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Provides: Page Layout/Publishing
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.11 or greater, G5 or Intel processor,
512MB of RAM, 1.6GB of space
Premium Retail Price: $599 for
standalone version, $199 for upgrade, and is part of Adobe
Creative Suite 4.
It's
fun to watch programs grow and develop. Some features seemed like
good ideas and showed a lot of promise but are dropped, while seemingly
neat features blossom into fantastic tools. Illustrator CS4 has all this
and more. Some of the new features have been begged for by users for years
and years (that'd be Pages) while other snuck up on us seemingly
out of the blue (that'd be Blob Brush). Yet, other features continue to
sit idle with no change or update in sight (that'd be 3D effects). So,
let's take a trip to see some of the highlights in Illustrator CS4, a worthy
upgrade.
When you first open Illustrator CS4, you will encounter the new OWL 2 interface that all of the Suite's programs have (except the Video programs and, of course, Acrobat). While I still have no use for the Application Frame, I do like the tabbed interface in Illustrator. The good news is that you can turn these features on or off as you so see fit. As you look around, one of the things you might notice is that a whole menu is missing; the Filter menu is gone, missing, removed, kaput. You will need to look around, but any Filter menu selection that was worthy of being kept is still there, it's just been moved to a new location. Since the Filter selections were not editable (like the Effects menu selections), I will not be missing them.
Like most of the applications in the Adobe Suites, there are so many new features that it is impossible to elaborate on them all. As such, below I'm focusing on the new features/improvements that affect me and have made my life easier when using Illustrator. As always, there are many many other features and improvements that are there waiting to be discovered in Adobe Illustrator CS4 (AI-CS4).
Artboards
One of the new features in AI-CS3 was the Crop Tool. You can read about that in my review of Adobe Illustrator CS3. That seemed like pretty a handy tool back then. What I didn't know about at the time was that it was leading us to multi-page—or rather, multi-artboards—in AI-CS4.
The distinction between pages and artboards is more than academic when you think about the differences; when you talk about pages, you realize that all pages in a book need to be the same size. Books that have different size pages are unwieldy.
If you zoom out far enough in Illustrator, there will be a dark "outside," within which is the "Canvas," a light region upon which you can draw as many "artboards" as can fit. I'm not sure of the full potential here, but in the image below, the artboard containing the triangle measures about 40 inches across. Artboards can all be the same size, or, as seen below, any size you want. When creating more artboards, you can pull from dropdown menus and select standard page sizes or common "use" sizes such as web banner dimensions. When you've completed a drawing, you can always have the artboard shrink to fit the image. You can also draw or drag objects outside the artboard if you need a place to store pieces. Also, each artboard can have its own bleed as needed.
My only complaint with artboards is that you cannot name them. As shown below, they receive a number as they are created that shows up in the upper left corner. The view below is what you see when you select the Crop tool. The Canvas region becomes as dark as what you normally see beyond the canvas region, and only the artboards light up. Any artboard you click on is the active artboard and can be resized, moved, or deleted. As you create new artboards or move around existing artboards, Illustrator's improved Smart guides pop up from any and everywhere to let you place or move items according to the placement of other items or other artboards. This can be very handy if you are making multiple mockups of the same artwork and wish things to be aligned similarly.
Illustrator's multiple artboards have been well integrated by InDesign. If you initiate a "Place" operation from InDesign to an AI document with multiple artboards, each artboard can be independently selected. This means that if you are creating AI illustrations for a piece of written work, you do not need to have one AI document per illustration, but can have one AI document per chapter and have many many illustrations within that document to select and Place into the InDesign document.
Smart Guides
In the image above, you can see the Smart Guides helping you to align the various components of your drawing to other components and/or the artboard. Other enhancements include showing a component's location and/or dimension as you move, create, or resize an object.
I have to admit that since I'm not using Illustrator for any CAD work, which can't be realistically done anyway since Illustrator is not a CAD program, showing dimensions doesn't make much sense to me. Fortunately, in the Smart Guides Preferences, you can turn on or off any of the dynamics. Surprisingly, I find the features of InDesign's Smart Guides more powerful and useful than those in Illustrator's. Specifically what's missing are the guides that let you space and rotate objects equally as you place them on a page.
The Appearance Panel
Without a doubt, one of my favorite features is the newly improved Appearance Panel. The Appearance Panel has been around for some time, letting you know the specifics of any object in a drawing. You could look, but that was about it. Well, now you can adjust any component of an object right from the Appearance Panel. If you have a stroke, by clicking on the stroke name you can change the thickness or color. If you click on the Opacity you can change the opacity. If you have an effect, you can click on the effect's name and make alterations. You can turn the eyeball off or on to see and experiment on what's the best way to present an object. In short, the Appearance Panel rocks.
