Roger Kroll began the meeting with a brief review of graphic design products at MacWorld Expo 2004 in San Francisco. He lamented about how few new graphic design products there were at this show. MIA with booths this year was Corel who had a large presence at MWSF 2003, but were purchased by the Vector Capital Group and Microsoft in August and DiamondSoft who’s fabulous font management program, FontReserve was purchased by Extensis in June. The new product he found most intriguing was Imagaro Z distributed in the US by Procut-Plus located in Portland, Oregon. The product is still in Beta, so Procut-Plus supplied Roger with 40 screen shots that comprehensively went through the steps to use the program. Imagaro Z is a scanning and auto trace application for OS X that creates vector images and text from a scanned image. You start with an image that you would like to vectorize. It can even be a low-resolution jpeg image. There are a variety of tools that help you vectorize your image. There is convert to square or circle for shapes that need that characteristic. There is copy shape to object that allows you to create one accurate object, they used a star, and copy the correct star by simply selecting the objects you need to change. There are also tools that allow you to split an object or weld an object. The most exciting part of Imagaro Z is the FontEye technology. With this you type the letters in the image you are trying to match. Amazingly, the typeface search engine can even recognize the font if the text has been stretched or compressed. And the best part is that you can use the font to get perfectly traced texts for use in other graphics software. If the text is stretched or compressed, it is virtually impossible to identify a font. Not so, with Imagaro Z. You can just as easily search through all typefaces and let the software compress and stretch the text. The stretch or compression rate is calculated so that you can reproduce new texts with the same look. The font recognition tool is great when you are working with auto tracing, the software can replace scanned or imported texts with a perfect trace based on the right typeface. You must naturally own the font to be able to use it, but the software also lists the fonts and their manufacturer that are close to the actual trace. All in all, it is a very promising product.

The remainder of the program was spent going over new features in the Adobe Creative Suite. Roger started off with Illustrator and showed off the new 3-D feature that is very slick. It is reminiscent to the discontinued stand alone product, Adobe Dimensions and works very swiftly in Illustrator CS. Roger, who had been using Illustrator CS for a short time on current projects had not figured out how to save Illustrator documents for backwards compatibility since his service bureau only supported Illustrator 10 files. Adobe removed this feature that has always been in the Save As… dialog box and he couldn't figure out where to go to save a pervious Illustrator version. One of the frequent criticisms of InDesign CS is that it won't save to previous versions and he was thinking that Adobe had done the same thing with Illustrator CS. Fortunately, all they did was move it to the File/Export/Illustrator Legacy (ai) or the File/Export/Illustrator Legacy (eps) menu item. Both the Illustrator and eps formats save back to versions 10, 9, 8, and 3.

Photoshop CS was the next program of the Suite that Roger reviewed. The improved File Browser was the first feature reviewed. Roger showed how to easily create a Workspace for wide or landscape viewing of photos and how to create a Workspace that optimizes browsing for long or portrait viewing of photos and switch between the two views when needed. Automate or batch tasks are now accessed through the File Browser as well as remain in the File Menu. A nifty tip Roger shared that he learned from Scott Kelby at MacWorld Expo is you can drag a folder in the Finder to the File Browser icon on the Dock in Photoshop and that folder will open in the File Browser. Another very handy feature in the File Browser is it lists recent folders that have been browsed and you can make favorite folders to quickly navigate back. Roger then used the new Color Replacement Tool that is located with the Healing Brush and Patch Tool. He took a red sweater, and with little effort transformed it to green using the Color Replacement Tool. When he made some mistakes, he used the History Brush to bring back the original color in the damaged areas. Next on the agenda was Type on a Path that has been dramatically improved in Photoshop CS. That was followed by a quick demo of the new Shadow/Highlight Adjustment, which does an amazing job of improving the contrast of over-, or underexposed areas of an image while preserving the overall balance of the photo. Roger concluded his Photoshop portion showing off the new Layer Comps feature. This allows more efficient design variations by saving different combinations of layers within the same file. In order to use Layer Comps, layer changes need to be on different layers. For example if you have a layer comp where you add green text, if you change the text on this layer to red, it will change on the Layer Comp, so you need to create a duplicate layer first, change it, Create a new Layer Comp to have it saved in the Layer Comp Palette. There are 3 scripts (File Menu>Scripts) that come with Photoshop CS that convert Layer Comps into Files, PDF’s and a Web Photo Gallery. In Layer Comps to Files, you have your choice of jpeg, psd, tif, pdf, targa, and bmp. The PDF option in Scripts is much more limited than the File>Automate>PDF Presentation feature. It allows you to have Slide Show Options on Advance Every x Seconds and to Loop after last page, but no Transitions or PDF Security as in PDF Presentation. The Web Photo Gallery Script is also more limited, but does make a Simple Style Web Gallery.

Roger concluded the meeting with a demo of his favorite new features in InDesign CS. One of his favorites is Workspace which functions the same as the feature introduced in Photoshop 7. He said he would be truly happy when they also implement Workspace in a future version of Illustrator because of the vast array of palettes. Speaking of palettes, new in InDesign CS are collapsible palettes, as are used in InCopy and GoLive. Now, when you drag a palette to the right or left edge of your monitor, it turns into a side tab and collapses to the edge. Clicking a collapsed palette tab opens it, so you can select options. Clicking it again tucks it out of sight along the monitor edge. You can collapse palettes in groups that suit your work. Also new to InDesign CS is a Control Palette which is like the dock in Photoshop or the Measurement Palette in Quark, but on steroids. Available on the Palette while working with text are all Character and Paragraph attributes including style sheets, Drop Caps, Columns & more. When working with objects, available on the Control palette are Transform, Align, Scaling, Skew, Stroke & more. If you are editing a Table, those features are available on the Control palette. Another new productivity booster available in InDesign CS is the Story Editor, copied and improved from PageMaker. Designed to function like a word processor within InDesign CS, the Story Editor offers an efficient new way to edit stories that run across several text frames or across multiple pages. When you open a story in the Story Editor, you can add, edit, or delete text as quickly as you can type—a real timesaver when you’re entering lengthy or complicated edits. The Story Editor provides an interactive view of the text in your InDesign CS layout: any changes you enter in Story Editor appear in the layout as you type, so copyfitting text is extremely efficient. Another new feature Roger showed was the Separations Preview palette. Just as the name implies, the Separations Preview palette enables print professionals—as well as designers and production artists—to preview and evaluate spot and process color separations onscreen. More importantly, it helps print professionals identify and prevent costly mistakes before they appear in film or on press. The final new feature that Roger touched on is the new nested styles in InDesign CS. Nested Styles is a text-styling innovation that takes the pain out complicated text formatting. With InDesign CS, you can nest one or more character style into a paragraph style to apply both styles at one time. A very powerful feature that is not available in any other program.

There was a raffle held at the end of the meeting where the winner got to choose between an educational version from the just updated Adobe line of Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2, GoLive 6, and Acrobat 6 Professional. Also part of the raffle were a couple of T-shirts from MacWorld Expo. The winner chose Photoshop and was very delighted.