Rochester InDesign User Group

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Sometimes when you see something awesome, it leaves you speechless. Other times, you see something so truly amazing that you have to shout out. That’s what it was like at the last Rochester InDesign User Group meeting. “Life is now worth living,” exclaimed one eager attendee while viewing new features of Photoshop CS3 Extended.

Over 40 people braved the torrential downpours to get to RIT’s Carlson Auditorium and attend our second meeting of the year. In response to your requests at our InDesign CS3 launch meeting, Noha Edell, Business Development Manager from Adobe, presented the balance of the CS3 applications. Members of the audience simply could not contain themselves.

Pizza and soda arrived right on schedule, and thanks and acknowledgement were given to Rochester Institute of Technology for providing the facilities for the meeting. Then Noha launched right into WOWing the audience with CS3. Starting with an introduction of the entire new “suite of suites,” continuing with a description of Photoshop Lightroom—a new tool for digital photographers to manage their photos—then a brief discussion regarding mobile content design and Adobe Device control CS3 which allows the preview of how content will appear on various mobile devices. Then the show really got started…

Bridge is the central nervous system of the Creative Suite 3 Design Premium package and therefore the perfect place to kick the night off. Noha introduced the group to the interface and the ability to customize it to the user. She demonstrated key features like stacking groups of images, previewing multipage PDFs and movies, the new loupe tool, and the ability to generate Contact Sheets to Photoshop or, alternatively, automate contact sheets into InDesign for flexibility of editing.

Photoshop has a host of new features to blow the audience away too. Quick select is the new enhancement to the old “magic wand.” Photo-combining has never been sharper than in this latest release. Auto-align layers and Auto-blend layers make combining images so simple that it might make you feel guilty to take money for it (or not). Open multiple files from Bridge into one file with multiple layers, create a mask on the top layer, then paint-brush black over the areas that are to be revealed from the layer below. “Do we stop there?”, Noha asked. “Hell no!” she replied to herself. Then she promptly proceeded with Auto-blend layers for stitching images together to make a panoramic image, for example. The discussion continued with an important feature in the extended version, vanishing point, which is used to map images onto the surface of three-dimensional images. Then we wrapped the first half of the evening with video editing capabilities in Photoshop CS3 Extended.

After a short break and some more pizza, we took the time to snap a few shots of the audience so that we could test the features we had just learned. Then playtime was over and it was time for Noha to get back to work. 

Illustrator has some important new features too. Live Trace has been around since Streamline was incorporated into Illustrator. Live Paint has been around too, but now it has a new twist—a cursor that allows use of the left and right arrows to quickly select and change to adjacent swatches in the color panel. The premier edition to the application, though, is Live Color. This feature displays a map of colors used and allows us to manipulate one color at a time or the entire color group in harmony. Illustrator discussion wrapped up with designing for mobile devices. Create a file appropriate for the device that you are designing for and use Adobe Device Central to see what that art will look like on that device and under different conditions.

Not to be left out, since we are the InDesign User Group, Noha wrapped up the presentation with a couple quick productivity tips to InDesign CS3. Double-click on a container to toggle between the selection tool and the direct selection tool was one, and placing multiple images into multiple containers, across multiple pages was another.

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