articles/Photoshop/adobecreativeuitecs4-page5
by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2009
Bird's Eye View
This is a simple but very effective new feature. If you are working at high zoom magnification on an image and wish to move to another part of the image you hold down the H key (which switches you to the Grabber Tool as long as you are not editing text). Then you mouse click which instantly flies you high above the image to give you the entire view. You then drag the rectangular box to the new position, let the mouse click off and instantly you are at the same high zoom magnification on the new area. It does not sound much as this little passage of writing, but is a dream to use!
Flick panning is also possible which makes moving about straightforward - you click the mouse down and flick the image, which keeps moving in the direction of the flick. We were able to throw a 600MB image around like a web image. It is very akin to working an iPhone for those who are up to speed on such things.
Arrange Documents
We agonised for some time about how useful this feature would be if you were designing a wedding album page. It allows you to arrange a bunch of images on-screen in a pre-set layout and includes some asymmetrical arrangements, such as four small views and one large one. However, for album design what you really need is a large, landscape, double-page spread at the bottom and a bunch of smaller satellite images above, for dragging and placing. An ability, therefore, to make your own, bespoke, Arrange Documents layouts would be a real boon. It is the kind of thing that some third-party geeks might even be working on already (anybody out there?).
Content Aware Scaling
This is very clever technology that has been paraded by the various pundits from within and without Adobe. As so often happens with the whiz bang show-stoppers, the reality is slightly less impressive. Our first attempt was to take Doug Gordon's shot, an image we needed to stretch across a double-page spread, as an album backdrop.
The image was nicely extended, leaving the middle figures in proportion but the edge figures were cranked all over the place - not good then! We tried a different tack on Judy Horgan's shot of the mother and children. Here we performed a content-aware scaling on selections either side of the group, in two bites. This worked well.
Overall then this feature is not quite as good as the featured examples in the various shows, but it remains very clever and will certainly be of great use if, for example, you have to extend an image to fit a page format (something we often have to do on our cover shots). There is a good QuickTime movie on the subject by Russell Brown. In it he shortens a VW Camper to Smartcar length and keeps the wheels round - very amusing as you might expect from Russell.
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