Adobe CS4 for IT Pros and Developers: Part 2

In my previous column, I offered a quick look at Adobe's CS4 design suite for IT pros and developers. Now in part two, I'd like to talk about some of the specific applications in the suite.

Photoshop CS4

Perhaps the most well-known of all the Adobe apps is Photoshop, considered the king of photo and image editing. Photoshop CS4 gives you a wide variety of tools to professionally edit photos and create and stylize images. At first glance, the program can certainly be intimidating to newbies. And even experienced users can be overwhelmed by the massive number and complexity of tools. But there's no question that you can achieve things in Photoshop that you can't with other programs.

One key way I use Photoshop is to select specific areas of an image or photograph. Using the Quick Selection tool or the Magic Wand, you can select any object in an image and then make changes to affect just that specific object. For example, you can remove or recolor the entire background of an image or photograph. You can select a person in a photo to change the overall, brightness, contrast, and other options. Each new version of Photoshop throws in further improvements and refinements to the selection tools to help you more accurately select an object.

Photoshop CS4 specifically offers other enhancements. You can more easily make changes to specific layers through the Adjustments panel. This gives you the ability to selectively adjust the color, contrast, brightness, and a host of other attributes by creating layers that you can easily tweak individually. Another feature I like in CS4 is the Masks Panel. Layer masks basically let you blend two or more layers onto a single image so that they all look like they're naturally part of the same image. With the Masks panel, you can more easily vary the density, opacity, and other attributes of each layer, creating a more seamless effect.

Finally, for you photographers who work with the RAW image format, Adobe beefed up the Camera RAW tool in CS4. This lets you perform some fairly heavy duty editing on your RAW images before they're officially imported into Photoshop.

Illustrator CS4

Illustrator is the tool to use to create and edit some very sophisticated and slick designs. I don't use Illustrator professionally as much as I use Photoshop or some of the other Creative Suite apps. But ever since taking an Illustrator course a few years ago, I've enjoyed using the program to create some cool images that you can't quite do in the other programs.

One of the limitations in previous versions of Illustrator is that you could only work with one single artboard. This is the area on which you place all your objects as you design your artwork. But as you worked with more and more objects, your artboard could easily become too cluttered. Illustrator CS4 lets you create multiple artboards and easily display or bounce from one to another, a great option if you need to juggle a lot of different objects.

Creating gradients is a snap in Illustrator CS4. Gradients allow you to gradually change the color of an object either in a linear direction, for example from left to right, or in a radial direction, for example from inner to outer. In CS4, you can simply select an object in your image and then apply a gradient. You can choose from a series of existing gradients or create a new one.

Sometimes trying to work with a single object in the midst of a lot of other objects can be difficult. One Illustrator feature that can help is Isolation Mode. By double-clicking on the object you wish to work with, the other objects in your image get dimmer so that they're less distracting. Another feature introduced in CS4 called Smart Guides can display the X/Y coordinates for the anchor points in an object, allowing you to more precisely align different objects. Finally, Illustrator's Appearance Panel is yet another helpful tool. Simply select an object, and you can easily see and adjust its stroke or outline, its fill, and other effects.

Fireworks CS4

As an image editor, Fireworks doesn't possess the depth or range of options that you'll find in Photoshop, but it's not meant to be a clone of Photoshop. Instead, it's an ideal image tool in designing for the Web. I use Fireworks quite often in my Web design and development to perform quick but effective edits on image files, create animated GIFs, and even build Web-based slideshows and image galleries.

One key benefit of Fireworks is that you can build actual Web pages and then export them into a program like Dreamweaver. Your pages can contain interactive form fields and other elements like checkboxes and Submit buttons, and those stay intact as a result of the export. In the past, Fireworks would export your Web pages using tables as layout. But CS4 can export your Web content using CSS (News - Alert), or stylesheets, to keep them more in line with current and accepted design standards. In addition to exporting your Fireworks file into HTML, you can also export them as interactive PDF files.

Fireworks offers a Styles feature, similar to what you'd find in Microsoft (News - Alert) Word, for example. You create a style with certain attributes and then apply that style to your text, images, and other content. In CS4, that feature is more robust as you can modify a specific style, and all objects to which you've applied that style are automatically modified as well. As in Illustrator, Fireworks CS4 also offers a Smart Guides feature to display the coordinates for specific objects to help you better place them on the screen.

That provides a look at a few of the key features in the CS4 editions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks. In my next column, I'll look at Dreamweaver, Flash, and InDesign. Stay tuned.