Adobe creative suite 4 launch at Trivandrum – Shortcut to brilliant.

Adobe CS4- Shortcut to Brilliant

Last Friday, I haven’t been online for a long time. I was at Mascot hotel Trivandrum for the launch campaign of Adobe creative suite 4. It was a nice experience to be in such an event in a weekend holyday. I know a lot of people have already had download Adobe cs4 with crack and being used like full version. I have tried the Dreamweaver CS4 when the beta was released and the trail version on the same is available on Adobe website. I am not talking a lot about the software and packages of CS4. You can grab it on Creative suit page.

Now talking on the session, near two hundred professionals where present in the hall and the hall was nicely arranged with six LCD projectors and a fair audio system. The background of the stage was decorated with creative graphics of Adobe product icons. The session was supposed to start on 10.00. As usual, people where arriving even on 11.30. I am not sure that they are working in the IT industry where time is money. Are they dealing with clients too the same way?!

Adobe Creative Suite 4 - The Grand Unveil Seminar

Adobe team too was not in track. There was a note, few broachers, pen and an agenda note. I don’t know why they wasted a paper by giving a print of agenda which was not a part of the campaign. The agenda was having no connection with the sessions happened there. And talking about connection, there was no internet connectivity for any computers used throughout and Presenters were talking " I am not having access to internet if it was there I could show you that stuff".

New media powering with CS4

Rajesh patel talking on New media powering with CS4

Mr. Rajeesh Patil, who is " Manager SE" at Adobe India, was the first person to make a talk on the Creative suite. He is a talented person with nice presentation skill and the widely noticed person throughout the program. You can have a view on his blog. I am not sure why he is still in love with blogspot :). First question he asked the crowd was "How many of you are using CS3?" hands shown that time was less than ten and when he added "I won’t ask you serial numbers", everyone raised their hand. This made the entire people laugh. Any way, he introduced new features in Indesign, Illustrator and few stuff on Dreamweaver. One impressive thing he spit a small idea I have noticed is In-context editing of websites, which I will be doing further study in coming days.

CPU or GPU? Ask NVIDIA

There was a hardware introductory session by Mr.R.Rajkumar of NVIDIA , who talked about Graphic processing unit, a must have if you are using CS4. I don’t know why there wasn’t a session by HP. HP and NVIDIA are now platinum partners of Adobe.

In the afternoon session, Rajeesh Patil showed us how GPU is helping you in Photoshop CS4.

Video – Still not in hands of Adobe?

One Mr. Guru was the person to talk on Video (Aftereffects and Premier pro). He also touched some what on Soundbooth too. I was not too much caring of it because it is out of my box, but few points to remind those who are gonna grab videos by Adobe. The accusation of Mocha, the video tracking software was a great deal. And Mocha is free with Adobe CS4 if you are buying Production premium. He was clicking on the windows desktop icons to open Aftereffects in every 3 minutes, while other guys where using MAC. He said he is using NVIDIA GPU and that is why the system is running too fast. But I felt like death breath few times. And he was closing and opening Aftereffects and Premier every time when the switching is available inside software itself.

Lunch

It is bad habit talking while eating.

Piracy

"Adobe is having a good user community all over India. But is lack of customer community". Almost every design firms are using Adobe products. But few companies are paying for it. It is the effort and hard work of a lot of people. Considering the amount Adobe spent on man power is huge. So you should be buying license if you are using it. He says. Some people might say" Adobe is too coasty". "If the product coasts you 150INR, every one could buy it." But he says no. "I will get the same for just 50INR, then why should I pay 100INR more?" This will be the question.

Photoshop CS4

The software which lead Adobe to the hero of image manipulation, now is taken to a new world. With CS2, they introduced video importing; CS3 came to us with 3D importing with the extended version. Now you can import 3D files in Photoshop and paint on it as if you are using a real life object to paint.

Few things he showed us as new features of Photoshop cs4 are..

Content aware scaling.

You can scale images by keeping some of the elements untreated. This is useful if you are creating a banner of 600X200 with a landscape image of beach with a 600X800 image.

Vanishing point

Not a new addition, but new improvements.

WEB –Still the new media? (At least for some people out there..)

Vyshak, a young Malayali, who use his hands more than mouth while speaking was the person, came to talk next. The most awaited session started from Fireworks CS4, where now you can have more than a single page. You can import all your PSD files in a single png fireworks document, link the pages and export a working demo of the site to Pdf or swf. And the horrible part is that; design a page using Photoshop or Fireworks, slice it, now you can save in to xhtml and CSS directly.

I will be reviewing Adobe Creative suite 4 web premium. I’m focusing on Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Photoshop is now out of box. So I’m not gonna extract it here. Did I mention that Dreamweaver has got live preview browser in itself with Webkit rendering engine?

That close

The Grand Unveil seminar gave me few good ideas on Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth. I will be digging in to those software soon and will let you know via this blog

Photos by :Sunil