It's a great time to be alive, and being a designer - Adobe has released CS4 and when they toured with a pit stop in Newcastle, fellow designer Maryam and myself could not refuse the invite to come and see what they had to offer! I went to their CS3 tour last year, so I was expecting to be gobsmacked, but my oh my it is definitely their biggest release so far. It's been a good while since Adobe bought Macromedia, and we can really start to see how they integrate so well with each other - even as a designer you can do the most amazing Flash things without writing any Action-Script. I'm a dab hand in CSS and HTML so I don't necessarily mind writing code in a different editor, but for a non-coder like most designers, the integration between Photoshop and Dreamweaver is just outstanding. Perhaps it's a good thing that I was taught mark-up from scratch, by the looks of it people mightn't even bother with that in the future. From my perspective I'd always want to write up my code from scratch, it's much easier to avoid pitfalls that way, and if you do make the occasional mistake it's a lot easier to recover.

Adobe has come a long way. Photoshop, which is where I spend 8 hours a day, has stacks of good stuff in CS4, such as the rotate tool, zoom to pixel grid, and much improved adjustment layers. But one thing which I'd like to point out is the Content-Aware Scaling feature, which does something I never thought I'd see. As designers, we all know how annoying it is when you've defined a certain space for an image that aligns with your text coloumns and everything. The client sends you their image to slot in, but ooops, it's not long enough! Now back in CS3 days you'd have to either crop off bits of the image, or work your magic with the clone tool. Enter: Content-Aware Scaling!

I've got an example image, it's taken years ago at a day trip to Holy Island, which I've made two copies of.

The second image shows how the free transform tool stretches everything out of proportions. The third image, using the new tool in hand, shows that the insignificant bits have been stretched whilst the significant bits stay firm.

I'm sure my friends wouldn't appreciate looking fat and distorted! Magical, eh? And even if the details are too fine for the tool to not scale by default, there's a protect function that let's you protect areas manually.

Also, Adobe Bridge has really made its way under my skin in this new version. I love the Review Mode - it's such a helpful tool for photographers like myself that likes to take hundreds of shots in a day.

Well, we've upgraded here at Orange Bus and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. I'd expect some tutorials on it soonish so watch this space!