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Creative Suite 4 Design Premium
Adobe - Creative Suite Design Premium
 
     
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About Creative Suite 4 Design Premium
- Adobe InDesign CS4
- Adobe Illustrator CS4
- Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended
- Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
- Adobe Flash CS4
- Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
- Adobe Fireworks CS4
Deliver innovative ideas in print, web, and mobile design
Design with familiar tools, including InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, knowing you can translate your work smoothly into virtually any medium. With Flash made easier than ever to use, Fireworks added for prototyping websites, and Dreamweaver enhanced for standards-based web production, now you can realize the full promise of cross-media design.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the latest evolution of the ultimate toolkit for creating and producing outstanding design for print, web, interactive, and mobile media. Craft precise page layouts, achieve typographic finesse, create compelling digital images and stunning vector graphics, develop eye-catching web pages and rich interactive experiences, and produce and deliver them all with utmost fidelity using this tightly integrated collection of exceptionally well-crafted tools.
Built to run on the latest Mac and Windows operating systems, this latest version of Design Premium includes exciting new versions of Adobe InDesign CS4, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended, Adobe Illustrator CS4, Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, and Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro software. Also included in Design Premium for the first time is Adobe Fireworks CS4 software for quickly prototyping websites and applications. What's more, new online services accessed from within Design Premium allow you to search for help from an online community, easily share your screen with colleagues or clients, get color inspiration from your peers, and more easily and efficiently manage day-to-day web content updates.
Leverage the familiar InDesign environment and your existing expertise to deliver design in more media. Just one example: Export an InDesign layout as XFL, open it in Flash, edit text and graphics, and then add interactive elements to produce a compelling dynamic document.
With Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, you can:
Easily innovate in new creative realms. Design is all about drawing on your ingenuity so that you can communicate, motivate, inspire, and persuade. Brand new tools in Design Premium let you imagine brand new creative possibilities and be confident that you can make them real. Whether it's exploring how to use transparency in Illustrator gradients for complex multi-layered effects, experimenting with easier-than-ever animation in Flash, or achieving exciting new 3D and video effects within the familiar Photoshop environment, Design Premium lets you translate even your most fantastic ideas into reality.
Follow streamlined workflows no matter where they lead. Customer-inspired enhancements and simplified workflows within each Design Premium component make you more efficient at everyday design and production tasks. But Design Premium lets you go far beyond the everyday: With improved integration and more consistent interfaces among Creative Suite components, you can venture into new creative territory while drawing on your existing expertise. Begin the creative process in the design environment you know best (usually Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign), certain that your work can be transferred smoothly to Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, or Acrobat for refinement, packaging, and high-quality output in virtually any medium. Drag and drop a Photoshop PSD file into a Dreamweaver page to create a dynamically linked Smart Object; if the Photoshop source file changes, simply click the Properties panel in Dreamweaver to update the image in the web page. Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium makes it truly possible to deliver the complex, consistent, high-quality cross-media campaigns that clients increasingly demand.
Collaborate from down the hall or around the world. Designers never work alone. Whether you're bouncing ideas off of a colleague, polling technical gurus for tips and tricks, or seeking concept approval from clients, you need convenient tools for eliciting feedback, finding help, and streamlining creative reviews. Design Premium enables you to communicate in a variety of ways without ever leaving your computer--or even the software you're using. Use a new online service, Adobe ConnectNow (a service of Acrobat.com), to collaborate live with colleagues and clients near and far by sharing your screen right from within your design software. Take advantage of an extensive community of Adobe experts by searching Adobe-endorsed technical content directly from within Design Premium--no more sifting through bottomless forums or endless, irrelevant web-search results.
Top new benefits of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium
This document describes the top new benefits of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, including new and enhanced features and streamlined ways of working within each Design Premium component, as well as versatile, integrated cross-component workflows. Also described are new tools for collaborating and for realizing the full creative potential of your Design Premium software.
Enjoy essential design tools and services, expanded and refined
The latest release of Creative Suite 4 Design Premium extends way beyond feature-packed new versions of InDesign, Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat Pro. For fast prototyping of websites and interactive designs, we've added Fireworks CS4. We've also included powerful new online services for learning, collaborating, and finding inspiration.
Streamline everyday tasks
Valuable new features in your favorite tools support smoother, more efficient workflows and let you stay focused on the all-important creative process. In Illustrator CS4, lay out and design multi-part projects using up to 100 variable-sized artboards in a single document; save multiple artboards in a single, multipage PDF file or export them in one step as sequentially numbered files in any supported file format; easily create complex vector shapes with the new Blob Brush tool; and specify transparent colors within gradients to create and fine-tune subtle interactions between objects.
