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Adobe Creative Suite CS4 - Design Premium - part 8 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2009

'Illustrator is complex with more panels than Photoshop. The similarities in the interface make it easy to follow your way around but you still need to know which tools do what task!'

One feature of Illustrator that is routinely useful is 'Live Trace' with which you can create vector logos from poor quality or web-sized originals. Using the low resolution image as a guide you can rapidly redraw a logo. We have used it commercially for advertisements, logos for adding to images and schools photography (eg school crest on each image, the schools never have a vector logo in our experience!) - once you are skilled in the art it is surprising how often you are called upon to use it!

Kuler Support

We have spoken of Kuler before. For newer readers, it is a way of creating a 5-colour palette of harmonised tones according to a selectable choice of harmony rules. It was originally web-based (and still is) but the basic functionality has been built in to CS4. However if you still need some inspiration from the colour palettes of others, the software will take you straight to the Kuler website and you can keyword search for your chosen theme.

Although it is a great tool for graphic designers you can also bring it into play as a photographer if you are designing wedding albums or even posters for your work. The only downside we can see is that the software-based version is limited to RGB. Designers wish to use CMYK and you have to go off to the web to get the 'generate' facility that allows you to specify your colour in CMYK. Failing that you can also go to either InDesign or Illustrator and perform more sophisticated colour control.

However, at Professional Imagemaker we often drop into Photoshop to do page backdrops with tricky ornamentation (eg drop shadows and fancy blends) and so it would have been nice to have the colour-editing strength in Photoshop for when we need to add correctly coloured page furniture.

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1st Published 01/02/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:50:53

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Adobe Creative Suite CS4 - Design Premium - part 8 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11