By selecting an item in the Appearance Panel and then going to the Select (menu) -> Same -> and then selecting an attribute, you can affect a number of items with the same attribute in the Appearance Panel.
It's very hard to underestimate the incredible power and capabilities that can now be harnessed via the Appearance Panel. You will be limiting your capabilities considerably by not working with this updated tool.
The Blob Brush
You have to wonder how many terms, definitions, and names that Adobe must have gone though to finally settle on the name The Blob Brush. Like the name or not, it's very descriptive and provides a significant new tool to Illustrator.
The Blob Brush, like the standard Brush, shares a number of the same Preferences as shown below. Of particular note is everything on the top half which cannot be found in the Brush's Preferences. Notice that both can take advantage of a Wacom Tablet.
Below are a series of screenshots of the same two lines, the top one is a standard Brush and the bottom one is made with the new Blob Brush. In the top image, they are essentially the same. In the 2nd image, I've selected them with the Select Tool and you can start to see the difference: the Brush leaves an Open path while the Blob Brush leaves a closed path.
The significance of this can start to be displayed when I give the Blob Brush object a red stroke on its path. The size of the stroke can be varied just as any stroke can be varied. The Brush line, since it is the stroke, cannot be outlined and in fact the only place I can provide any variation on it is to change the fill (where I selected the same red as the stroke in the Blob Brush line).
A last example of the differences is by using the Eraser Tool on each. Since the Blob Brush is a closed path, the Eraser tool simply "ate" away on the side of the line. The Brush line, however, was chopped in two as soon as I crossed the stroke line in the middle (and lost the Wacom's pressure dynamics as well).
Some other attributes of the Blob Brush are that if you are painting with the same color, you can add to the blob at any time. If you are painting with a different color (shade, whatever), that will be a different object and cannot be joined with the original. In addition, if you have a Blob Brush object selected and then paint over it with the same color, that object will be merged with the new BB, and other objects, not selected, will not be even if they are the same color. In the image below, the "L" shaped thing in the middle merged with the left object (which was selected) and not with the right (which was not selected). [Please note: the orange and blue outlines were added after the 2nd BB stroke to visually help display what happened. If they had the different strokes prior to the "L" stroke being added, the items could not have merged.]
Isolation Mode
Isolation Mode was introduced in CS3 so it's not a new feature, but it has been improved in a very important dynamic. Previously you could use Isolation Mode to separate a grouped object from a page of other objects. If the object wasn't already grouped, one option you had was to Group a single object to satisfy how Isolation Mode worked. Now you can isolate anything from a simple object to a grouped object. In fact, if you have several items grouped together, you can double-click the grouped object to isolate it from the rest of the items on the screen and then double-click a component from the grouped object to isolate it from the group to alter and/or adjust that item without having to un-group the items.
Below is a collection of stars, one of which also has some lines grouped with the star. If I double-click that star, it rises to the top of the stack and all other objects on the page become washed out in color, meaning you cannot access, click on, or do anything to the other objects on the screen. If I then double-click one of those lines I can separate it from the grouped object, and it rises to the top of the stack (the rest of the group falls back into its previous location) and I can do what I want/need to do to that line.
Once the adjustments are completed, simply double-click anywhere on the page to return to an un-isolated page, tap the Escape key, or click on the left facing arrow in the gray strip that appears on the top of the screen once you enter Isolation Mode (see the above middle and right images). [Also note above that your "bird trail" path appears as you progress on your isolation objective, showing you what you are doing and from where that path of access to isolation started.]
Gradients
There has always been a bit of magic and crossed fingers to gradients. You select the Gradient tool and drag across your object and mull over it, re-drag and mull, and this continues until you are mostly kinda sorta satisfied. Well, the need to futz and play and mull are still going to be around, but at least you now have an object to futz with. And it's pretty cool.
Oh yeah, we also have transparency gradients.
The deal has always been that you create your object and then select a gradient from a swatch or the Gradient Panel and then take the Gradient tool and drag across the object. Once the drag was complete and you released the mouse. If you didn't like it, you'd have to re-guess where to start and/or stop the next drag to fine-tune what you wanted. Now, we have an actual widget to work with.
