Today, Raffi and Kelly attended an introduction to CS3 at St Pete’s USF campus sponsored by the Tampa Bay AIGA.

First we were told that AIGA members now get a 15% Adobe product discount. So if you were debating about joining, the savings in your software could pay for your membership.

The presenter was Mike Richman, Adobe’s Sr. Solutions Engineer. He helps simplify and update workflow using Adobe products.

New stuff you should know about CS3 if you are an Adobe user:

1. Device Central - preview your files for mobile devices. And select a specific mobile device and the type of lighting situation to preview your image on. (i.e. is the Motorola phone being used outside on a cloudy day?) The preview will actually render at the processing speed appropriate for the mobile device selected. Cool, huh?

2. The presentation on the big screen we were watching was made in Acrobat. How many designers think their favorite design tool is PowerPoint. I’d say zero is a great guess. So why limit yourself to designing presentations on PowerPoint?
Make your presentations look as great as your graphic layouts by creating them in InDesign. Import your PSDs and AI files, export to Acrobat, add video, audio and transitions. And voila! You have a presentation you can present, share easily with a small file size, and lock so your logo and copyright stays on every page.

3. Adobe Bridge: I’m not a big Bridge user. But I have never had it explained to me like this guy did.
Open Bridge first thing in the morning, and all of your files can be previewed and accessed through it. No more operating system File Manager to view files and no more missing thumbnails.
New with CS3 you can view page by page thumbnails of Acrobat files in Bridge, colors and fonts used within documents, rename a batch of photos, group photos in stacks or sort photos by rating (4 stars, 5 stars). You can even create a metadata template to batch copyright images. And if you are going through a bunch of similar photos, use the loop tool to zoom in on a specific area of the image to zoom in.

4. Photoshop: Bye Bye Magic Wand! The new Quick Select toolwill help you make faster and more accurate selections. You can choose to see selection in “dancing ant” format, or masked out format, or other styles. Then use the Refine Edge Component to get the itty bitty details. Nondestructive filters rock. Add a filter to a layer, and it can be made visible or not visible with a click on the little eyeball icon. The filter does not actually harm your pixels!

“No pixels were harmed in the use of this filter,” Mike joked.

Photographers will love the “Auto Align Layers” feature. Let’s say you take a picture of 6 friends. And then another one just in case. Sure enough, Tom’s eyes are closed in photo #1 but Alice looked away in photo #2.

Open photo #1. Put Photo #2 on another layer. Auto align the layers. They will Automatically Align by reading the pixel data. No more arrowing over and scooting layers while zooming in and out. And the auto-align does not leave you with time to run 4 errands. Maybe time enough to hit send/receive once. And badabing badaboom - they are auto-aligned, mask out what you don’t need and you’re done!

Let’s take this one step further… You’re standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. You take 6 photos of the bridge while pivoting for a panoramic shot. You don’t use a tripod and in fact you’re not real careful about the angle of your wrist either.
Open the photos in separate layers. Auto alignthem in pano mode instead of on top each other by ticking one check box. Now normally you would take out your blur tool and clone stamp tool and fix all the seams between photos. Not anymore – now just Auto Blend the layers and you have time for about 2 sips of cocoa before they are super duper.

The Vanishing point tool in Photoshop is no longer limited to 90 degree angles.

5. Illustrator – Live trace has a new feature called “ignore white”, so if you are tracing a line drawing on a white background, the white will be dumped out and the image will have a transparent background.

The new Color Guide lets you select a color an then shows warm and cool variations of the same color and matching colors all the way around the color wheel.

Live color lets you edit a color pallette on a color wheel, and then change your color mode to 1-color or 2-color, etc on the fly and it will replace the colors throughout your document.

You can also import color palettes from Kuler (labs.adobe.com – under technologies).

If you have a symbol repeated throughout your file you can edit that symbol in “isolation” mode, and when you go back to viewing the full image that symbol is changed throughout the file.

6. Flash: .AI layers can be imported by selecting the AI file you want to import and then selecting specific layers in the new, huge dialogue box. You can customize how the layers are brought into Flash, can keep text editable or bring it in outlined and ready for animation. This does not modify your original .ai file and takes moments instead of 10s of minutes to import.

The new Flash import .ai dialogue box.

7. InDesign: Multi File Place is what Raffi was most excited about. It allows you to select multiple files to place at once. After selected, the document has a small thumbnail of the first image to be placed, and in parenthesis tells you how many others are waiting to be placed. Your arrow keys let you select which image to place, and then click and move on to the next image to place.

This time saving technique prompted the Adobe rep to say, “Our goal is to allow you to go home early every day.”

The new transparency palette allows you to take a text box, lower the opacity of the background color, and maintain the opacity level of the text separately!! The transparency palette is part of an effects palette that includes Photoshop favorites such as bevel, emboss, drop shadow, feather, satin, etc. so you can apply your favorite effects in InDesign to shapes and text boxes instead of drawing text boxes as an AI or PSD first and editing them in another program.

Table Styles allow you to save a specific style for a table and with a click change colors and fonts throughout the table.

Bullets and Numbering has a level 1 and level 2 option, so you can create an outline-like numbering system with headers of 1.2.3. and subheaders of a.b.c. This is also great for creating multiple-choice quizzes!

8. Dreamweaver: an updated browser check lets you view your webpage in multiple browsers without actually loading multiple browsers. GoLive 9 was just released, but not as part of the Creative Suite package, and our presenter encouraged those with a future in web design to learn Dreamweaver.

Kelly wanted to win some free CS3!

Another thing that excited me about the presentation was that the Adobe rep wrote down people’s questions to take back to his staff. They also took our evaluations of the session and drew one winner of a free CS3 package. (We didn’t win.)

Thank you AIGA for having this in St Pete and for it being free!

For student pricing on CS3, visit adobe.com/education.

For help with adobe software you can email our staff or we encourage you to visit the forum on adobe.com for answers from experts and your peer designers.

If you’re like me, you’ve got an ever increasing number of passwords to keep track of for online accounts. There’s online banking, shopping sites like Amazon and Ebay, forums, webmail accounts…the list goes on and on.

Now, there’s a new online alternative to keeping track of all these accounts. IDProtectU, an online password manager, stores all of your internet accounts in one place, protected by one username and password combination. At first, this seems pretty dangerous, but IDProtectU takes several security precautions to make sure its clients’ account information is safe.

Access to IDProtectU.com is via a single username and two separate passwords. Once into your account, you see a list of all of your internet accounts. You have the option of changing your usernames and passwords, or simply viewing them. The interesting part of the interface, however, is its legitimate use of pop-ups. For a given internet account, you have the option of clicking an “open” button that opens the account’s website (bankofamerica.com, for instance) in a new web browser, with a small pop-up window containing your login information next to it. You can view your login information directly in this pop-up while you type it in on the site. You can then manually close the window with your login information, or allow it to automatically close after a pre-determined amount of time (which you have control over).

Overall, IDProtectU is quite easy to use and much more convenient than other options that are stored on your hard drive because it can be accessed from anywhere. The price is right too. Monthly use of IDProtectU starts at $1.59.