Adobe's Creative Suite CS2 Hits the Shelves Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, and Illustrator CS2 Scott Koegler
InDesign CS2
Among InDesign CS2's new or improved features is a more elegant import of Microsoft Word and RTF files. With a great deal of text starting life in Word documents, importing them in previous versions of InDesign meant spending considerable time adjusting formats that weren't properly translated. InDesign not only handles format conversions but also includes several enhancements to its Styles function that make formatting both new and imported text simpler. We were able to import both Word and PDF files, and the imported text looked just as it did in the original files.
A new Snippets function lets you select portions of InDesign documents and save them for use either in other documents or other sections of the same document. Snippets are stored and managed in Bridge.
Adobe's Bridge is especially important to Photoshop CS2 when used as its file browser. It's a natural act to select images from Bridge and either drag them to Photoshop or simply double-click to open the image(s) in Photoshop. Among Photoshop's more significant new features is its Vanishing Point tool that lets you define perspectives, like the sides of a building. We marked the wall of a picture of a house with the vanishing point function and then selected a door on another wall. As we dragged the door from near to far and back it changed size according to its location on the wall. (Now if only we could move the real door just as easily.)
The Image Warp feature may not be as important to everyday photography, but if you've ever tried to simulate wrapping an image around a tube you can appreciate the difficulty of the task. We selected a landscape image and were able to wrap it around a soda can with just a few mouse clicks by dragging the image's corners.
Illustrator CS2
Adobe Illustrator is an indispensable tool for many graphic designers, and nearly unfathomable to neophytes. To provide a starting point, Adobe has included a set of predesigned templates for Illustrator (as well as for Photoshop and InDesign). These help new users tremendously, and can even be good starters for seasoned users.
One of the difficulties for new users getting familiar with Illustrator is its plethora of tool palettes. Illustrator CS2 includes a new context-sensitive Control palette that lets you access the most common functions from a single location. We found it much easier to find the exact tool we wanted using the Control palette than looking at each of the previous version's separate palettes that always seemed to be covering exactly the portion of the image we needed to work on.
Previous versions of Illustrator often created vector images that were not overly friendly with bitmap images, and converting bitmap images from Photoshop to vector images that can be scaled and manipulated easily in Illustrator has typically been a tedious task at best. Illustrator CS2's Live Trace makes conversion simple, if not automatic. We used Live Trace to convert a scanned line drawing to a vector image. The process wasn't a one-click process, and it did leave us with a few minutes of manual editing. Even so, the tool was much more successful than other methods we've tried and certainly better than having to redraw the image manually.
