The Creative Suite from Adobe is a widely used set of design, editing and development tools for images, video, audio and Web pages. As a follow up to CS3, Adobe announced CS4 which will be available from mid-October, and is alread out for beta trials. CS4 will be Adobe’s biggest release to date. The software took a a little less than 15 million man hours to develop.
There are four versions of CS4 available — Design Premium, which has 10 applications; Production and Web Premium, which each have eleven applications; and finally, Masters Collection, which has the full suite of 17 applications.
CS4 allows interportability of data between different applications in the same window. This functionality will be achievable through a tabbed interface. Adobe Flash functionality is embedded into all the applications.
Photoshop, which is the most widely used image editing software, will feature advanced 3D painting and compositing in its CS4 version, which allows users to edit, enhance and manipulate 3D images. Fluid canvas rotation is a new feature, along with a new and improved adjustment panel and colour correction interfaces. There is also a new masks panel and content-aware scaling, which recomposes an image as you scale it, preserving vital details. The Photoshop CS4 will be available in two versions, the CS4 for photographers and Web designers, and the CS4 extended for media professionals, scientific researchers, architects and engineers.
Premiere Pro CS4 will have SWF output, a speech search function that lets you search through the dialogues, a meta data editing workflow, blu-ray authoring, and batch processing in background. The new features in After Effects CS4 will include tracking the motion of elements — even when they are off screen, keyframing in 3D space, importing 3D layers from Photoshop, exporting layered projects and numerous interfaces and workflow tweaks.
The CS4 suite has a promising set of improvements, with an enhanced workflow and a simplified interface, and some stunning new features.
Each of the software in the suite will be sold separately. The Master’s collection will be available as a licensed product and with support for Rs 1,14,661 from mid-October.