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(More customer reviews)I'm a graphics professional and have been using Adobe software for 20 years and this is by far the most amazing suite of tools that they have produced. The upgrades to Illustrator are impressive-Bristle Brush (natural media painting tools that are vector), Perspective Grid, Shape Builder, enhanced Artboards, and more. I am already using all of these features to great benefit in my workflow. I've also used the new Blender Brushes in Photoshop which are very nice and I have played with Content Aware Fill and have been stunned by how well it works. It puts a lot of power into the hands of even casual users of the application. If you have any reservations simply go to their site and download a 30 day trial version and test some of these great new features.
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Adobe Illustrator CS5Product Description: Create distinctive designs for any project. Used by creative professionals worldwide, Adobe Illustrator CS5 software provides precision and power. Paint expressively with vectors, draw in perspective, and explore designing for interactivity. Move easily between Illustrator, other Adobe products, and Adobe CS Live online services. Get the job done efficiently but beautifully, moving quickly from multiple ideas to multiple outputs with complete control and delivering exactly what you had in mind.
The new perspective drawing tools in Illustrator provide a powerful way to create an accurate cityscape with as much architectural interest and decorative detail as you could ever want. Explore new paths with the essential vector tool
Sophisticated vector drawing controls Create distinctive designs with precise shape-building tools, fluid and painterly brushes, and advanced path controls. Such powerful drawing capabilities provide practically infinite possibilities for creating unique and striking artwork.
Advanced typography Enjoy easy type creation and professional control with more than 80 OpenType fonts, paragraph and character styles, paragraph composition, underlining and strikethroughs, transparent effects, and more.
Gradients and transparency Interact with gradients directly on your object, defining the dimension of elliptical gradients, editing colors, and adjusting opacity. Control the transparency of individual colors in a gradient, including those applied to a gradient mesh.
Perspective Drawing Use perspective grids to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, or 3-point linear perspective. Create the look of realistic depth and distance with snap-to guides to quickly put objects, live text, and symbols into perspective.
Beautiful Strokes Adjust stroke width interactively using new width handles. Precisely position arrowheads and symmetrically align dashes. Control stretch at any point when scaling art brushes on a path, and see how patterns behave beautifully at corners.
Multiple artboards Work on up to 100 artboards of varying sizes in one file, organized and viewed the way you want--overlapping or on a grid. Quickly add, delete, reorder, and name. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together.
Work interactively with stroke widths, using your cursor to adjust sides independently. Move and edit swells and constrictions freely along the path, and save profiles for later use. New brush options enable full control of how your brush shapes scale and transform.Click to enlarge. The Bristle Brush can be used in a variety of ways. You can paint traditionally or you can brush along text shapes to create scrubby or soft-edged type. This text logo works perfectly on the web or on a billboard because it's all purely vector. In-panel appearance editing Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels. Work with shared attributes and toggle individual attribute display for faster rendering.
Drawing enhancements Work faster with everyday tools. Draw behind, disregarding stacking order. Draw or place an image inside, instantly creating a clipping mask. Join paths with one keystroke, see ruler origins at the upper left, and scale symbols with 9-slice control.
Crisp graphics for web and mobile devices Create vector objects precisely on the file's pixel grid for delivering pixel-aligned artwork. Generate clean, sharp raster graphics by turning on Align To Pixel Grid and using text anti-aliasing options for individual text frames.
Integration with Adobe CS Review Create and share--from within Illustrator--online reviews for clients and colleagues down the hall or around the world. Publish your review to the web and see comments in Illustrator so you can track feedback on specific design elements.
Integration with Adobe design applications Share files smoothly with other Adobe professional design applications and easily create artwork for multiple outputs. Work across products and across media with roundtrip editing and user interface similarities among Adobe Creative Suite tools.
Adobe PDF file creation tools Create protected, graphic-rich PDF files with Illustrator layers retained, multiple artboards for multiple pages, and color space and transparency handling. Include printer's marks and bleeds to share files confidently with service providers and with ultimate prepress control.
Industry-standard graphic file format support Work with almost any type of graphic file--including PDF, EPS, FXG, Photoshop (PSD), TIFF, GIF, JPEG, SWF, SVG, DWG, DXF, and more.
Top new features of Adobe Illustrator CS5
Perspective drawing Use perspective grids to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, and 3-point linear perspectives. The new Perspective Grid tool allows you to turn on a grid that supports drawing directly on planes of true perspective. The new Perspective Selection tool allows objects to be moved, scaled, duplicated, and transformed dynamically in perspective. Easily move and duplicate objects from one plane to another.
