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Welcome to the second part of our special report. We left off with Apple representative Richard West talking about the importance of color calibration…

Next up was Jonathan Ferman, Business Development Manager, Media & Publishing for Adobe, going through some of the new features of the main applications in CS3. He started off with Bridge, Adobe’s asset management program, which managed to first draw blanks from the audience (a show of hands revealed that although all of the attendees used CS2 or at least a few of its programs, none used Bridge for asset management) and then chuckles when Ferman showed its “completely reworked and improved UI”: everything from functionality to colour scheme seems to have been lifted from Apple’s Aperture (down to the 100% magnification function, a square called Zoom in Bridge, more than reminiscent of the circular Loupe in Aperture). Inside Bridge are some new collaborative features like Version Cue, offering built-in support for workgroups and check-in and check-out functionality when multiple people are working on the same file/project, and Acrobat Connect, a flash-based mini-app that allows onscreen meetings and classes with remote assets-sharing capabilities.

Photoshop sports faster startup times and a reworked UI. Palettes have now been renamed Panels, and have been made more fluid and easily customizable. Panels work in a way that is similar to browser tabs, movable and switchable around the workspace, and new tools/name/icon views allow saving screen real estate to concentrate on the image and minimize the pixels taken over by the tool switches. A very cool feature is the quick selection tool, an improvement on the lasso tool to cut out elements of an image with stunning precision. The new tool takes into account not only edges, but also colour and even texture: and if that’s still not precise enough for you, a Refine Edge tool brings you into the finest details like hair and fabrics. The ease of use of this features was quite impressive. Perhaps the most interesting feature of all was the auto align pictures: you can now select a bunch of similar pictures, and PS will align them for you based on content, layering them in an onion skin fashion, and allow users to choose the best exposure by deleting or bringing parts of the layers to the front. Stitching panoramas with auto exposure correction via auto blending is also possible, all at a click of one button. 3D and video/audio are now supported, and fully editable, inside PhotoShop. 3D layers, wireframe views, lighting effects, frame by frame editing, music scoring, all in one place and with tight integration with the other programs of the Suite.

Dreamweaver is one of the Macromedia applications Adobe is bundling in CS3, and is now fully compatible and integrated with Photoshop. It boasts even better tools to check browser compatibility issues (offering solutions through a community-driven website) and CSS stylesheet manipulation, with presets for outputting the same content for web, print, and mobile devices alike. In particular, users are able to preview how their work will look on different handeld decives through Device Central, a fully featured emulator with a list of the latest phones from the main manufacturers (which Adobe promises to update regularly). From screen size to processor simulation, no detail is left off to replicate the user experience on different devices. And developing for different platforms is just a matter of clicking a button, Dreamweaver will do it automatically for you, adapting the content to your choice of device.

Square Group Ltd in association with Adobe, Apple and a slew of other partners organized an Adobe Creative Suite CS3 seminar at BFI Southbank in London last Tuesday, May 15, 2007. The seminar featured presentations from both Adobe and Apple about the new features of the many applications that make up Adobe’s new crown jewel, CS3, alongside demonstrations of related products from the likes of Eizo, Wacom, Extensis, HP and G-Tech. SourceCrowd was in attendance and can bring you an exclusive report from the event.
Before the seminar, attendees were able to peruse stands with a few interesting products on show. Eizo wowed the crowd with its stunning professional quality displays like the ColorEdge CE240W sporting hardware colour calibration, 14-bit color processing and easy profiling. Extensis was showcasing two of its software products for asset management: Suitcase Fusion, a font manager to organize, categorize and activate/deactivate fonts on the fly, and Portfolio, a complete multimedia files management tool. HP was showcasing the HP B9180 Photosmart Pro Printer, an eight-tanks pigment ink powerhouse which demonstrated stunning results on some of HP’s custom papers (especially impressive were the results on canvas-textured paper). Wacom had both the A4 Intuos3 graphic tablet and the Cintiq 21UX display available for hands-on demonstrations, making precise editing of pictures a breeze. Last but not least, G-Tech had the whole range of its external high speed hard drives solution on display. The elegant silver enclosures sport the latest in eSata and Firewire connections on the G-Raid2, G-Drive 250GB External FW400/USB2, G-Mini and G-Safe, with high-end fibre-channel RAID solutions also available in the G-Speed models.

Then it was finally time to immerse into the presentation!

The first speaker was Richard West, Apple Business Development Manager for the UK and Ireland. He started by stressing how important it is, in a multimedia communicational landscape, to put to good use the plethora of different ways that businesses have to reach clients, by customizing communications to target and focus on different markets. Adobe Creative Suite CS3, he argued, is the tool of choice to do so, allowing the use of a single creative process for multiple disciplines through its multiplicity of applications. Since output is so important to the designers and developers who use CS3, he then went on to demonstrate how colour calibration devices (in this case, the Pantone Huey Pro MEU113) can work in tandem with OS X ColorSync Utility (found in the Applications>Utilities folder) to prevent disparity between screen output versus print/web output. In particular he showed how it is possible to compare colour spaces graphically, and onscreen proofing of different colour spaces just by dragging and dropping images on the application. Microsoft’s Windows has “borrowed” the same functionality for its latest OS, implemented in Vista under the name Windows Colour System (located in the Control Panel).

Stay tuned for the second part of our report - coming soon!