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Provides: Vector illustration and editing
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.6.8 or greater, Intel processor, 1GB RAM, 2GB hard disck space
Retail Price: $599 for standalone version, $249 for upgrade. Also available as part of the Design Suite, Design & Web Premium, Master Collection Suites, and the Creative Cloud.
This is Illustrator, the overhaul version. After 25 years (yup, it's been out that long now), Illustrator is having the first major internal overhaul since, well, ever. It's not that there haven't been internal updates, there have. But this release is now 64-bit native and is one of the applications from Adobe that is getting the Mercury update engine to better speed things up. By that, I mean that not only is AI getting access to as much memory as you've got (that's where the 64-bit comes in) but it is also accessing hardware acceleration via OpenCL. And while all that was being done, the AI team also completely rewrote the Live Trace feature (now called Image Trace) and introduces a new Pattern Maker that is as much fun to use as the results are to behold. So sit back and be ready to enjoy Illustrator CS6.
As much as the excitement of new builds, there's also the sideshow-curiosity of what the new splash screens might look like continues to shock those who are ready to pass judgment. The new splash screens are certainly new and different. As far as good or bad, who cares? I'll leave the judgment of that to those who feel that the quality of a program is affected by such features. But for those who are curious, here's the splash screen for AI-CA6.
In the grand scheme of things, the quantity of new features within this release are not overwhelming. That's not to say the new features are trivial, rather they are exceptional. The realities are the bulk of the time was spent on updating the entire program's electronic guts so to speak. The way that Adobe has chosen to introduce us to this new AI World is to show off the interface in a darker mode. More on this later.
Speed
The biggest update is that AI now is fully 64-bit meaning that it can now use as much RAM as you've got in your machine. In addition, Adobe is using hardware integration to access the video RAM to increase the speed. This will definitely show up when doing processes that have either Gaussian blur and larger number of "things" per image. In the past, as the number of objects increased in your drawing, you'd eventually start to see a slowdown in the programs performance. So, not unlike the frog in the kettle of water. This is probably not something that you'll notice at the very beginning. However, as your image progresses with more and more objects and more and more effects, at some point you'll realize that with CS6, you will not need to go and have a coffee break after each alteration.
On a completely non-scientific test, I took a simple oval and gave it a Gaussian blur of about 7 and copied then pasted this one object. I then selected both and copied and pasted them. This was repeated over and over until by the time I got to the 7th copy & paste (total of 128 objects), the paste in CS5.1 took about 20 seconds. In CS6 this took about 2 seconds. However, other operations were all over the map: it might take a number of seconds to move the pasted objects, it took varying length of times to make the copy. It took varying lengths of time to deselect my selection. Regardless, whatever amount of time it took to do these operations in CS5.1, it took less, to much less time in CS6. Obviously your mileage may vary due to nature of image, computer speed, amount of RAM, number of applications concurrently open, availability of scratch disks, etc., etc., etc.
Image Tracing
Image tracing in AI is not new. For some time Live Trace was the standard with its modal window. LT did a fine job but was frustrating to use and took much more time than it deserved for the output you got. So, rather than trying to fix it, Adobe chose to toss it and start from scratch. Enter "Image Trace." Now, as a Panel, accessing the controls is easy to do and since it's non-model, one is not constrained to work ONLY on the tracing until it is down and with limitation of going back, etc.
If you look at the images below, the decision you need to make is which one is an original bit-mapped image and which one is the vector image?
In this case, you have to zoom in to see as shown below. As you can see, I've clicked on one of the vectors (in the eye) indicating which is which.
But then again, this is a high-color option. Below you can see the new Image Trace Panel next to a low-color trace. When you first open this Panel, the Advanced region is closed so you see everything on the top and everything where it says the Paths, Color, Anchors and the Preview check-box. When you turn the Advanced option on the Panel is as you see it below. The icons across the top are simply the same Presets you would see in the drop-down menu for Presets on the top of the Panel. From the far left you have Outline, Black and White, Grayscale, Low Color, High Color, and Auto Color. The Auto Color is rather strange, I could not really understand its objectives or goals.
But outside of that, the Panel is excellent with great options and control. If you create a preset that is particularly useful, save it for future use (but there will be no icon for personally saved presets). Of particular note is an item located in the Advanced region, "Method." There are two options here: Abutting and Overlapping. Abutting, shown in the top of the image below takes each vector region and each one "abuttes" itself against other vector areas. Overlapping is a stacking process so that each vector region lies on top of other vector regions. As you can see below, I've pulled out the pupil and catch-light sections. on the top you can see the hole where these come from while in the bottom there's no hole.
Pattern Making
Creating or editing patterns has been turbocharged in CS6 like nobodies business. Now, by taking any image and selecting from the menu Object -> Pattern -> Make, you are halfway done. As shown below, once selected, you get a non-permanent Panel with your selected image displaying an array. To keep track of things, during construction your working image is outlined in blue and the copies are dimmed to 70%.
The nature of that array can be adjusted in the drop-down menus from the Pattern Panel shown below.
The interesting development when in the Pattern mode, is that anything you add/subtract/alter/change in the image will be reflected in the pattern. You can add other objects, add fills, borders, rotation, anything you can do within Illustrator you can do here, and observe the results before you commit to anything.
Once you have your pattern, you can save it out as a swatch and then use it in other parts of your image as shown below.
Probably the biggest confusion or problem with this feature is that the Panel needs a "Save" and "Cancel" button because it can be confusing as to when your Pattern is saved or completed. In addition, there's an issue with Swatches in that if you have named a Swatch and create a new Swatch and want to give it the same name (with the intent of having the 2nd swatch replace the first), you can't. You must manually delete the first swatch to have the 2nd one have the same name.
