Bridge. To show this, I've saved three different crop versions of the same document. On the left is the crop represented on the above image on the left. In the middle below I'm showing the crop region presented on the above right image. Last is the thumbnail of the document with no crop where the art board is the entire page.

I do have several gripes about the Crop Tool. For one thing, resizing a crop is overly sensitive. To resize, you are supposed to click on any of the eight resize handles and drag appropriately. I found them to be a bit too sensitive where you mouse-down, and kept losing my crop, forcing me to restart from scratch. In addition, if you are doing multiple crops (like the third image above), you have to start a crop from outside any previous crop. I understand what's taking place here, but I would like some mechanism to crop a region inside a previous region without having to move the previous crop out of the way first. My last complaint is that although it sort of works like the Crop tool in Photoshop, there is one clumsy difference; in Photoshop, when you are marqueeing something, you can always press the Space Bar to re-set the marquee location without changing the size or shape of the marquee selection. Not with this Crop Tool; pressing the Space Bar does nothing. It's fascinating how by not adding the functionality in one tool that you are otherwise used to can be so frustrating. It's a small thing but...

The other new tool is the Eraser Tool found below the new Crop tool and mixed in with the Scissors and Knife Tool.

The concept of the Eraser Tool is fairly straightforward; it creates a vector erasure and removes from the object(s) below. The basic mechanics are the same as a Brush tool, and if you double-click the tool you can see how you can customize it to even work with a Wacom Tablet.

As a demonstration of how it works with a Wacom Tablet and how the vector aspect looks and works, I've take a collection of rectangles and, using the Wacom pen, drew a pressure sensitive squiggle through them. I then duplicated the set and left the group on the right active to show the vector points of the erased squiggle.

Note in the above image that if you drag the Eraser Tool through a bunch of items, the Eraser Tool will cut through all of them. If you select one item to make it active and then do the same thing, only the item that is selected will be affected by the Erase Tool, as seen below.

Unfortunately the new Eraser tool works like Illustrator's Brush tool, and the Illustrator Brush tool does not work like Photoshop's Brush tool. One feature in PS's Brush tool is that I can click anywhere on a drawing, press the Shift key and click anywhere else, and get a straight line between those two points. In Illustrator, the Shift key only limits drawing on 45° angles while you drag out the line. Thus, as long as you want to erase along a 45° angle, you're good. However, if you want to erase a straight line on any other angle, you are on your own.

Speaking of selection, there is now an "Isolation" mode. Have you ever had a complex drawing and tried to futz with one region where there were a lot of other parts and you kept inadvertently clicking on the wrong thing? Now, with Isolation mode, you select the part of the image you want to work on and, well, work.

As seen below on the left, I've created two flowers. Each is a group, both are on the same layer, and the red one is over the orange one. With previous versions of Illustrator, the easiest way to work on the orange one would be to move the red one to its own layer and either lock that layer or make it invisible while I worked on the orange one.

Now, in CS3 I can simply double-click the orange one and every other object on the art board fades out. And, from within a group, I can double-click on part of a group and now just that one part will be isolated for alteration. The object on which I double-clicked moves to the front so I can alter it as needed. While in Isolation Mode, I can only alter and/or move that one item. Nothing else can be affected.

There are (at least) three different ways to get out of Isolation Mode. First, I can double-click anywhere on the drawing's art board. Alternatively, when you go into Isolation Mode, a broad gray strip crosses the top of your art board as seen below (in addition, the color for that layer will border the bottom part of the gray strip). On the left side of the gray strip there will be the bread crumbs of the item you've isolated, and there will be an arrow pointing to the left. If you click that arrow, you will leave Isolation Mode. Finally, if you look at the Control Strip underneath the Menu selection "Select," you will see a new icon with four arrows pointing out from a rectangle. If you click on that, you will also leave Isolation Mode.

The one curious limitation of Isolation mode is that the item has to be in a group or part of a group. Thus, if there is something on your art board that you want to isolate to work on, you need to first make it into a Group.

There's been a great new single feature added to Live Trace (introduced in CS2) that's worthy of mention, and to demonstrate it I had to go through a bit of a process. Here's what I did: I took a screen shot of the two flowers using Snapz Pro (that's what I use for all my screen shots) and saved the image as a Photoshop document (.psd). Then, from the desktop, I dragged that bitmapped image onto an empty Illustrator document, which brought up the Live Trace option, as seen below. If you look at where the cursor is in the bottom third, you can see I've checked the option to "Ignore White." This means I've traced the object(s) but am ignoring any white.

