Review: Illustrator CS3 a good upgrade for serious illustrators
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Review: Illustrator CS3 a good upgrade for serious illustrators

Live Color

Our favorite feature is Live Color, a color exploration environment for those of us who've gotten frustrated in selecting the best color for a job. Live Color lets you select any artwork and interactively edit the colors to see results immediately. You can use the Color Guide panel to quickly choose tints, shades, or harmonious color combinations. The panel loads swatches from a range of preset combinations. Modes such as Complementary, Analogous, High Contrast, Compound and Triad make it easy to choose and explore a variety of colors.

imageYou can choose a color from your artwork and add it to the panel to produce an instant series of swatches showing various tints of said color, adding and subtracting luminosity from it. You can choose how many steps are displayed through a separate options panel and add colors to the standard Swatches panel, if you want to.

With the Color Guide in Illustrator it's easy (and fun) to explore color combinations and remap existing vector artwork colors. With the Live Color dialog box, you can dynamically apply colors to selected objects, and even shift the tone of multiple objects at one time. Remapping tools are also provided for intelligently reducing the numbers of colors in an image.

Flash integration

Now you can import native Illustrator files into Adobe Flash CS3 Professional software -- or copy and paste artwork from Illustrator to Flash with paths, anchor points, gradients, clipping masks, and symbols intact. Layers, groups, and object names are also preserved.

You can port text created in Illustrator to Flash as static text, which is treated like regular artwork. But if you change this to Dynamic Text it can be tweaked by scripting in Flash. Choosing Input Text enables user-editable text fields, and the ability to specify the antialiasing method, selectability and character embedding is set in the Flash Text panel.

You can also use Symbols to animate repeated objects while keeping file sizes small. You can define and name symbol object attributes, and preserve these properties when you take the artwork to Flash CS3 Professional for further editing.

Document palettes

A series of new document profiles lets you create artwork by selecting prebuilt profiles for various types of media, and save custom profiles that specify such setup parameters as artboard dimensions, styles, and color spaces. You can pick your artwork size for specific jobs. New category groups for print, web, video and mobile devices now complement the standard RGB and CMYK workspaces. These groups can be customized to suit each medium.

New tools

imageThe Crop tool (shown) lets you define crop areas interactively for print or export. You can choose preset web ratios or video formats with safe areas, and set crop marks intuitively. You either define a desired crop area or let Illustrator "guess" what you're trying to choose. Then you can export pieces of a composition directly to PDF or any other supported file format.

Once you define multiple crop areas, you can move between them as needed. The Crop tool will limit the bounds to the region you specify. This saves the aggravation of creating a Masking Object if you want to crop an illustration.

The new Eraser tool -- which supports various stylus options, such as pressure and tilt -- lets you remove areas of artwork as easily as you erase pixels in Photoshop. You have complete control over the width, shape, and smoothness of the erasure. You can erase any part of a shape just as you would in a paint program, and Illustrator CS3 automatically adds the control points and builds the needed shapes. Using it is easy: erasing a portion of artwork (which doesn't even have to be selected) will remove the erased area, creating additional anchor points in the remaining objects. You may have noticed that since you don't have to select what you want to erase, you could have a problem if you're not careful.

However, Illustrator CS3 takes care of that with its capability of isolating groups of objects within the workspace. Click on the new Isolate button on the Control panel at the top of the screen and all unselected artwork becomes inactive. Or you can double-click on a group to isolate it -- and then double-click anywhere outside the group to leave Isolation mode.

Speaking of the new Control panel, which sports a lot more options than CS2’s Control Bar, it simplifies the configuration of tool options. The CS3 Control panel frees up screen space by accessing anchor point controls, clipping masks, envelope distortions, and more from the context-sensitive Control panel. You can set fill, stroke color and weight, and opacity directly from the panel. When multiple anchor points are selected, the Control panel displays options for manipulating them -- remove 'em, join end points, cut the path at chosen points, etc.

The Control panel sports Alignment buttons that lets you select points align them left, right, top, bottom or center with a mouse click. You can also distribute them along either axis. You can also now make anchor points appear automatically when the cursor is moved over them. A new Preferences pane controls how close you need to be to activate a point, and how the activation is displayed.

Other changes

Illustrator's overall interface has been streamlined and improved. It's leaner, meaner and more effective. It's also zippier. It has more responsive drawing and editing with improved performance in key operations, including faster screen redraw, object moving, panning, scaling, and transformations.

However, the graphic tools and 3D features introduced in CS haven't been updated. They're not bad, but they're overdue for an overhaul. Still, Illustrator CS3 is a fine upgrade of the big dog of illustration programs.

Adobe Illustrator CS3 will begin shipping in April 2007 to customers in the United States and Canada. It will cost US$599; for upgrade options for previous versions, go to the Adobe web site. Illustrator CS3 can also be purchased as part of the [url=http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/adobe_unleashes_creative_suite_3_product_line]Creative Suite 3 bundles[/url].

 

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