Gradients on Strokes
The last big new feature is one that's been on many peoples "please do this" list for a long time: Gradient on Strokes. Simply, having objects with no strokes, or using meshes to generate gradients can only go so far.
Below I used a simple oval with a stroke of 20 pixels. The top three have a linear gradient, the bottom three have a radial gradient. Then, going from left to right, I am displaying the distribution of the gradient within the stroke via within, along, and across the stroke.
On the bottom of the image below, you can see the new Gradient Panel with the new Stroke option (underneath the gradient Type). By clicking on the three icons, you can select from the within, along, and across the stroke options. The only one with a limitation is the "along" gradient if you are using a closed stroke.
On a side note, all of the images I use in my reviews are ones I've created. For me it's a personal thing. As a reviewer, I often receive sample images and pre-made tutorials, and while they can be helpful, I don't use them. But every once in a while there is an image created by a master artist that displays a feature better than I could ever do and the following is one of them.
Created by the Adobe employee, Yogesh Sharma, the bike below is made mostly of just lines and a few objects with meshes within them, but mostly this is made of gradients along a stroke. To see the "guts" of this image, below the bike is the Outline view (Command-y) showing only the strokes. If you want to see the actual image, if you do get your hands on Illustrator CS6, go to the Illustrator CS6 folder within the Application folder and contained within the Illustrator folder is a folder called "Cool Extras." Within that folder (inside the "en_US folder) are two folders called "Templates" and "Sample Files." Inside the "Sample Files" is "Sample Art" and inside that you'll find this file: "Looking For Adventure." Needless to say, there's a lot of other things in these folders worth looking at.
It's the little things...
Besides the new features, there are a number of "little things" that have been done within AI. Some quickies:
There is now a field within the Color Panel that lets you either grab or place hexadecimal code. Below on the top is the CS5.1 Color Panel, below that is the CS6 Panel.
If you have some text selected on the page, by clicking into the text field in the Character Panel, you can scroll up or down your fonts and see the font change on the page. In addition, icons for All Caps, Small Caps, Super- Sub-scripting, and Underline and Strike-through now appear on the Character Panel.
One long-standing request is to be able to rename a Layer's name in the Layer's Panel, now you can as well as any other name within other Panels. Also, if you look at the Layer Panel, you will see a new icon on the bottom: a "Search" tool. For anyone who's ever used AI over time, you know how there can hundred and hundreds of Paths in a given layer. Finding that one path you just clicked on can be a big PIA and a lot of guessing. Now you can click on a path to make it active and then click on the Magnifying glass and that path is now selected in the Panel. Very cool.
In the past, if one wanted to scale the strokes and effects of an image, you had to double-click the Scale Tool to access the scaling feature. Well that feature is still there but now you can also click the check-box in the Transform Panel.
By the way, while not new, did you know you can click on any of the dimensional or positional field indicators in the Controls strip (e.g., "X," "Y," "W," or "H") and that will bring up the Transform Panel and on the upper right corner of that panel are some standard Transform operations. Again, that's not new but handy to know about.
And saving my favorite "little thing" for last:
After starting the new AI, you will see one of the darker preset UIs. While not new (CS5.1 also had dark presets available for use), in CS6 Adobe has chosen to make one of the dark preset the default. In addition, the darker preset is in alignment with the other applications so that the fonts, contrast, and tones are more consistent throughout most of the other Adobe applications. Nonetheless, if you are like me, this might prompt you to immediately go to the Preferences to change to one of the lighter presets, and this leads me to one of my favorite "little things" changes: the tab-based Preferences. In all previous versions of AI, if you wanted to drift from (say), "General" to "User Interface," you'd have to continually go back to a drop-down menu and select the area where you wanted to work. The big problem with this is that you had to know which area the desired item was actually located. If you are an advanced user, chances are you know exactly were each item to change is located. But most users need to hack around and look here and there for what they want to change and/or adjust. Thus, the new Preference's interface will tremendously help users so that they will be able to (and more willingly) change and play with Illustrator's Preferences.
Below you can see CS5.1 and CS6's Preferences. Please note that these are reduced in size (to fit in this column) but most importantly, they are not reduced proportionally. CS5.5 Pref window is originally 547 pixels wide and CS6 Pref window is 721 pixels wide.
Unfortunately Adobe continues its war against older folks by making the fonts just a smidgen smaller as shown below with a side-by-side of the older and newer Prefs showing the real sized font differences. As our monitors increase in pixels/inch, the size of things goes down in real size. Your use on laptops, where this issue is more acute, may be affected. Also note that both screen-shots were taken at maximum UI lightness and the new "lightest" is somewhat darker than the previous "lightest."
In short...
In short, this is a very good release. However, it's a very important release. It's important because Adobe took the time to update and revise some code that had gotten very old and very stale. It's a new engine under the hood and that lets Adobe do a number of things that have been sitting on the "to do" lists for way too long. People often compare Illustrator and InDesign and say "hey, why can ID to such-and-such but AI can't???" Well, old college dormitories were made for a student to have phonograph/stereo unit and an electronic typewriter. They were not designed to handle the microwaves, small refrigerators, computers, TVs, sound systems, etc. that most students go to school with now. So this was mostly an infrastructure build and there's nothing wrong with that. But this does put forth a conundrum: how many people elect to go to a college because the dormitory had the electricity in the dorm rooms updated? Probably not as many as chose to go because of the exciting classes. In other words, probably the most important part of this update is something that many people are not going to see or notice. Just please understand, that doesn't make it any less important.
What we did get was speed, a fantastic updated tracing tool, a very ingenious pattern maker, and a number of other features for good measure.
___________ 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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