In Illustrator, create and arrange up to 100 artboards of differing sizes, and then save them in a single, multi-page PDF file or export them as sequentially numbered files.
Two new panels in Photoshop CS4 Extended provide convenient yet exacting creative control: The Adjustments panel bypasses dialog boxes and allows direct, nondestructive editing without altering or losing your original image, and the Masks panel speeds creating and fine-tuning pixel and vector masks for application of special effects. What's more--a top request from Photoshop users--you can now rotate the canvas so that you can work on any image from any angle.
In Photoshop, rotate canvas and image together to any angle for convenient viewing and editing.
In InDesign CS4, use the redesigned Links panel to easily find, manage, and organize placed files; quickly scan a customizable selection of linked-file attributes; and identify files by scanning crystal-clear thumbnails instead of confusing filenames. For a fresh perspective on an InDesign layout or to tweak unconventional design elements, rotate the spread in 90-degree increments. Use convenient new Smart Guides in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks to display information such as height, width, X and Y coordinates, and rotation and shear angles--as you drag--so that you can precisely position or resize objects. Design Premium offers improved speed and accuracy so you can be more productive than ever before.
In InDesign, sort by any column and easily scan the thumbnails in the enhanced Links panel to view detailed, customizable information about linked content.
Use your existing expertise as a foundation for web, interactive, and mobile design
The smoothly integrated software in Creative Suite 4 Design Premium lets you use work created in the familiar environments of InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator as a platform for experimenting with new media and delivery channels. Here's one example of a highly efficient workflow for developing a website or rich interactive application: Open Photoshop or Illustrator layered artwork in Fireworks to begin building a prototype, and continue to refine high-quality typographic elements thanks to the newly incorporated Adobe text engine. To add Flash components or to produce and publish web pages, export the Fireworks prototype as a CSS-based layout and import it into Flash or Dreamweaver. Whether for websites or for Flash, Flex®, HTML, or Adobe AIR applications, you can move from concept to mock-up to prototype to finished product while retaining every modification you make from one step to the next.
Another possibility--combine the page layout and typographic strengths of InDesign with the interactivity of Flash to create compelling dynamic documents. Start with an InDesign layout that incorporates superior typography, multiple columns, long text flows, and rich graphics, and export it in XFL format (the internal file format that allows for improved integration within the Creative Suite 4 family). When you open the document in Flash, not only will you see unparalleled fidelity between the InDesign and Flash versions, you can also freely edit text and graphics. This new integration between InDesign and Flash lets designers and developers collaborate closely, each using their favorite tools, to produce engaging online reading experiences.
A third alternative--quickly create attention-getting brochures and datasheets by adding dynamic buttons and page transitions to a layout in InDesign and then exporting it as a SWF file for playback with Adobe Flash Player.
Finally, new visual design features in both Flash and Dreamweaver make it easier than ever for designers who shun code to produce engaging web, interactive, and mobile designs.
In InDesign, quickly create a compelling interactive document by using the new Page Transitions panel to add animated transitions such as Page Turn. Then export the document as a SWF file that anyone with Adobe Flash Player or a web browser that supports Flash can conveniently view.
Set your ideas in motion with video and animation
If you've ever wanted to venture into animation and interactive design, now's the time. New object-based animation makes designing in Flash more straightforward and similar to working with other Adobe creative applications. This enhanced ease of use reduces the learning curve for print designers accustomed to working with static design elements. Building a basic animation now takes two stunningly simple steps: Right-click an object on the stage and choose Create Motion Tween, and then move the object. Motion paths are generated automatically and can be easily edited using familiar Bezier curves. What's more, entire animations can be moved to new locations in a single step, and adjusting object location, rotation, and scale is as simple as grab–move–release. New Motion Editor and Motion Presets panels provide quick and exacting control over minute details, while advanced tools for creating complex motion effects, applying decorative patterns, and animating 2D objects in 3D space offer more creative options for designers and developers alike. If you incorporate video or animation into your web and mobile designs, you'll appreciate being able to paint, retouch, and do pixel-level editing on every frame of a movie file in Photoshop--especially with a new audio playback feature that makes it easier to sync the visual effects to the audio track.
Creating a basic Flash animation is now a simple two-step process: Select an object and choose Create Motion Tween, and then drag the object. The resulting motion path can be easily edited using Bezier curves.
