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Adobe Ships Creative Suite 4, Flash Player 10
10/15/2008
Adobe has begun shipping Creative Suite 4, with new versions of its development, design, publishing, and video/motion graphics applications, along with new and modified pricing and licensing schemes for both K-12 and post-secondary education. The company also released Flash Player 10 Wednesday.
Creative Suite 4
Creative Suite 4 is available in six distinct editions--Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Standard, Web Premium, Production Premium, and the Mast Collection, which contains all of the individual applications. Almost all of the applications in the collections have received some major upgrades, with a particular focus on performance and UI enhancements in the applications that formerly belonged to Macromedia (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.).
For an in depth look the updates to the individual applications, please see our article "First Look: Adobe Creative Suite 4." What follows is a list of some of the more significant enhancements to the individual applications in Creative Suite 4.
Photoshop:
- 3D compositing and editing features;
- 3D object/layer manipulation directly within the main interface window;
- Support for painting on 3D objects;
- New painting modes used on 3D layers--diffuse, bump, glossiness, shininess, opacity, reflectivity, and self-illumination;
- A new integrated ray tracer for higher final render quality;
- Non-destructive adjustments for raw images;
- A new version of Adobe Bridge featuring updated navigation, workspace control, and UI, among other new features;
- New printing options, including 16-bit printing in Mac OS X;
- Support for multi-touch gestures in Mac OS X;
- Overall performance improvements;
- Support for using video layers as textures;
- Support for exporting 3D layers to the OBJ, KMZ, Collada, and U3D file formats;
- General UI enhancements;
- Manipulation of light, camera, and material properties of imported 3D objects; and
- The new ability to convert text and images to "volumes."
Dreamweaver:
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