With Adobe® Creative Suite® 4, you can keep the creativity flowing, express ideas consistently across multiple media, and easily share your work with clients and fellow creatives. Take a closer look at the top five features of new Creative Suite 4:

1) InDesign to SWF/Flash
Just what designers have been waiting for. Now you can leverage your colour, layout and type skills into interactive, online output. CS4 delivers real cross-media functionality, allowing you streamlined delivery across media. Build rich, interactive documents by exporting an InDesign layout and adding animation in Flash CS4 Professional. Prototype websites by opening Photoshop or Illustrator mockups in Fireworks CS4, and then producing in Flash CS4 Professional and Dreamweaver CS4.

2) Flash Animation
Whether you are new to Flash or an ActionScript pro, the new Flash animation timeline model in Adobe CS4 makes Flash fun. Allowing you to add in motion presets and 3D controls, Flash CS4 is a huge leap ahead.

3) Photoshop to Fireworks to Dreamweaver
Now you can bitmap to code, move pixels to CSS or add images to AIR applications, easily, accurately and fast.

4) Video: Power and Revenue
Adobe CS4 brings you the "never rendering story": move back and forth between Premiere Pro, After Effects, Soundbooth and Encore, without needing to render. You can also make your videos searchable using the new Speech Search technology in Adobe Premiere Pro and Soundbooth that turns spoken dialogue into XMP metadata.

5) Photoshop's Content Aware Scaling
Photoshop CS4 solves hours of work with one menu command. Content Aware Scaling (CAS) means you can interactively resize and reshape images without changing the general content and makeup of the image. You can push and pull different image parts around the canvas and have Photoshop fill in the gaps. The image is scaled by keeping detailed areas the same, and up or downsizing the parts of the photo that are featured less.

Beta Testers - What they have to say about the new Adobe Creative Suite 4

With thousands of beta downloads of the new Adobe Creative Suite 4, plenty of designers, photographers, web developers, and film production artists have been taking sneak peaks at what's on offer. Plugged In caught up with a few Australian beta testers and asked for their feedback.

Motion Graphics: John Dickinson, director, Motionworks. "With CS4 Adobe has again raised the bar by taking the software to a new level of usability. The integration between the suite applications is now tighter than ever. "My work involves projects that have many layers and until After Effects CS4, navigating large projects wasn't straightforward. The new mini-flowchart and search features in AE CS4 will streamline my workflow and save me time.

"Having Mocha AE included with After Effects means that AE now has an efficient and powerful solution for motion tracking. The speech search feature in Premiere Pro certainly surprised me, seeing the keywords in the transcribed text highlight whilst the vision plays back is amazing."

Photography: Philip Andrews, Photographer.
With more power, better feature sets and tighter integration between all the key players, the photographer's CS4 workflow is not just Photoshop centric one but rather a shared task between Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge and Photoshop.

When first opening CS4 you may think that the biggest changes are purely cosmetic, but after playing with the program for a while you realise Photoshop CS4 heralds one of the most significant changes to the way that we edit and enhance photos in the life of the product.

In previous version, editing images was a series of steps that required the user navigate a path through a series of adjustment dialogues, saving their changes along the way. CS4 changes this whole approach. Now, with the addition of the Adjustments and Masks panels image editing becomes a non-stop affair. You can switch between all the adjustment types (Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation etc.) grouped in the Adjustments panel without the need to first commit your changes. Each adjustment is dynamically and non-destructively applied to the photo, providing a 'tweak and tweak again' workflow where image makers can combine a range of changes gradually adjusting each with reference to their combined effect.

Adding to the new look and feel is the way that Photoshop CS4 makes use of the awesome power of the modern graphics card to help display pixels on screen. Users with a recently released graphics card containing at least 256Mb of onboard memory and a supported GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) will be able to take advantage of the changes which include:

• Fluid Canvas Rotation - the option to rotate the canvas non-destructively to any angle using the new Rotate View tool from the
• Smooth Accurate Pan and Zoom functions - Unlike previous versions where certain magnification values produced less than optimal previews on screen, CS4 always presents your image crisply and accurately. Yes, this is irrespective of zoom and rotation settings and available right up to pixel level (3200%).
• Animated Zoom and Toss functions - Because of the extra power gained from leveraging the processing abilities of the GPU you can now 'toss' the enlarged image around the screen with the Hand tool in an animated panning motion. Zoom changes are animated with the photo sliding and then snapping into place