Milwaukee InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

May 17, 2007

The Milwaukee InDesign User Group members had such a great response to the CS3 topic that the regular evening meeting was changed to a half-day event for May 17, 2007. Expanding the topics, inviting more speakers, and attracting ever-increasing registration, we outgrew the regular meeting space at WCTC and moved the event to the Harry V. Quadracci Printing Education and Technology Center (HVQ PETC) right next door. Our event took up the largest space available, combining three conference rooms to make it easy for the group to follow the presentation. Our best-attended chapter meeting to date, it was standing room only for many of the sessions!

We got started with a greeting by Dean Flowers, dean of the Printing and Graphics programs at Waukesha County Technical College. Dean introduced the sponsors and the speakers, then he turned the mic over to Hal Hinderliter of the Institute for Graphics Imaging. Hal welcomed the crowd to one of the first events at the new IGI building, and then introduced Noha Edell of Adobe Systems to start the presentations.

Noha was fresh from the huge CS3 launch event in Chicago the previous day, and the IDUG of Chicago meeting the night before that, so she was on a roll presenting the new features of the Creative Suite. She revealed Adobe’s mission to be the choice of designers across workflows: Design, Web, Video, and More; and she described the different editions of Creative Suite for different applications.

There are lots of new configurations for the several Creative Suite 3 editions that now include many of the former Macromedia applications. Even Photoshop comes in several flavors now; in addition to the much-more-than-vanilla version of Photoshop for image editing, Adobe has added Elements for casual users, Lightroom for professional photographers, and Extended for video, multimedia, medical, and scientific uses.

Once we were introduced to the many new Adobe releases, it was time for some real CS3 demos! Noha got the party started with Bridge, the hub of the Creative Suite, by showing quick new ways to manage files, and easy methods to preview images without even opening them! From the Bridge she launched Photoshop CS3, showing off personal family snapshots of her son as the main image ingredients for the magic that followed. Lots of ooohs and aaahs from the crowd as Quick Select and Refine Edges made fast work of previously tedious tasks. The nondestructive Smart Filters made the biggest impact, offering new ways to work while keeping the original image quality. Aligning Images is now easier than ever for building panoramas from multiple files and for retouching between several image layers.

Moving on to Illustrator CS3, Noha did a quick review of the Live Trace and Live Paint features added in CS2. She then expanded that with Live Color, using exquisite artwork as a complex graphic example with hundreds of colors that were able to shift and change in moments. The Eraser tool was a breakthrough, the way we always thought that vectors should work in one intuitive step.

After a break, we dove back into CS3. Terry Rydberg, a graphics instructor at WCTC, had just recently completed a book on InDesign CS3 that will be published soon. Her segment of the CS3 presentation was like a show & tell of what this newest InDesign version does even better than before, emphasizing productivity and efficiency to make your work quicker and easier.

Next, James Wamser of Sells Printing took Terry’s InDesign files and continued through the prepress and printing phases by showing Acrobat features. James had a lot of valuable Quicktips for PDF workflows, and spoke of future developments with the PDFX4 format.

The last session of the day was presented by James Conway, an instructor and owner of C2 Graphics Productivity solutions. He covered the integration of Flash and Dreamweaver into the Creative Suite, especially from the point of view of a non-web graphic designer. He was even able to migrate graphics to a cellphone using Device Central, another new component of the Creative Suite 3. James Conway’s presentation on how InDesign and Dreamweaver can work as a team really brought new understanding and options for print designers who may have been intimidated by web design projects until now.

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