Now, I click the Trace button and then I select the two flowers, and copy. Then, back in Photoshop, I create a new document (which will automatically be sized the same size as anything I have in the clipboard), and Paste the flowers I just created in Illustrator. When I do this, the flowers will be placed in their own layer. I then turn off the visibility of the Background layer which lets the invisibility grid display through, as seen below. This demonstrates how using the "Ignore White" feature really does ignore the white.

This is a nice enhancement of a feature that appeared in the last update, but as long as Adobe has done this, a wish list for CS4 would be user selection of what color(s) to ignore. After all, why stop at white?

One last great enhancement in this review (and certainly not the last of all of the changes) is selection of handles with the Direct Selection Tool. In the past (and by that, I mean forever), it was always a bit tricky to select a handle with the Direct Selection Tool. Now, whether the item is selected or not, if you move the Direct Selection Tool over a handle, not only is there a small square near the end of the selection arrow, but the object's handle will turn into a square making it easy to select. It's so often the little things...

The full range of the handles is now a user Preference, including how far away (in pixels) you have to be to have the effect kick in.

But wait, one more new feature: Knowhow. Accessed from Window (menu) -> Adobe Labs -> knowhow, this is an interactive Help tool. Knowhow is (1) a link to the standard Help file that comes with Illustrator, (2) a sort of "Google search" that comes standard with any Internet access, and (3) a cheat sheet of what the various optional modifier keys can do to the selected tool.

Below, you see Knowhow, and in my tools I've clicked on the Scale Tool. You can see what the name of the tool is in the text field on the top. To the right of the name of the selected tool is a binocular icon for searching for help. Below this, you see items with Adobe's "A" icon, and those are links that will open Adobe Illustrator's Help program and bring you right to that specific item in the Help. If you click on the four-pair grid pattern, you will be taken right to some website with information on that tool. Some of these are Adobe's own site while others are someone else's website, blog, whatever. (How one gets added to this list, I do not have a clue.) On the right side, you see what you get if you click the "butterfly" icon, second over from the Tools name. Each icon represents a modifier key; in order, there's the Shift, space bar, Command, Option, and various chords of these keys, as available. The last icon brings up the customization of that Tool. This is no different than if you double-clicked the Tool.

Knowhow is a redundant (in a good way) and snappy way to get information that you already have access to. That is, if you open Illustrator's Help program and either search or select (from the Index) the Scale Tool, you have exactly the same information as you'd have if you selected Scale Tool from Knowhow—just more direct. Likewise, if you went into Google and typed in "Illustrator "Scale tool," you'd find yourself with pretty much the same links that you have from Knowhow—again, just more direct. The biggest frustration of Knowhow is that it is currently limited to Illustrator's Tools. No menu selection, panels, or any other feature. Knowhow is a handy feature that needs to be expanded.

My only two complaints with Knowhow is that you cannot change the size of the palette. What you see above is what you get. If you want to see items that cannot fit into the small palette, you have to drag the scroll bar down, and this leads to my second issue; why should an active scroll bar be grayed out? For 20 years, the standard user interface of any computer image is that an active image is fully contrasted and an image that is not active is grayed out. To make this palette function different from what is standard may be artistic, but is also confusing. When one is learning and/or using tools and/or new tools, companies should not be throwing in monkey wrenches to confuse us. It's bad enough for Adobe to make their icons small enough to print on grains of rice, but to change interface standards is simply curdled cream on top.

Otherwise, this is a great update. There is the full range of new features, including those under the hood and those that make up the hood. Missing are any updates and/or repairs to the 3D Effects. Round Corner Rectangles are still as clumsy as ever. And while Adobe may say you can do multi-page documents in InDesign, not all Illustrator users have InDesign or the Design Suite; ergo, they still cannot do multi-page documents. For those users who do have InDesign, we've seen InDesign's Effects Panel and it puts Illustrator's Effects and Filters to shame. It's time these were updated as well.

If Applelinks had "1/2" point ratings, I'd give this a 4-1/2. As it stands, I can't justify a full 5. That's the way it goes. There are some really nice updates to this release, but we are still left to wish for what's to come.

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