Local Adobe CS3 Event

Posted on April 29, 2007 | Filed Under Local Happenings, Website Development 

I attended a two hour demonstration of the new web-oriented features offered by Adobe’s CS3 products, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks, this past Wednesday at Vulcan Park.

We were fortunate to have two great, well-qualified presenters in Greg Rewis, the Worldwide Senior Evangelist for Web Tools for Adobe and Stephanie Sullivan, a Dreamweaver, accessibility, CSS and XHTML expert who recently contracted with Adobe to produce the new CSS Layout templates found in the CS3 release of Dreamweaver. Both of these folks are prominent heavy hitters and well respected in the field. Thank goodness Atlanta is just a two hour drive away!

Greg wowed us with new features in CS3, including an Auto Align layers command in Photoshop that looks for similar content between layers and automatically aligns them. He took five or six photos that were taken of a group of people with a handheld camera, selected the Auto Align command, and the layers were perfectly aligned. Next, he pointed out that in each of the shots one or more of the subjects weren’t looking at the camera or had their eyes closed. He then proceeded to quickly erase portions of layers to let the “good take” of each person shine through, resulting in a great composite image.

He had one more auto align trick up his sleeve. He showed us several handheld shots of a beautiful fountain that had tourists and pigeons (a nuisance he said you can always count on at tourist attractions) obscuring various parts of the shot. He selected the Auto Align command to line up the shots again, but this time he proceeded to select a Median effect to be applied to the layers. The median effect throws away elements that appear in less than half the layers. The end result was a perfect photo of the fountain with the tourists and pigeons nowhere to be seen.

The niftiest PS thing of all though was a new mask selection tool that makes extracting subjects from their backgrounds a quick and easy piece of cake. I don’t recall what the name of the tool is, but he was able to accurately extract a guy from a complex and similarly-colored brick wall background in less than 15 seconds. Goodbye magic wand!

He also demonstrated some great integration features. The previously Macromedia-owned products are now fully cognizant of their Adobe brethren. For example, you can create a multi-layered/grouped illustration in Illustrator CS3, assign instance names to the groups, then import the resulting .ai file into Flash and proceed to immediately animate those layers, eliminating several of the steps previously required. The same goes for Photoshop .psd files.

Dreamweaver CS3 also offers similar support. For example, you can place a Photoshop .psd file on a page and DW will immediately prompt you for info on how the image should be converted, knowing that .psd files aren’t natively supported on the web. You can select .png, .gif, .jpeg, various quality settings, etc., and the image is converted. The cool thing about it though is that you can proceed to edit the original .psd file in Photoshop and Dreamweaver will automatically convert the image again using the settings you previously specified. That can be a big time saver after a while!

Stephanie Sullivan gave an entertaining and enlightening presentation on the new CSS layout templates she created for DW CS3 and gave us a good CSS primer in the process. I’m now fiddling around with an elastic CSS layout on a site I’m working on thanks to you, Stephanie! If you ever have a chance to see Stephanie talk CSS, do whatever you have to make it. She makes it all make sense and is a great presenter. Check her out at communitymx.com, VioletSky Design and her forthcoming w3 Conversions site.

While I was hoping to be the lucky winner of a free copy of the CS3 site, it was not meant to be. Still, I enjoyed an entertaining and enlightening evening and I’m definitely glad I went.

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