What To Expect When You’re Expecting: Adobe Creative Suite 6

May 22, 2012 by Jennergy    No Comments    Posted under: Design Tips

It’s heeerrrre! The newest edition of the Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) is now shipping. For many of us, upgrading can be costly, time-consuming and frustrating, so we really have to be convinced before we upgrade. Rest assured, with CS6 being Adobe’s biggest upgrade in ten years, it’s actually a good investment. Below, we’ve listed a few fresh features from our three most-used programs, Photoshop, Illustrator and of course InDesign.

Photoshop:

• Improvements on Camera Raw include support for 7.0 and a ton of new controls, many brought over from LightRoom for streamlined photo editing.
• The Adaptive Wide Angle tool allows you to correct distortion from a wide-angle lens, and quickly reduce horizontal and vertical lens curvature.
• The Content-Aware Move tool, easily the most amazing of Photoshop’s new features, allows you to select and move key objects, while the content-aware technology seamlessly fills in the background area.
• The new Blur Gallery allows much more control when using blur features, along with new features that allow you to create an edgy tilt-shift effect, and even a convincing blurry lens effect.

InDesign:

• The new Liquid Layout feature allows you to set rules for a layout to be set in different dimensions without re-positioning everything in the composition. Precise controls allow the layout to manipulate to fit different sizes and contexts.
• Finally, persistent text frame options allow you to create text frames designed to expand and contract with the amount of text, with parameters as to how far they may expand. There are even features that allow text boxes to expand with callouts, headlines, and other text variables.
• With the new PDF tools, you can create PDF forms directly in InDesign, before you even export your PDF. Also, tab orders can be set and changed with the new Articles Panel.

Illustrator:

• The new vector pattern tool makes it easy to create complex and seamless tiled patterns. Once created, patterns can be placed in other objects, and remain fully editable with the pattern tool.
• Gradients can now be applied to strokes, and are as fully editable as gradient fills, allowing fast production of art with crisp, professional, and easily manipulated graphics.
• Many of the tool panels, such as the gaussian blur tool, the type panel, control panels, and even workspaces and hidden tools have been enhanced and improved upon for better performance and ease of use.
• At long last, the tracing tools have been completely re-vamped in this version, allowing it to be used in almost any context for crisp, clean graphics that are actually usable. Advanced controls allow you to precisely convert raster images into vector images without all of the irritation that the old live trace tool created.

Today we’ve barely scratched the surface on the new Creative Suite’s tools, and we still haven’t touched on some of the awesome tools in other programs such as Flash, Dreamweaver, AfterEffects, and PremierPro, but rest assured, we’ll get to those in time. For the time being, our mouths are watering at all the possibilities that the new CS6 has to offer, and we’ll continue to talk about new features as we find them. In fact, we’d love to hear what your favorite features of the new Creative suite are, and even what you think of some of the features. Send us a message or comment on the post below and we’ll be sure to get back to you!

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