Capture attention with stunning 2D and 3D images
Photoshop CS4 Extended enables everything from streamlining everyday tasks to tackling new creative possibilities. In addition to enjoying the convenient new Adjustments and Masks panels and the canvas rotation feature described above, you can now zoom and pan freely without delay or distortion, and paint more quickly and smoothly. Refine images using enhanced Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools that allow you to lighten or darken specific areas while preserving natural-looking overall tone and color. Experiment with advanced compositing enhancements, including 360-degree spherical panoramas, vignette correction, expanded depth-of-field adjustments, and more.
Powerful new 3D painting and compositing features make editing, enhancing, and manipulating 3D images both exciting and easy. Convert 2D images to common 3D shapes such as cubes, cylinders, or spheres. Paint directly on 3D models with all of the powerful Photoshop image-editing tools, and see the results immediately. Create print-quality 3D product shots that can be merged into consistently scaled, aligned, and lighted composite images, or experiment with 3D logos that can be rotated in space while being moved along an animation path.
Paint directly on 3D objects in Photoshop Extended and view the results immediately.
Deliver compelling content to mobile devices worldwide
Given the skyrocketing use of mobile devices around the world, getting up to speed with mobile design offers both rapidly expanding business opportunities and intriguing creative challenges. Adobe Device Central CS4 software, a visual testing tool that works with content from most Creative Suite 4 components, makes developing mobile designs easier and faster--even if you're brand new to this emerging creative discipline. Develop content with your favorite Adobe creative tool, and then use Device Central to preview and test it on an extensive selection of devices under a variety of simulated real-life conditions. Whether you're creating wallpapers, screensavers, or even mobile websites, blogs, or "advergames," Device Central enables you to extend your workflow to successfully incorporate high-quality mobile content into cross-media campaigns.
Quickly and reliably test mobile content in a variety of simulated lighting environments by controlling test settings for backlight, reflections, contrast, and more.
New and enhanced features in Device Central CS4 include an automatically updated online device library, automated testing on multiple devices, simulation of network performance impact on user experience, and improved video-packaging tools. Device Central also includes new tools for simplifying project management, collaboration, and deployment of content to mobile phones, as well as streamlined workflows for handling mobile video.
Collaborate, package, and present in exciting new ways
Timely, convenient, and effective communication with clients and colleagues can make the difference between a design project that's a resounding success and one that misses the mark, veers off schedule, goes over budget, or all three. And how you package and present your work--whether you're pitching a new job or seeking review at a project milestone--determines whether you land that work or get that go-ahead.
Design Premium includes several exciting new capabilities to help you access the timely information you need or get the favorable reception you want. E-mail a PDF document with built-in synchronized viewing; whether scrolling page to page or zooming in for detail, you and the recipient navigate the document together, simultaneously seeing exactly the same view so you can collaborate in real time.
You can also give your colleagues or clients a front-row view of your desktop by using ConnectNow--an Acrobat.com service connected into key components of Design Premium. Just choose File > Share My Screen in InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, or other components of Design Premium, and start working online with up to two guests at a time for no additional service charge. Simple to use, easy to access, and with reliable cross-platform support, ConnectNow allows you to more readily share knowledge, get immediate feedback, and streamline your creative review workflow. For more information, see "Creative Pro Online Services" on page 11.
Showcase completed projects or works in progress using new PDF Portfolios to deliver dynamic, interactive presentations that anyone using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Pro can view. Combine layouts, drawings, images, video, audio, animations, and other elements into a single PDF Portfolio; add navigation by easily customizing and branding a built-in, professionally designed navigation template or by developing your own with Flash or Flex. Marry the visual fidelity of PDF with the dynamic appeal of Flash to make your work look its very best.
Quickly package your work in an elegant, highly secure PDF Portfolio, complete with customizable layouts, color schemes, welcome page, header, animated page transitions, and much more.
Achieve high-quality production at every step in every medium
Creative vision is one part of the success equation; high-quality execution of that vision is the other. Design Premium offers a range of powerful preflight, preview, testing, and correction tools to help you achieve precise control over your finished product, catching mistakes as they occur rather than at the last minute, when it can be costly and time- consuming to correct them.
In InDesign, a new Preflight panel provides continuous, real-time, comprehensive error checking and notification so that you can detect, locate, and fix problems on the fly directly in the layout. No more discovering just when you're about to go on press that a thorny production problem on one page means reflowing text on all the rest. In Illustrator, a new Separations preview panel prevents output surprises such as unexpected spot colors; missed, unwanted, or white overprinting; and CMYK blacks in text and placed files.