You can also create objects in flat space and then apply them to a perspective plane, where they will correctly transform in shape. This works particularly well with symbols, in that you can place easily reapeatable instances onto the perspective grid and see the symbols "in back" recede to give you the look of realistic depth and distance. You can use the perspective grid to resize objects; you can even work with live text in perspective.
No longer do you need to construct your own perspective environment--no more creating your own horizon lines and vanishing points. You can even use the perspective grid to draw vector objects on top of a reference photograph or video still placed on your artboard. Consider adding a series of street lamps to a cityscape for a sequential lighting animation, for example. Or add fence posts to a reference landscape image to complete your billboard for a western wilderness camp.
Beautiful strokes In Illustrator CS5, a number of new features have been introduced that make designing with strokes even more powerful and flexible. The core drawing tools within Illustrator merit attention every software release, and with Illustrator CS5 there are five significant updates that new and long-time users will appreciate. You can finely control stroke width, dashes, arrowheads, and how brushes stretch along a path. And improvements in corner handling mean that stroke shapes behave predictably in tight angles or around sharp points.
Variable-width strokes--Draw strokes with variable widths that you can quickly and smoothly adjust at any point, symmetrically or along either side. You can create custom width profiles that you can save and subsequently apply to any stroke.
Dashed line control--Control alignment of dashes on a stroke. Now enjoy symmetrical dashes around corners and at the ends of open paths, with lengths adjusted automatically to fit. Toggle between adjusted and preserved dashes and gaps.
Precise arrowheads--Work in a completely new way with arrowheads. Pick an arrowhead shape and control placement and scaling from within the Stroke panel. You can even choose whether to lock the tip or base of the arrowhead to the path endpoint.
Stretch control for brushes--Define how art and pattern brushes scale along a path. Choose areas of the brush graphic you wish to stretch and those you wish to keep in proportion. For example, you may need to elongate the middle of a banner graphic while keeping the detailed, curly ends of the banner from stretching.
Brushes with corner control--Apply art and pattern brushes to a path and get clean results, even at tight bends or corners. Where strokes of different widths join, or they form obtuse or acute angles, choose options to properly fill points where joins occur.
Zoom in to see the pixel grid and watch your objects align as you work. Align To Pixel Grid ensures that when you save artwork as a raster image, the results will be crisp and clean. Name and reoder artboards using a dedicated Artboards panel. The new Rearrange Artboards dialog box allows you to arrange artboards quickly and easily. Click to enlarge. You can quickly create a photo mask out of any object. Simply select a text object, choose Draw Inside, and then choose File > Place. Bristle Brush Paint with vectors that resemble real-world brush strokes. The new Bristle Brush provides breakthrough control of painting. You can set bristle characteristics such as size, length, thickness, and stiffness. Set brush shape and bristle density. And set paint opacity, which uses transparency variations to simulate lifelike blending. When you have chosen the perfect characteristics for your Bristle Brush, you can save it for later use.
With the Bristle Brush you can achieve the expressiveness of natural media like watercolors and oils--but with the scalability and editability of vectors. Get the most out of the Bristle Brush using a tablet with a Wacom 6D Art Pen, which responds automatically to pressure, bearing, and tilt, plus provides 360-degree barrel rotation and anaccurate brush preview.
Crisp graphics for web and mobile devices Create vector objects precisely on the file's pixel grid for delivering pixel-aligned artwork. When you're designing artwork for Flash Catalyst, Adobe Flash Professional software, and Adobe Dreamweaver® software, it's critical that raster images look sharp, especially standard web graphics at 72ppi resolution. Pixel alignment is also useful for video resolution rasterization control. And in Illustrator CS5, new web graphics tools include type enhancements. Choose one of four text anti-aliasing options for each of your Illustrator text frames.
Pixel grid alignment Generate clean, sharp raster graphics by turning on Align To Pixel Grid. Objects are automatically nudged to the closest pixel edge when you create them or apply transformations.Now, a one-pixel stroke won't straddle two pixels and get blurred or lost with anti-aliasing. Zoom in to see the grid and watch your objects align as you work. The alignment control is located in the Transform panel.
Text anti-aliasing Create readable text for the web, mobile devices, handsets, gaming devices, or any destination where you need to generate raster images from your Illustrator artwork. Four anti-aliasing options now appear in the Illustrator CS5 Character panel. Choose among Sharp, Crisp, Strong, and Smooth, which match the text anti-aliasing rules in Adobe Photoshop® software. You can apply a different rule to each text frame in your artwork, and your specifications are saved with the file.
Multiple artboards enhancements The multiple artboards feature introduced in Illustrator CS4 is now markedly better. Work on up to 100 artboards of varying sizes all in one document, organized and viewed the way you want. New and greatly expanded artboard options in Illustrator CS5 include a full Artboards panel, in which you can name and reorder artboards. Quickly add, delete, and duplicate them using panel controls or keyboard shortcuts.
