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Adobe Illustrator 10 Training Solutions |
For those who have followed my writing career, you'll know that I have focused almost exclusively on CorelDRAW. So now a box of Adobe Illustrator 9 had landed on my review desk. I'm going to gear this review more as a comparison of the two products that highlights Illustrator features that are new and exciting. While I'm not likely to give up CorelDRAW, there is always room for another tool in the toolbox if it provides good value and helps to get projects out the door.
If we look at the basics drawing and editing tools, the products are more or less the same. The interface and terminology are different but making that translation isn't too hard for someone used to the other program. Thus I was able to easily pick up the basics in Illustrator.
One of the most exciting new features is the graphic Styles. Each style can contain one or more of the effects available in Illustrator. With any object selected, you simply double-click on the style to have it applied. But the best part is that the original object, including text, is fully editable at any time. Where editability is taken for granted by CorelDRAW users, it is fairly new to Illustrator. And these styles are certainly a feature that is only available in Illustrator. My only complaint is that so few presets are supplied. At right is an example of a style that turned plain text into something much more interesting with one click.
Layers are certainly not a new feature in illustration software, but Adobe has done some really interesting things with them. One of the neatest is that a thumbnail is displayed in the Layers palette for each layer. This is very similar to the Layers palette in Photoshop. While this is a small change in the user interface, knowing exactly what is on a layer is so much easier by seeing the thumbnail. At left is an example of the Layers palette complete with thumbnails.
Transparency is another feature that comes late in the game to Illustrator. I find the Interactive Transparency tool in CorelDRAW much easier to use, but Illustrator does have some neat tricks up its sleeve. Obviously you can apply transparency to objects. But the big benefit is that it can be applied to groups or layers just as easily. Another plus is that transparency can be applied to spot colors so that they remain spot colors when printed as separations. I must say that filling an object with spot colors is incredibly difficult as you must manually create each spot color you want.
Seeing results on screen that are consistent with your output is extremely important. Illustrator 9 has taken several steps to improve this situation. The most innovative is the pixel preview mode. In other vector packages you can zoom in all you want, but the graphics still look perfect. This is great for print output, but not realistic for Web graphics. Illustrator's pixel preview shows you the exact pixels you'll get when a file is output as shown at right. If you zoom in, you still see the same pixels are just more evident. This continues with the Save for Web export filter. If you've used Photoshop 5.5, this filter will be very familiar. It lets you see optimized views of GIF, JPG and PNG images. You choose the exact settings and then see the results with up to four previews at once. This is great for comparing settings to find out which is best for any particular image. And since it gives an approximate download time, you can see if it will work for your site visitors.
On the print side, overprint preview was added. This setting can be toggled on and off so that you can get an idea of how overprinted outlines and fills will look when printed as shown at left. Since Illustrator is lacking a print preview, this is especially important in deciding whether separations will print correctly.
Another area where Illustrator and Photoshop work well together is with the transparency features. If you bring a PSD file into Illustrator, the layer transparency is not only shown in Illustrator but also editable. And it works the same in reverse. This is really handy if you didn't quite get the transparency exactly right in one program. Not only does the transparency come across, but also the merge modes.
One more major feature was added to aid in Web design. You can now export directly from Illustrator to both SWF (Macromedia Flash) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) formats. SWF is the most popular format today for vector graphics on the Web and SVG could be the future format. Add these two formats to the great support for Adobe's own PDF format and Illustrator has all the major Web formats covered.
In working with Illustrator, I found the interface to be very difficult to understand. The main reason was the lack of CorelDRAW's Property Bar. This is a context sensitive toolbar that almost always has the needed button or drop-down list available. Without this in Illustrator, I was constantly searching for the settings I needed. I've got to admit that I did really like the palettes much more than CorelDRAW's Dockers. Palettes are so much smaller while providing the same functionality. And the fact that they automatically snap to one another was really nice.
So what's the final verdict? I really liked a lot of the new features and many of them are unique to Illustrator. But I also found a bunch of features that just don't exist in Illustrator. That combined with the confusing interface left me wanting to get back to good old CorelDRAW.
Do you have a product you would like to have reviewed? Send press releases to reviews@unleash.com.
Foster D. Coburn III has written six best-selling books on graphics software and is currently the Webmaster of the popular Graphics Unleashed Web site.
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CorelDRAW X6 Font List · CorelDRAW X5 Font List · CorelDRAW X4 Font List · The Terms of Adobe Photoshop and Corel PHOTO-PAINT · CorelDRAW X3 Font List · Cropping and Rotating Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · The Magic of Color Styles · CorelDRAW's Find and Replace Wizard · Shorten Your Design Time with Templates · CorelDRAW's Multi-Faceted Eyedropper Tool · CorelDRAW and Special Characters · The Easy Way to Create Calendars in CorelDRAW · The Wide World of Labels in CorelDRAW · Including Variable Data with Print Merge · Resaving, Resizing & Resampling Files in Corel PHOTO-PAINT · Creating Your Own Fonts in CorelDRAW · The Evils of Using JPEG Files · Speeding Up CorelDRAW 11 and Windows XP · Symbols and Imposition · The Easiest Way to Recreate Logos · A Few Guidelines to Follow · Square Corners Can Be Sticky -- Rounding Corners in CorelDRAW · Creating Complex Shapes Easily with CorelDRAW · Identifying the Mystery Font · Two Ways to Create a Split Front Design · Last Word in Font Management · Calibrating Your Printed Colors with a Color Chart · Graphics Computing in 2001 · Hottest R.A.V.E. In Town · Get the Red Out of Eyes · Secrets of Color Management · Dressing Up Your PDF Files · How Adobe Acrobat Can Make Life Simpler · Why You Want PDF in Your Workflow · Converting a Scanned Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Designing 360 Degrees · Customizing Your Interface in CorelDRAW 8.0 · Fitting Text to a Path · Creating Cool Graphs Without a Spreadsheet · From CorelDRAW to Macromedia Flash, A Simple Example · Getting Rid of That Darned White Box · Converting a Bitmap Logo to Vector in CorelDRAW · Finding Clipart with ROMCAT
Xara Xtreme Pro 5.0
Serif WebPlus X2
Xara Web Designer 5.0
Xara Xtreme Pro 4.1
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional
Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom Digital Camera
Procreate KnockOut 2
Hemera Photo Objects Volume I and II
Wildform SWfx
Macromedia Fontographer 4.1 and FontLab 4
Caligari iSpace v1.5
Xara X
Macromedia Fireworks 4
Web Site Design Made Easy
Alien Skin Eye Candy 4000
Swish 1.51
Macromedia Flash 5
Corel KPT 6
Dreamweaver Ultradev
1st Page 2000
Adobe Illustrator 9
Corel KnockOut v1.5
Xara 3D 4
Cool 3D 3
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