The initial setup for creating the gradient is no different. However, now when we drag across the object, something remains. The anatomy of the Gradient widget is effectively no different from the Gradient Panel. There will be two squares on both ends where you can double-click directly on the little squares. This will bring up an option to replace the color with a swatch, or you can select a tool from the color picker. If you drag the square along the widget, you will move where that color's location appears on the gradient. Below on the left image you can see I've clicked where there was no swatch square and created one in the middle. Besides setting a color for each swatch square, you can also set the transparency. Between each swatch square is a small white dot which represents the mid-point of the color transition. These can be slid back and forth on the widget to move where the mid-point of the transition is located.
On the left side is the "fulcrum" of the widget. You can move this fulcrum around the object for placement. On the right side you can grab the end with your mouse and increase or decrease the length of the widget. If you move your mouse off to the (lengthening) side, you will see a rotation icon, meaning you can drag to rotate the widget. It seems you should be able to mouse-down on the end of either side of the widget and simply drag from there to rotate, but unfortunately you can't do that; you must slip off to the side to rotate.
One other "it seems like it should..." is that to convert from a linear to a radial gradient, you should be able to right-click on the widget and convert from there. Unfortunately you either have to select an appropriate swatch or select from the dropdown menu on the Gradient Panel.
Before I leave gradients, let me also point out that if you have a radial gradient, you can grab one quarter of the circle around the radial gradient and pull down to form an ellipse as shown below.
Graphic Styles
In the past, when you clicked on one Graphic Style and then the next, each style would remove any aspects of the proceeding style. Now you can have cumulative styles. That is, let's say you have one style of a 4 pixel red border, another style of a drop shadow, and another style of blue fill. By pressing the Option key when clicking on any of those (or other) styles, you'll be adding any style to any previous style your object already had.
Adobe has enhanced this feature by providing a batch of pre-built styles to use. If you go to the side menu in the Graphic Styles Panel, the 2nd option from the bottom is "Open Graphic Styles Library." There are new libraries with the word "Additive" as part of the name.
By the way, if you Command-click (and hold) on a Graphic Style now, you can see what the effects of that style will be on your object. (Unfortunately, right-clicking on a Graphic Style does not work on a Mac.) While this is nice, it does have limited potential because the size of the pop-up image is not very large. It's quite possible, depending on the size of your object, that it will be more effective to simply select your object, click on the Graphic Style, and then undo as needed.
Clipping Masks
Clipping Masks provide clean cut lines and objects to the exact ends of the desired shape. Well, now they do. The top image of the two images below shows a clipping mask over two lines created in AI-CS3. When the object is selected, the trails of the original lines leak out way past the clipping mask. However, in the lower of the two images created in AI-CS4, note that when the object is selected, the line trails are no longer visible. If you actually click on the line, then that line becomes active and you do have access to the entire length of the line. The significance of this is that you no longer will accidentally be grabbing them, hiding them from access, or trying to explain to a client that they are not really there. Now, they are not.
Alignment Trick
This is only an enhancement of an old feature but one that is so nifty, I have to mention it. One of the long-time "hidden" tricks of Illustrator is aligning a group of objects to the location of one of those objects. To do this, after selecting all of the objects you want to align, do one last click on the object that you want the object to align to. Then, after selecting the align options, that one object will not move and all the rest will move to align to that one object. The only catch in the past was that there was no feedback to see which object you last clicked on, you had to just "know." Now there is feedback, as the last object you clicked on will get a blue outline, as shown below (the cursor is pointing at the "last clicked" object). This function has been around for a long time, but it sure is great to have some feedback about what we are doing.
The only problem with this new feature is that you cannot change the highlight color. You've got that one "blue" with that one size stroke and that's it.
Conclusion
The multi-artboards and the Appearance Panel are worth the price of the update, but the advantages are not limited to those two. When you add the Gradient Widget, the Isolation Mode advances, the Clipping Mask improvements, the Blob Brush, Smarter Smart Guides, and dozens of other subtle, but no less important improvements, this is one heckofa update.
Unfortunately, one can still not change the radius of round-corner rectangles, stars, or other objects once you let go of the mouse. The 3D tools have remained unchanged for years, the Kuler and Color Edit tools remain more confusing than they should, etc. Oh the humanity...
But seriously, this is a great update. But besides giving us great new features (and they are), it would also have also been nice to go back to some of these earlier issues and do some clean up. As such, I'm giving this a full five "A" rating with the understanding that if I could give half points, I'd chop this down some due to the long, long, long lingering items that certainly need to be dealt with at some point.
Applelinks Rating:
See our Adobe CS4 Overview.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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