Artboards are also easier to arrange, aligned to a grid if you wish, with rows and columns you define. New ruler behavior includes automatic top-left origin, and the options for saving your artwork now include saving one, all, or a range of individual artboards as individual AI files. The advantage of multiple artboards is that you can work on a variety of related projects in a single file and share settings and content across designs. For different outputs, you can choose among a variety of preset ratios and guides, such as for print or web design. You can create artboards to mock up aspect ratios such as an HDTV screen, a movie theater screen, or the screen of a mobile device, exploring ways to adapt your composition for each of them.
You can also create an artboard inside an artboard to serve as a crop area so it's easy to export just a piece of a composition. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together--as a series of files or as a single, multipage PDF file.
Shape Builder tool Intuitively combine, edit, and fill shapes on your artboard. Drag the cursor across overlapping shapes and paths to create new objects and add color without accessing multiple tools and panels. Quickly unite, exclude, trim, and more.
If you have ever worked with the Pathfinder panel, you will appreciate the Shape Builder tool. It enables merging objects, breaking overlapping shapes into distinct objects, subtracting areas, and more. For example, you can draw a stroke across a the middle of a circle and quickly create two half-circles--no need to open a panel or choose another tool.
Coloring fills and strokes is easier now, too. The Shape Builder tool includes interactive color selection for quickly filling closed or partially closed areas of your artwork. Options include automatic gap detection and choosing whether or not to automatically fill new shapes.
Drawing enhancements Work faster with everyday tools. Improvements to familiar drawing tools make using Illustrator CS5 efficient and productive. Instant masking using Draw Inside mode and joining paths with a keystroke are just two of the enhancements that speed up your routine tasks.
Draw behind and inside--Draw behind other objects without choosing layers or worrying about stacking order. Draw or place an image inside a shape, including live text. The draw inside feature automatically creates a clipping mask from the selected object.
Find Draw Behind and Draw Inside modes at the bottom of the toolbar. Select an object, choose a mode; then, when you draw, place an image, or create a shape, your new element is behind the selected object. With Draw Inside, the selected object will also become a mask.
Symbols--New 9-slice scaling in Illustrator and registration point control make symbols more powerful than ever. Scaling an object with 9-slice control enables proportion maintenance in exactly the places you want it, now available in Illustrator and not just for export. Repeat extremely complex symbols and maintain ultimate control while you scale and transform them in Illustrator.
Artboard ruler origin and coordinates--No longer think twice about your coordinates. Artboard ruler origins and coordinate systems are now oriented from the upper left. If you have scripts that use a previous coordinate system, they will still work correctly. You can also choose to work with a global ruler that provides coordinates across all your artboards, or you can work with local, artboard-specific rulers.
Path join--Join open paths in a single keystroke with objects selected. You no longer need to select endpoints, and you can join more than one path at a time. Simply select two or more open paths and press Command+J (Mac) or Ctrl+J (Windows) to see your paths join into one open path.
Select behind--Use a keyboard shortcut to easily select an individual object located behind other objects. Press Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) when you select the object that's in the back.
Roundtrip editing with Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5 Use Illustrator CS5 for interaction design, now enabled by new Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, available in Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. Develop your ideas and design your interface in Illustrator, creating screen layouts and individual elements such as logos and button graphics. Then open your artwork in Flash Catalyst and add actions and interactive components there--without writing code.
After you've added interactivity to your designs, you can still make edits and design changes directly within Illustrator. From Flash Catalyst, simply choose Modify > Edit In Adobe Illustrator CS5 and the artwork opens, ready to edit, in Illustrator. For example, you can edit the look of interactive button states in Illustrator while seeing that the structure you added in Flash Catalyst is maintained.
Resolution-independent effects See raster effects such as drop shadows, blurs, and textures maintain a consistent appearance across media. Have you ever found that your artwork mysteriously loses its smooth, high-quality look when you publish? You can now create work for different types of output and know that popular raster effects maintain an ideal appearance no matter how your resolution settings change--from print to web to video. You can even go up to a higher resolution. Work quickly and efficiently with low-resolution artwork and then scale up when you're ready to go to a finished output such as high-quality print.
Integration with Adobe CS Review Illustrator CS5 integrates with Adobe CS Review, one of several new CS Live online services. With Adobe CS Review, you can create and share online reviews for clients and colleagues down the hall or around the world. From within Illustrator CS5, publish a review of your work to the web. Multiple reviewers can then access your review from a browser without any additional software and make comments right in their browser window with easy-to-use annotation tools.
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