MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/11584
FIRST LOOK ADOBE CS5 >IT’S ABOUT TIME WORDS BY RIC GETTER Even when Adobe’sCreativeSuite4 arrived, all Mac hardware was 64-bit and the heaviest metal, the Mac Pro line, could address obscene amounts of memory. It was no surprise that there was more than a little disappointment that 64-bit support on Mac platform had fallen off the short list when CS4 was released. Well, the long-awaited Cocoa rewrite of Creative Suite is finally complete and is now ready to bring all of the Mac’s power to bear. And it’s about time. That’s just not a snarky comment from an Apple fan-boy. That’s the overriding theme throughout AdobeCreativeSuite5. Not only does it let creative people do a whole lot of new stuff, it lets you do it a whole lot faster. For creative professionals, time is money. Thus, the overriding theme in CS5 is not to simply cost-justify the upgrade, but to make it a bargain by both harnessing the processing power you have (or can add) and adding a new layer of intelligence, which can best be described as “thinking out of the selection box” to let artists and designers do their work better and faster. We’ve had a chance to work with a beta version of CS5. The final release didn’t appear in time for our publication deadline, so you’ll be seeing some formal reviews in our next issue as well as on MacDirectory.com. And also, the suite has actually grown, so this “first look” will be reporting on the biggest news and won’t touch on each and every app. fill in the gap. This new level of intelligence also applies to smart selections and masking. Photoshop is aware of hard vs. soft or fuzzy edges and provides greater user control over exactly what constitutes an “edge” in any part of a selection. It also helps you win the battle with background color bleed from green screens, blue skies and the like. “Mini-Bridge” is a new interface element that offers many of Bridge’s preview and management features without having to have the full application open. Adobe Camera Raw has undergone a major rebuild with a breathtaking improvement in luminance and chroma noise reduction, powerful lens aberration correction and image enhancement features. CS5 adds some “brilliant” brushes that not just paint but PS As the one application that’s common to all residents of the Suite, Photoshop CS5 has gotten a lot of attention. Whether you’re using the program as a designer, photographer or in video production and post, there’s a lot to love that goes way beyond the 64-bit rewrite. We got a hint of what was coming with CS4’s context-aware scaling. Now, many more features of Photoshop are aware of and responsive to what lies beyond the borders of a selection. This is most evident the program’s remarkable new “healing” powers that not only mend tears in images, but do an incredible job of removing a foreground object and intelligently replicating the background to smear, Adobe Repoussé extrudes text and objects into 3D, and Photoshop Extended is now smart enough to create 3D lighting that matches the natural lighting of a background. Flash The changes in Flash were telegraphed by Adobe Labs for much of the past year (it’s always a site worth watching). Flash Catalyst is one of two new products. It offers a simplified point-and-click interface that lets designers and non-programmers access many of ActionScript 3’s capabilities without writing a line of code. This is a great prototyping tool and may all that a lot of web designers need to add a Flash interface to their sites. On the other end of the spectrum, Flash Builder MacDirectory 133