Adobe’s CS4 is out!

And just one year and almost 6 months later, Adobe gives us the CS4. But… is it really worth to get an upgrade?

Of course Adobe says it is, list­ing this new fea­tures (in the Mas­ter Col­lec­tion):

More speed and con­trol in every­day design tasks: catch pro­duc­tion errors on-the-fly with Live Pre­flight and man­age placed files more effi­ciently with the newly cus­tom­iz­able Links panel in Adobe® InDes­ign® CS4. Zoom in on images more smoothly and rap­idly than ever, and rotate your can­vas to any angle in Adobe Pho­toshop® CS4 Exten­ded. Com­bine mul­tiple art­boards in a single doc­u­ment in Adobe Illus­trator® CS4. And do more with dozens of other enhance­ments that help you deliver the design work you do today, faster. 

This sounds cool, an instant alert of what’s wrong could be really help­ful.
 
New dimen­sions in image edit­ing: use the indis­pens­able tools in Pho­toshop Exten­ded as a start­ing point in any medium: Apply the revolu­tion­ary new Content-Aware Scal­ing to auto­mat­ic­ally recom­pose an image as you res­ize it, smartly pre­serving vital areas of the image as it adapts to new dimen­sions. Paint, com­pos­ite, and anim­ate 3D mod­els using famil­iar tools. Enhance video foot­age, even syncing visual effects to an audio track.

Nice.
 
Rich inter­act­ive doc­u­ments: export a dynamic present­a­tion or inter­act­ive bro­chure as a SWF file with inter­act­ive but­tons, hyper­links, and unique page trans­itions, such as curl, wipe, dis­solve, and fade. Or, com­bine the page lay­out strength of InDes­ign and the author­ing power of Adobe Flash® CS4 Pro­fes­sional to cus­tom­ize rich inter­act­ive doc­u­ments. For example, export an InDes­ign lay­out as an XLF file and open it with full visual fidel­ity in Flash. Then add soph­ist­ic­ated inter­activ­ity, anim­a­tion, and nav­ig­a­tion in Flash to pro­duce enga­ging online experiences.

Flash and ID com­bined? Does it really work?
 
New anim­a­tion con­trols for richer online exper­i­ences: sim­plify the cre­ation and updat­ing of anim­a­tions in Flash CS4 Pro­fes­sional without los­ing cre­at­ive flex­ib­il­ity. Apply tweens dir­ectly to objects instead of to key­frames with greater con­trol over indi­vidual anim­a­tion attrib­utes. Use the new 3D trans­la­tion and rota­tion tools to anim­ate 2D objects on x, y, and z axes in 3D space. Cre­ate more nat­ural anim­ated inter­ac­tions between linked objects or dis­tort a single shape using the new Bones tool.

No. No. No. I used to hate Flash just because I couldn’t use it, but then, after learn­ing, I real­ized how import­ant it is. Now I don’t really want it to be Photoshop-like, it shouldn’t be used by any­body. Damn.
 
Easier inter­ac­tions with com­plex web pages: design and develop more soph­ist­ic­ated web­sites with new Live View in Adobe Dream­weaver® CS4, which fea­tures inter­act­ive code edit­ing. Use the new Related Files and Code Nav­ig­ator fea­tures to dive deeply into com­plex pages that include HTML files, link to external JavaS­cript doc­u­ments, and integ­rate XML data. Update your code in the asso­ci­ated files and review changes instantly in the mas­ter document’s Design view.

I think this is a good thing, but I should prob­ably try it first.
 
Excep­tional pro­ductiv­ity in video post-production: move con­tent among Adobe After Effects® CS4, Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4, Sound­booth® CS4, and Encore® CS4 with unpar­alleled effi­ciency, so you have more time to craft your vis­ion. Expan­ded Adobe Dynamic Link enables you to link con­tent between com­pon­ents so you can see updates instantly without rendering.

This is def­in­itely going to kick Final Cut’s ass for good, trust me.
 
Direct-to-disk record­ing and tape­less work­flows: shoot foot­age dir­ectly to disk from non-file-based cam­eras with redesigned Adobe OnLoca­tion™ CS4, which now runs nat­ively on Win­dows® and Intel® based Mac OS sys­tems. Import and nat­ively edit the latest tape­less formats — includ­ing AVCHD, P2, and XDCAM EX — without transcod­ing or rewrap­ping in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

Can’t com­ment, I’m not get­ting it.
 
Pro­ject intel­li­gence with XMP metadata: cap­ture valu­able XMP metadata from your cam­era, and accu­mu­late key inform­a­tion through­out the pro­duc­tion pro­cess for intel­li­gent media man­age­ment. For example, use new Speech Search tech­no­logy in Adobe Premiere Pro and Sound­booth to turn spoken dia­log into metadata, mak­ing it easy to find par­tic­u­lar clips and mak­ing video assets search­able online.

Thank you.
 
PDF col­lab­or­a­tion: com­mu­nic­ate effect­ively with cli­ents, col­leagues, and oth­ers using Adobe PDF files. Add video and audio cre­ated in Flash to PDF files for smooth play­back in Adobe Acrobat® 9 Pro and Adobe Reader® 9 soft­ware. Quickly export inter­act­ive web pro­to­types from Adobe Fire­works® CS4 to PDF for cli­ent review. Embed video into PDF files for cli­ents to add timecode-specific com­ments, and then view those com­ments mapped to an Adobe Premiere Pro timeline. Pack­age doc­u­ments in dynamic PDF Port­fo­lios with cus­tom­iz­able inter­act­ive navigation.

Lovely.

So it looks like it’s worth an upgrade, but I’d rather be wait­ing a while, until they fix everything they can find. Oh, and by the way, did they integ­rated an auto­matic save file in ID? ‘Cause I do need it, really.

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