Illustrator CS3 Enhancements

Now that I got the rant out of my system, I've got to say that the Adobe Illustrator Color Guide panel (?) is really cool. It is one of those features that make you slap your head and wonder why someone didn't think of it 10 years ago!

The editing of groups is very Flash-like now also. You can even name groups. Of course, if you duplicate a group, it is still a duplicate. Illustrator has had symbols for years, I think they are even easier to work with now, especially for the Flash artist. Now you can even specify the symbol to be a movieclip or a graphic. The distinction seems to be meaningless in Illustrator, put there for the purposes of allowing you to better prepare the artwork for import into Flash. F8 is even mapped to the New Symbol command.

A small touch that I like is the ability to specify larger anchor points and control handles. You only get to chose from 3 sizes, but that is 2 more than before. I never thought I'd like larger control handles but recently I felt like the current ones were getting smaller. :)

Adobe CS3 Rant

I try to stay positive with my blog, this is really my first big rant. But I had such a bad experience, I had to blog it.

I had been looking forward to the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) upgrade for a month (or more). When the Design Premium version finally arrived, I excitedly tried to install it. After going through the entire install routine (between one to two hours), it failed. I tried again, and again it failed at the end. The next night I searched the web for solutions, called Adobe and tried two more times, both failing. The next day I called Adobe again and this time they finally knew what the problem (and solution) was, which is here. So it took five installs which cost me two and a half evenings (not to mention stress).

I've used Adobe products since early 1987. I'm very disappointed with this experience. If you read the tech note I linked to, you'll see that the problem was the Flash 8 Player! How does a problem like this make it through QA? Adobe used to have very good QA. The Macromedia acquisition may be having a bad effect on Adobe.

While I'm ranting... what is the deal with the user interface for the CS3 line of products? While the new features are GREAT, the new UI is cumbersome! Who designed that and thinks it is a good idea? What a waste of screen space. Apparently someone who does not use the products to make a living and has a very large monitor (or two). I've had to spend time creating workspaces that somewhat resemble in function the CS2 and earlier functionality. The Flash CS3 workspace does not bother to remember the location/orientation of the timeline, nor does it remember how much you were zoomed into the stage.

And did someone actually get paid for this branding? It is like a bad (almost generic) version of the Macromedia branding for their products. Colored squares for the program icons. For Illustrator's splash page, it is just an orange box. No more Venus, or even flowers.

One last rant... I'd hoped that they'd improved the Flash to Illustrator conversion. They improved the Illustrator to Flash but it looks like they did NOTHING going the other way, from Flash to Illustrator. As I've posted in the past, I now love doing some types of illustrating in Flash. For creative vector drawing, Flash blows away Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't live without Illustrator for most types of graphic illustration. It is a shame Adobe didn't see fit to focus on this aspect of the product line integration.

Well, looking on the bright side, at least these problems are not to the magnitude of the Illustrator 6 to 7 upgrade. Now that was a nightmare! I don't even want to think about it anymore (shudder).

InDesign

I attended an InDesign seminar today. It was put on by NAPP and taught by Taz Tally. It was very well done. I was thinking about the favorite things I learned today and in keeping with my previous post of the little (but important) things, I'll post a couple little things which make a big difference.

• In the Preferences>Type, you can set a preference for text to be linked with Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files. For someone who has written programming books, I can tell you this is huge.


• Again in Preferences>Type, the Text Only setting when pasting text.


• Using the Story Editor to view and edit just the text in a text box. It even shows you which text is overflowing. What a nice feature to be able to focus on the text when you need to.


• Under Windows>Output select the Separations Preview. Very cool.


• Under New Paragraph Styles>Drop Caps and Nested Styles check out the Nested Styles.


• The Table>Convert Text to Table... feature. Just select some delimited text and apply it and you have a table.

It was a great seminar at a very reasonable price ($79 for NAPP members). I was surprised at the number of people that showed up (450-500). The workbook was followed pretty closely, so it will be a useful reference/reminder for what was covered.

