Welcome to our Killer Feature Guide for the all new Creative Suite 3, during the Adobe Live 2007 Amsterdam edition we’ve picked up some great features and tips for you. If you use any of the following applications make sure you get your productivity & creativity boost: Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Light Room, Dreamweaver and Flash.

Photoshop CS3

The most used and well known product in the Creative Suite, has been updated with some incredible features. Before we get to these great features, there is something much more important to highlight! Photoshop now launches in just a few seconds, that is as long as you’ve launched it once before, otherwise it I’ll take slightly longer. Great new features in Photoshop are auto aligning pictures to get rid of (for example) tourists and 3D layers to import your 3d files into Photoshop, 3d layers support input from 3D Studio, Alias | Wavefront, Google Earth files and more. Of course Photoshop files can now be opened in Flash and Dreamweaver. The absolute and brand new Killer Feature we highlight today is the 3D Layer functionality.

Killer Feature: 3D Layers
open a Photoshop document
go to Layer > 3D Layers > New Layer from 3D file
locate and select your 3D file
go to Layer > 3D Layers > Transform 3D Layer
use the options in the toolbar to change the rotation, position, scale and material

The 3D layer is very useful when you want to do low-quality 3D product presentations, the quick and dirty kind, for high quality and detailed textures and materials you’ll still have to use your 3D application.

InDesign CS3

The new release of InDesign has got some great improvements, most of the improvements are just a breeze for artists that have to work with the software on a daily basis. A great feature is the availability of Photoshop effects in InDesign, just go to and you will find your familiar effects. The second feature is just an easy trick, to solve those oversized bounding boxes around objects with opacity, just double clicking one of the corners fixes this. InDesign also allows you to export for crossmedia which helps you to put InDesign files straight into Dreamweaver. The Killer Feature however is the multiple images place feature, which allows you to place multiple images in different frames very conveniently.

Killer Feature: Multiple Place Images
open your InDesign document
go to File > Place
locate and select multiple images, press open
InDesign creates a preview for each image and shows the total number in a thumbnail
you can now scroll through by using the arrows up and down, and esc to drop one, place a visual by clicking in a frame or by dragging a new frame

This tool is very fast and allows you to add visual in a matter of seconds to a template or text document, the images you place are also fitted to fill frame proportionally.

Illustrator CS3

There are a couple of nice improvements in Illustrator, that will help you improve your workflow, for example you can now use the eraser on your vector artworks like you would do in Photoshop or Flash. Another significant improvement is the pen tool which works the same in Flash and Illustrator since CS3, which means no more trouble when copy-pasting from one to another. However the best new feature is the Live Color tool, this allows you to create different variations for a set of colors you use in your design. So for example you have a packaging or logo design you can change the colors simultaneously and harmoniously by using the Live Color feature.

Killer Feature: Live Color
open your Illustrator file
go to Window > Color Guide and choose one of the different color harmony presets
click the Live Color icon
now you can edit the colors by rotating and moving the circles, while the color harmony remains

This is a great feature you can use to double you price, just send your client 5 different color proposals instead of one!

Premiere CS3

The latest CS3 release of premiere allows you to easily dock your panels, and to create new panels when browsing for your files. This is extremely useful if you have a second or third display in your office or studio. One more great feature you don’t want to miss is the replace clip feature, this allows you to replace a bit of video while keeping the effects you have applied to the clip. The killer feature in the all new Premier release is that you can now apply certain effects like speed over time and gradually.

Killer Feature: Gradually apply effects over time
open your Premiere project
import a video sequence and place it on the timeline
now right-click or ctrl-click on the video en select Time Remapping > Speed
now add keyframes by clicking on the movie sequence
to decrease the speed drag the yellow line down, to increase speed drag it up
these effects can be tweaked by adding a beziers between different speeds

This is is very useful when you want to create those couple of slow motion seconds in that action packed movie.

