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Adobe
Illustrator CS4
Professional
Powerhouse
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There
are
essentially two ways to do art on a computer. The first is via
bitmapped graphics (sometimes called raster) and the other is through
vector graphics, sometimes referred to as line art.
When you
draw in a bit-mapped graphics program, you draw with little dots of
color called pixels. Once you create an object, if you try to change
it, (resize, shrink, stretch or scale) it may start to show pixelation.
In contrast, in a vector, or drawing program, when you create an
object, you have created a series of lines and linked them
together. When you resize or change the object, it changes much more
easily and without distortion (most clip art is vector).
If
you've ever scaled a bitmap image, such as a GIF or JPEG file, and
gotten the dreaded “jaggies,” or puzzled over complex scanning
calculations in trying to decide on the best resolution at which to
scan an image, you can appreciate vector artwork. You can scale vector
art to billboard size, knowing it will print out just as smoothly as
when it was postage-stamp size.
Illustrator
is a program that creates such graphics, and in this market it has no
major competitors. Illustrator CS4 is Adobe's upgrade to stay in
competition with its only rival--itself! Fortunately Illustrator
continues to be great for graphic artists.
Feature
Uniformity
 Since
all of Adobe's programs work more or less alike, having similar
palettes, keyboard shortcuts and so on, it makes the programs easier
(though not easy) to learn, just as the uniform interface guidelines of
Apple makes Mac programs easier to learn, because they also all work
pretty much alike. This is a wise move on Adobe's part and, in the long
run, will benefit the most users. Too bad all Mac software still
doesn't follow this philosophy.
Several features work
similarly in Illustrator and Photoshop. As in Photoshop, you define
colors, store them for future use, and create gradients in separate
palettes. Like Photoshop, Illustrator supports the RGB and HSB color
models. Both programs let you create, hide, activate, and reorder
layers in the same manner. Grids and guides work identically in the two
programs, both feature tabbed palettes, and tools that have
counterparts in Photoshop share the same keys in Illustrator.
Navigation, selection, and file-management functions are also
standardized. However, the two programs still don't take
standardization as far as they could (and should). Masking, for
example, is one of several features that still work differently in the
two programs.
Software seems to have been battling with
each other over the past few years to see which can clutter up your
screen with the most palettes. Fortunately, Adobe has long had a way to
deal with this mess: palettes which you can drag together to make one
centrally accessible command panel. Clicking on tabs at the top of the
panel will switch from one formerly separate palette to another. This
is a great feature even for those who don't have 27-inch screens.
Every
icon in the toolbox has a single-key shortcut, allowing you to select
tools directly from the keyboard. Popup tool tips inform you of the
name and shortcut for each tool, and context-sensitive menus put
commands within easy reach. And of course right- or control-clicking on
an object in the drawing brings up a popup list or context-sensitive
menu of available options.
A
nice feature is the ability to reshape complicated lines (or
paths) by simply drawing over them, thereby easing the editing of
complex drawings.
Illustrator also has the ability
to
link files to your Illustrator document, rather than actually placing
the files inside the document. This allows you to keep file sizes down.
For example, when you place a compressed TIFF image in an Illustrator
document, the TIFF is converted to PostScript. But when you only link
to the TIFF image, you are able to retain the TIFF's compression, while
making it appear in your Illustrator document at the same time.
Illustrator
for Online Marketers
There
are a lot of features in Illustrator that applies to online graphic
creation. For the purposes of creating an Adobe Acrobat document or a
GIF image map for a web page, Illustrator lets you assign a URL to any
object in your illustration. To assist in designing graphics for the
Web, Adobe Illustrator includes a color library containing 216
"Web-safe" colors (colors that display without dithering on older
systems). The Windows and Macintosh versions of Illustrator are
fully compatible for easy file transfers.
Illustrator has a
lot of features that do not apply to online marketers, however, such as
ColorSync support, which synchronizes the color on the monitor with the
color printed out. But for the graphic artist who is going to do
4-color separations and send them to a printer, this ability
is
important. Knowing that "what you see is what you get" is very
important to you if you are an artist or are with any desktop
publishing
company worth its salt.
New in Illustrator CS4 are multiple
artboards that allow you to manage an entire project within a single
file, a new Blob Brush tool for natural sketching results in a single,
filled object, and transparency in gradients that allow you to define
the opacity of any individual color stop in a gradient.
And of
course, all the old features are still there: multi-color gradient
fills; character and paragraph palettes for applying text attributes; a
layers palette for creating layers and managing objects in complex
illustrations; pathfinder filters for creating objects and effects that
would otherwise be time-consuming or impossible to create; multiple
levels of undo; instant conversion of artwork to raster images;
built-in color separations, and more. And Illustrator accepts all
Photoshop-compatible plug-in filters to instantly create unique raster
effects directly within Adobe Illustrator.
Make no
mistake: Adobe Illustrator is a professional powerhouse, not a tool for
the casual dabbler. But if your user profile matches that of the
product, you can hardly go wrong with Adobe Illustrator.
Order
Adobe Illustrator for Mac from MacMall
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