When I was an instructor at Sun, I suggested more than once that the 5-day classes were too expensive and too much of a time time commitment for a majority of potential students. Given the enormous turnout for this seminar, I think my feelings are justified. Not only was it only one day, but it had no labs. He just delivered the information (no questions during the lecture either). That lecture only could have been a negative but it was very efficient and I think made effective by the high quality of the workbook. I've been review the book and my notes this evening and trying out some of the material demonstrated. I plan to attend the next seminar NAPP puts on in Denver.

The Little Things Mean Alot

I was working on an animation in Flash the other day. Traditional frame-based animation in Flash is not something I normally do. I was starting to get irritated with having to constantly use the mouse to advance to the next frame so I started looking for a short cut. After looking through the menus and the list of shortcuts you can redefine, I couldn't find anything. I posted to a group of Flash users and within minutes I had two replies... you use the comma and period keys to go to the previous and next frames, respectively. After learning that, I had a vague memory of going through a Flash 2 or 3 tutorial and learning that, could they have been there since v2?

Now let's see if I can help anyone else out with a really obscure key. I've been doing a lot of drawing in Flash recently and I don't know what I'd do without knowledge of the "G" key. When drawing, it is very useful to have snapping on so existing points can be easily connected, aligned, or merged by snapping them together. But often snapping is a problem when you're trying to move to a specific spot. Well if you press and hold the "G" while moving the point snapping will be temporarily disabled. I can say enough how useful this has been. I have to credit the book Illustrating with Macromedia Flash Professional 8 for showing me the light (which I first mentioned here).

ExtendScript Toolkit

I don't know how I never knew about this, but the ExtendScript Toolkit that comes with the Adobe Creative Suite is really useful. I've done some scripting of Illustrator in the past and it took a bit of work looking up the various objects and their relationships. With the ExetendScript Toolkit you can see and examine the objects that are active, drill down into them, to make your script writing much easier. It is a debugger to boot.

Note that the Adobe Updater does NOT update the ExtendScript Toolkit. After discovering it, I did a quick web search and found that the latest version is 1.0.3 and I was running 1.0 (even after running the Adobe Updater).

You can download the latest version here.

An "ah ha!" moment with Painter

I had a mental breakthrough in Painter this morning. I was just experimenting with brushes and irritated that the airbrush tilt is not working correctly when it occurred to me that the color seemed flat and uninteresting. At that moment I had an "ah ha!" and when into the brush controls and altered the color variability, as it sprays I made the brush vary the hue, saturation, and value. Above is an image sprayed from the Broad Wheel Airbrush 50 variant, note how it look like I've taken a green image and added noise. The cool thing is that I have control over how much it varies in hue, saturation, and/or color. If I just wanted to have the hue vary, I could do it subtlely or wildly. This is a great way to add a subtle texture and depth to digital painting while maintaining control in a somewhat natural way.

"Ah ha!" moments are what makes learning addictive. Especially when you've had a mental block for sometime, like I have with Painter. You can read about a technique, watch someone do it, but the thrill comes when it finally clicks while you're doing it. In fact, I'd say that is a good order of events for learning a complex tools like Painter, Flash, etc.

Painter is NOT Photoshop

I've used Photoshop since version 1.0, it is a great image editor and it is useful in image creation as well. I first tried Painter a dozen years ago, at that time Adobe had already won me over with how to edit bitmaps and vectors using Photoshop and Illustrator. Painter has some similarities to Photoshop, but the similarity between working with Photoshop ends quickly once you scratch past the surface of the tool. Just as drawing with vectors in Flash is very different from the feel and approach of drawing with vectors in Illustrator, manipulating pixels in Painter is very different from doing so in Photoshop. A good mantra when trying to get your head around Painter would be repeating "Painter is NOT Photoshop".

My desire to learn Painter never quite went away, so in September I bought Painter 9.5. I gave it another shot and felt that I was hitting the same Adobe-UI-induced mental block that I hit years earlier. Before I knew it, Painter X was released and I bought it.

After two false starts with Painter, I decided to get some instructor-led training from Painter expert John Derry. After watching John work, I feel like I finally have an idea where Painter is coming from.

Here are a few images I created at John Derry's Nashville Workshop:

• Two Amused
• Learning Moment
• Wheel Fun