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Title

Adobe Illustrator CS4

Description

I've dabbled with graphics tools for a long time, starting with Super Paint on Apple's System 6 & 7 way back in the day, moving through a succession of icon and bitmap editors and settling for several years on Macromedia Fireworks. It was one of the first applications with a focus on producing web output and one of the first that was capable of saving compressed PNG files <i>with</i> alpha transparency. It also marked a transition to vectorized graphics from the more traditional rasterized graphics. While Fireworks is great for online graphics, it's not a tool for producing printed materials. For that, you need to move on to a more heavyweight vector tool, like Macromedia Freehand. While Freehand was capable, it wasn't as well-known or accepted by printers as its competitor, Adobe Illustrator. While Freehand knows how to import and export the Illustrator format, Illustrator has no idea what the FH10 or FH11 or FH-whatever format is. When the time came to upgrade Freehand, it had been acquired by Adobe and was being quickly shuffled toward an end-of-life phase. Given that, it was time to---once again, as with the transition from Fireworks to Freehand---throw all the learned actions and tricks overboard and move to another vector graphics editor. At the time, Illustrator CS3 was in beta, so I purchased Illustrator CS2, which was---and is---just fine for my needs. The advantages over Freehand were immediately evident, with the most obvious of these being the "Live Trace" and "Live Paint" features, which makes importing raster artwork into a vector format unbelievably easy. Some things are still not that easy to do in Illustrator but a bunch of these have been addressed in the latest release, CS4. <a href="http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/adobe-illustrator-cs4-review.ars/1" source="Ars Technica" author="Dave Girard">Adobe Illustrator CS4 Review</a> offers an in-depth look at the new features. It's amazing how long it takes for certain, seemingly no-brainer features, to make their way into flagship products. Features such as adjustment layers for effects, like drop shadows, so that they can be toggled on and off as via pseudo-layers rather than painstakingly toggled via a custom dialog. Or features such as alignment tools and "Smart Guides", which take the guesswork out of wondering which objects are going to move when you select a bunch of them and align or redistribute them. At least the features are finally here, but people have been paying $600 and up for vector graphics software that made <i>lining things up</i> a chore. Another nice, finally-it's-here feature is the "Blob Brush", which let's you draw with a brush that makes paths rather than single strokes. When you make other types of objects (not pen or brush strokes), you can join them, crop them or do whatever to them and you get a single path outlining the entire object. You can then adjust the stroke, fill, transparency or what-have-you for this object as a whole. When you used the "Live Trace" feature on what were ostensibly strokes, it would create a path around these fine lines as well. If you used the brush tool to replicate or extend these lines---to emulate the imported, stroked style---you got a single stroke in the center with a shape extending to the sides the width of the brush. You could not adjust the fill for this object or the surrounding stroke, because it didn't have one, per se. CS4 finally lets you use a brush as a tool for painting bounded regions that, when they overlap, automatically join to the overlapped regiong to form a single, contiguous shape. A welcome, if long-overdue, feature. Another feature that was sorely missed when moving from Freehand to Illustrator was decent gradient support, especially with transparency. You can usually figure out how to do what you want with Illustrator CS2, but it was sorely lacking in that department when compared to Freehand. CS4 finally addresses this drawback by introducing in-place and live transparent gradient editing. It seems like a basic tool, but it took over a dozen versions before it became reality. I'm still not sure whether I'll do the upgrade from CS2 to CS4---CS2 still fulfills its duties adequately---but it's much more tempting than the upgrade to CS3 was. And, at only $199 for the upgrade from any previous CS-version of Illustrator or one of the last three versions of Freehand, the price is quite reasonable.