Orlando InDesign User Group Home Meeting Summary Archive

Meeting Summary

THE NEW ADOBE® CREATIVE SUITE® 4 : SHORTCUT TO BRILLIANT
Tue, Sep 30th, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Orlando Sentinel Conference Center
Event Details

If you were present at the September 30th meeting of the Orlando InDesign User Group, you were a part of history. There were 130 people gathered for a truly amazing evening. This was the largest meeting of the Orlando chapter. From a show of hands, we had over 40 first-time visitors (including about 20 students from Valencia CC).

We gathered in our final meeting at the Orlando Sentinel Conference Center to get a first-hand look at Adobe CS4 Design Premium. Patrick Koster, a senior solutions engineer from Adobe, wowed the audience with many of the new features spread throughout the new Creative Suite.

Some of the highlights included:

Photoshop
• New interface of Bridge
• Productivity enhancements
• Photoshop interface
• More like Windows but in a good way
• Rotate canvas
• 3D (Extended only)
• Content-aware scale -- reset with cloning and blending. Keeps items of interest (best of show)
• Channels are used to tell PS what to preserve. Amazing.
• New Adjustments panel: Vibrance. Preserves skin color. Create new adjustment layer. With presets, with lots to choose from.
• Zoom tool -- holding the click down does a smooth zoom in and out.
• Adjustment layer with mask adjustment; vert fast selections.
• Bridge is a lot faster.
• Dodge Protect tones buttons.
• New camera Raw 5. Localized nondestructive processes. Adjustment brush. Graduated filter.
• Post-crop vignetting.
• 3D modeling. Better 3D layers.
• New workspace
• You can now paint on a 3D image as easy as 2D. Full rotation. Easy mapping of a 2D object to a 3D object.
• Merge down. Very cool.
• Change any of the lighting in the model. Came from the modeling tool.

Illustrator
• Multiple art board.
• Art Board tool. One file, many art boards. Smart guides. Create art board to fit art. Print to PDF where every art board is a separate PDF.
• Drag selected element to panel like (spring loaded) symbols.
• Organic paint tool. Blob Brush tool. Paint to single blob. Isolation mode combined with Blob brush.
• Isolate selected path with breadcrumbs to back out as needed.
• On-object gradient selection and control. No longer do you need to select an object and then go to a panel.
• Gradients can now include transparent color.
• Fade to transparent.
• Appearance panel.
• Select same appearance attributes. (free distort) You can disable appearance effects without taxing your processor. Very good for Gaussian blur.
• Graphic styles, allow you to see what is going to happen before you apply it. You can combine graphics effects.

InDesign
• How to take ID files with a great presentation.
• Pages panel, Master pages. Convert to object/button.
• Buttons panel
• Smart guides rock!
• Normal, rollover, and click state. Automatic.
• Much improved.
• New hyperlinks/Cross-Ref. panel.
• Page transitions. Page turn (SWF Only).
• Export to SWF
• Lots of smart stuff -- smart spacing, align, rotating.
• Links panel now has thumbnails. You can now open/edit with from the Links panel. Group every instance of an image in the Links panel. Shows the page where the image is linked. Takes you to the object and resized to fit image to window.
• Link Info gives IPTC (metadata) and lots of other info. You can show in panel as well.
• Rotating spread
• You can edit tables in story editor. and ad notes.
• Cross-ref. Wow. Remember how you felt about nested styles and then Grep? Now there is cross reference. Synchronized text.
• Conditional tags.
• Multi-channel publishing.
• Live Preflight -- completely customizable to match the things you want to have flagged. Like “non-proportional scaling”. It will indicate as you create the file. No longer do you wait for the end. These can be embedded in the file.

Thank you

Many thanks to our sponsors for their ongoing and generous support. Obviously we could not do this with out the help of Adobe and our special sponsors:
• Heather Young at Proforma
• Rob Christopher at Abbott Printing
• Fire House Subs downtown.

Thanks to our Book and Raffle sponsors:
• Douglas Mitchell, Adobe Certified Instructor, for $150 Apple iPod Nano (www.trainingbrain.com)
• Peachpit for books (www.peachpit.com)
• O'Reilly for books (www.oreilly.com)
• Wiley for books (www.wiley.com)
• Markzware for PUB2ID conversion program (www.markzware.com)
• Stocklayouts for Brochure Design Cards (www.stocklayouts.com)
• iStockphoto for $10 credit (www.istockphoto.com)
• Kelby Training for complimentary subscriptions (www.kelbytraining.com)
and
• Adobe for our Big Prize of the evening -- the complete InDesign CS4 application.

And thanks to everyone who bought those extra tickets to win the grand prize of a new full copy of CS4 Design Premium.

Thank you to the Orlando Sentinel for the years of support in supplying us such a nice meeting place.

A special thank-you to Patrick Koster for going the extra miles to be with us and for helping us all want to move to CS4 as fast as possible.

Comments from attendees

"Great class; very informative. New tools will speed up production." —Orvin Love

"Wonderful speaker—clear & organized material, good voice that was clear and carried." —Ann Pullin

"Fantastic & informative presenter. Excellent content, venue & overall presentation! Thanks for the hard work!" —Terry Jarnell

"Great—as always! Very informative and clear presentation. Thank you again!" —Debi Buis

"Excellent presentation! The presenter was very knowledgeable & could communicate the material well. I especially enjoyed the Photoshop and InDesign portions of the presentation." —Bill Gibson

"Helpful, interesting tips and tricks on the new additions to CS4. Interesting speaker, easy to understand. Learned a lot of new tricks." —Savannah Hanson

"Excellent presentation, exciting new features in CS4. Hospitality is exceptional and the meeting, as always, was very well organized." Thank You! —Maureen Jarrell

"Excellent product overview, great presenter—excellent on volume and speed, not a drone! Thank You!" —Valerie Opyd

"Great stuff! The present was very engaging, and the new CS4 seems very intuitive and, overall, an improvement over CS3." —Angie Rachwal

"Great Overview! Wish we had more time. Anxious to see more InDesign & Flash." —Angela Plagmann

"This is my first meeting and it was Great. Thank You! I will be back & with friends." —Clarissa Santos

"Awesome! Patrick was terrific. Bring him back for some more info on InDesign CS4!" —Barb Welgas

Next Meeting

We are growing and moving — our next meeting will be November 19 (Wed) at our new location at the Winter Park Civic Center.
NEXT MEETING - Haziel Olivera speaks

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