Using Live Preflight in InDesign, you can open the Preflight panel to be alerted to errors as they occur rather than when the presses are just about to roll.
In Dreamweaver, too, you can deliver an error-free final product in less time. Live View previews your pages under real-world browser conditions while still giving you direct access to the code, and improved JavaScript debugging helps you deliver flawless code the first time around. Acrobat 9 Pro also includes numerous enhancements that make preflighting more powerful and convenient, including support for new PDF/X standards; new checks and fixups; and refinements to the Preflight panel that make it easier to find, select, and organize profiles, checks, and fixups. A new option in the Output Preview panel allows you to click on any object to view metadata and information about images, text, graphics, and object stacking order. And for mobile content, as you've already learned, Device Central offers automated testing using an extensive, automatically updated selection of device profiles.
Live View lets you see exactly how your pages will appear in a web browser directly from within Dreamweaver, so you can quickly tweak the code right then and there.
Discover power, depth, and ease at your fingertips
Professional design just keeps getting more fast-paced, demanding, and competitive. To maintain your edge (and your equilibrium), you need design tools so well crafted that you never have to think about them--they're there when and where you need them and they do exactly what you expect, so you can remain absorbed in the creative process.
To allow you to work smoothly and swiftly within components and to move effortlessly among them, Design Premium offers several elegant, cross-component interface enhancements, including N-up view, an application bar, an application frame, and tabbed documents (shown below), and task-based workspaces.
In addition to harnessing shared interface enhancements, individual components offer further refinements that make commonly used tools easier to find the first--or the umpteenth--time you use them. For example, new easy access to on-object and on- artboard controls in Illustrator let you focus on your artwork, not on searching for panels and options.
Creative Pro Online Services
Connect to the power of the online community through your creative desktop. New online services accessed from within Design Premium let you search for help from the online community; share your screen with colleagues or clients in a few quick clicks; get color inspiration from your peers; more easily and efficiently manage day-to-day web content updates; and more. (All Creative Pro Online Services require an Internet connection.)
Adobe Community Help. Get the power of an online search engine within Design Premium, but with more targeted results thanks to Adobe Community Help. Searchable content includes the in-depth, product-specific Help Adobe has always delivered, plus additional Adobe and third-party content chosen by experts at Adobe and in the design and production communities. With Adobe Community Help, you can find exactly the answers you need, fast. (Internet connection required for extended content.)
Adobe Kuler panel. Explore, create, and share color themes with Adobe Kuler. Kick start your creative projects with color inspiration from the online Kuler community. Browse thousands of themes by newest, most popular, or highest rated; or search themes by tag word, title, or creator. Themes can be downloaded and moved to your Swatches panel with a single click. Or use an interactive color wheel that supports standard harmony rules to develop your own color themes that you can save, move to your Swatches panel, and upload to share with others. (Internet connection required for community functionality.)
Acrobat.com. Use Acrobat.com services with Acrobat to store and share large documents, collect form data, and review documents with anyone, anywhere. Thanks to the connection between one of the Acrobat.com services, Adobe ConnectNow, and Creative Suite 4 Design Premium, you can meet live over the web to share your screen, present creative concepts and ideas, and brainstorm with up to two online guests for no additional service charge. To share your screen with colleagues and clients, choose File > Share My Screen from Adobe CS4 components, such as Photoshop CS4 Extended or Flash CS4 Professional, or choose File > Collaborate > Share My Screen from Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. Guests can then see your desktop on their screens as you work. You can exchange ideas using the chat pod, add a live video or audio feed, or use the Whiteboard feature to enable guests to comment on content. You can even temporarily hand over control of the screen to a guest to collaborate on a file. Additional Acrobat.com services, such as Share, Create PDF, My Files, and Adobe Buzzword, are accessible via Acrobat 9 Pro, an Adobe AIR version of Acrobat.com (included with this edition of Creative Suite 4), and your web browser. (Internet connection required.)
InContext Editing. Make your web page content available for online editing by others when you use InContext Editing. Offer your colleagues, clients or end users an easier way to make simple edits without impacting the design integrity of your web pages--and without help from you or additional software on their computers. Use the InContext Editing toolbar in Dreamweaver to set up your web pages, and then use the preview of this online service to enable content changes by others. (Thi