After Effects CS3

After Effects has been reloaded with some great features in the CS3 release, to start with you can edit a movie sequence in Photoshop, the different frames are represented in a timeline and Photoshop effects can be applied easily, a great feature to make some detailed changes on a short movie sequence. The next feature we would like to highlight is the Brainstorm effects feature, if you ever run out of ideas this is perfect! You can just select a number of effects and parameters and hit the Brainstorm button, After Effects creates different alternatives with the selected effects, in a similar way like Color Variations work in Photoshop.
After Effects has integrated extremely well with Photoshop since you can import Vanishing Point scenes as a composition. Including perspective planes and After Effects Camera’s. However the killer feature in CS3 is definitely the Puppet Pin Tool, which is about a much fun as it is useful for rapid animation editing.

Killer Feature: Puppet Pin Tool
open your After Effects project
select the vector object or image you would like to animate
click the Puppet Tool
define the pivot points for manipulating the object
animate the object in real time by dragging it while your movement is recorded
hit render to see the outcome of your animation
you can tweak the Puppet tool in many ways to achieve convincing effects, but the basics are very simple and fast

Just try it out, we had so much fun with this cool feature, try text or a picture of your girlfriend!

Light Room CS3

In essence Light Room is a lot like Photoshop but whatever you do in Light Room is none-destructive, which allows you to edit, duplicate and variate with your photographs really easily without having to worry about file sizes, as a matter of fact all your actions are saved and completely reversible even after you close and re-open your collection. Next to this great advantage over Photoshop, Light Room is also equipped with a couple of tools that allow you to do color corrections in a professional and none-destructive way. The killer feature we find in Light Room is the Sync function. Which applies your the set of effects you have used on one photo, on a selection you choose by a single click of a button.

Killer Feature: Sync effects & adjustments
open Light Room
import your picture collection
select the first picture, adjust exposure, color and white balance
now select a number of similar pictures taken a the same location and hit Auto Sync
the effects you applied on the first photo are now applied to the selected pictures
you can save this set of effects as a preset by clicking the + next to Presets

This is a real timesaver, it’s also fun to save certain effects as presets to create your own preset library.

Dreamweaver CS3

A great improvement in Dreamweaver is the fact that you can just place an PSD file in you website design, Dreamweaver will prompt you with a window to give size, name and location to place the JPG of GIF file, editing this visual can be done by clicking the Photoshop icon in the Dreamweaver options panel, which takes you to Photoshop immediately. The new Dreamweaver release is also packed with templates that are cross platform and cross browser compatible, which is a great starting point for a website or blog.
If you are web designer you must feel familiar with the endless browser problems, especially that Microsoft browser your client might be using. Worry no more and check out the Dreamweaver killer feature.

Killer Feature: Browser Compatibility Check
open your Dreamweaver site
click on the “Check Page” button
click on Check Browser Compatibility
if any problems are found you can use Adobe’s CSS Advisor website to solve the problem

Always check your designs before you send them to your client, you want to make sure he sees what you see!

Flash CS3

The last software tool we’ll discus today is Flash, which has gotten a pretty big update, not only has the new version of Action Script been implemented also the user interface has been adapted to match the CS3 style we have seen in the other Adobe applications. As mentioned before the pen tool has been adapted to behave exactly like the pen tool in Illustrator. This allows you to switch easily between these two drawing applications. Further more you can import symbols from Illustrator as movieclips including instance names. The integration would not be complete if you couldn’t import Photoshop files to Flash intuitively, so when you do, a window appears with detailed options allowing you to select and deselect Photoshop layers and objects, and what about those blend modes.. yes they are seamlessly converted to Flash blend modes. Flash video has been around for quite a while, so many artists have tried to build their own flash video player skins, and therefore this part of Flash has been improved, the different components can be added and customized in a few clicks. However we find the killer feature in Flash CS3 the ability to export a tween to Action Script 3, this makes it easy to apply any Motion Tween to objects without having complicated timelines.

Killer Feature: Copy Motion Tween as AS3
open your Flash file
create a motion Tween
right-click or ctrl-click the Motion Tween in the timeline
select Copy Motion as Action Script 3.0
choose a name for this piece of Motion Tween to refer to
you can now apply this Motion Tween by pasting the code on a keyframe
finally give the object you want to animate the instance name you defined earlier
Of course you can now share this code easily by email or in a text document.

This wraps up the Killer Feature Guide for Adobe Live 2007, feel free to comment with any additions or questions!

Studio469 - Tools for Design

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 13:05 and is filed under Designer Tools, Live Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.