Key Findings
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For Design Professionals:
- Users can identify and eliminate production-level errors more than twice as fast in CS4 than in previous versions by activating the Live Preflight feature in InDesign® software.
- Multiple artboards in Illustrator® CS4 can help users save almost one-third the time previously needed to make changes to common parameters, like fonts and color, in projects composed of numerous design pieces.
- New Smart Guides provide positioning hints including alignment with borders, spacing and angle rotation when one is creating or modifying objects on a page. Creation of a new object and aligning it with two other objects now takes less than half the time it took with CS3.
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For Digital Imaging Professionals:
- Making simple, non-destructive adjustments to an image is more than twice as fast using Adjustment Panels with Photoshop® CS4 than with previous versions.
- Adobe Bridge CS4 increases efficiency in managing a wide variety of files and metadata. The new Review mode can help users review and select images for use twice as fast than with previous releases of the application.
- Open GL support in Photoshop CS4 helps speed up image-navigation features including zooming and panning. Benchmark tests showed that in one month it can save users one hour and 40 minutes compared with CS3.
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For Web Professionals:
- New commands such as Live Preview and Live Code are designed to eliminate time-consuming tasks that can shave hours off of Web development projects each month compared with CS3. Using Live Code versus checking code in the browser to preview a Web page now takes 68 percent less time than CS3.
- With Flash® CS4 and a more streamlined process for creating Motion tweens, Web professionals can create simple animations in one-third of the time than with previous releases.
- Photoshop Smart Objects in Dreamweaver® CS4 allows users to place native, multi-layered Photoshop files in a web page without needing to update images already placed. With three Photoshop round-trips, CS4 users take 33.98 seconds to complete the project, less than half the time it took in previous versions.
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For Video Professionals:
- CS4 users who leverage the new Speech to Text feature in Adobe® Premiere® Pro to search for a specific spoken phrase in a 10-minute video can achieve results in 16.46 seconds. Users of previous versions would have taken almost a minute and a half to get the same results.
- Navigating to a specific layer or effect in a complex After Effects® project containing thousands of layers previously may have taken nearly two minutes versus the previous version. With Quicksearch in After Effects CS4, searches now take 80 percent less time.
- Working with Adobe® OnLocation™ in CS4 revolutionizes tapeless video capture by uploading footage directly to the hard drive of a computer for immediate editing, which eliminates time spent ingesting video from tape. It now takes less than a minute with CS4 versus more than 11 minutes with previous versions of Creative Suite.
