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 Adobe Illustrator CS4 Videos |
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Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tutorial Center - Free Video Tutorials
This page features free Illustrator CS4 Tutorials for CS4.
If you own Illustrator CS4 you can go through this collection, but if you have an earlier version of Illustrator, these tutorials may include features you might not have. To upgrade visit the Adobe Online Store. If you are a student get super savings at the Adobe Education Store. You can also try a free trial download. Get all your Illustrator & Creative Suite upgrade options at the Adobe Store.
Below are links to our free Illustrator CS4 video tutorials, Illustrator CS4 tips and tricks. Fireworks CS4 Beta has been released. Read all about the Fireworks Beta on our Free Illustrator Trial Download page.
Free Illustrator CS4 Videos From lynda.com
We have some great free Illustrator CS4 video tutorials for you from lynda.com. Both of these are high quality videos that will show you some of the amazing new features in Adobe Illustrator CS4.
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Multiple Artboards
Mordy Golding walks through one the most anticipated new features in Illustrator CS4, multiple artboards. With multiple artboards, you can keep related, but separate and even differently sized artwork together in a single document. Mordy shows you how to create a document with multiple artboards from scratch, how to add, edit, and delete artboards within the document’s canvas using the new Artboard tool, and some handy shortcuts for navigating an Illustrator document with multiple artboards.
Watch the Multiple Artboards - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Enhanced Clipping Masks
Mordy Golding examines the new clipping mask behavior in Illustrator CS4. The new un-selectable state of the clipping mask makes it easier to work with your transformed artwork. Review how to create a mask from scratch and then learn how you can also modify the mask in the new Isolation Mode.
Watch the Enhanced CLipping Masks - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Adobe Illustrator Fundamentals: Drawing With Vectors - Illustrator Pen Tool Tutorial
This free Illustrator tutorial — Adobe Illustrator Fundamentals: Drawing with Vectors — is adapted from Adobe CS4 Web Workflows: Building Websites with Adobe Creative Suite 4 By Joseph W. Lowery
If you had to choose one tool that defined Adobe Illustrator, it would undoubtedly be the Pen tool. Illustrator is known primarily for its ability to produce high-quality illustrations, reproducible at any resolution. The vector paths created by the Pen tool are completely flexible and, because they are vectors rather than pixels, never degrade no matter the resolution. Unfortunately, the Pen tool is one of the hardest to master; however, with a bit of practice, you’ll find yourself beginning to draw the most sophisticated of shapes.
One technique for learning how to use the Pen tool stems from a common early childhood practice: tracing. Chances are you’re like me and millions of other children who spent hours outlining their favorite animal, flower, or character with a carefully selected crayon—perhaps, like me, with your tongue stuck out of the side of your mouth in deep concentration. In the upcoming exercise, you’ll have an opportunity to relive those days, but with the Illustrator Pen tool instead of a crayon: Whether your tongue sneaks out or not is up to you.
1- Open Adobe Illustrator and, from the Workspace Switcher, make sure Essentials is chosen. Almost all the available workspaces keep the tools you’ll need in this exercise front and center, but the Essentials option is the default.
2 - Download the bird.jpg file and open it.
Note: While it is true that Illustrator has a very robust tracing feature called Live Trace, using it won’t give you the practice you’ll need to master the Pen tool. However, if you’d like to experiment with this feature, select the JPEG image and, from the Options bar, click Live Trace. There are a good number of presets from which to choose on the left side of the Live Trace Options bar that can give you a sense of what’s possible. READ FULL TUTORIAL...
Adobe Illustrator CS4 & CS4 Design Premium- Best Deals From Adobe
Design quickly and confidently with Adobe Illustrator CS4 software. Sophisticated tools for drawing and typography, along with advanced color controls and creative effects, provide a comprehensive vector graphics environment.
Explore more efficient ways of working with multiple artboards, a Blob Brush tool for intuitive vector painting, and transparency in gradients with on-object controls. Stay ahead of the pace of change — equip yourself with precisely the tools you need for today’s print, web, interactive, motion, and mobile content design.
You can design with multiple artboards and create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. Display the artboards any way you want — overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Learn more on our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Illustrator CS4 Free Trial Download Page.
Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - Complete CS4 Bundle
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment. Also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe InDesign CS4, plus Adobe Fireworks CS4.
Buy now or download the free trial at the Adobe USA Store, or buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Free Fireworks CS4 Video - New Adobe Fireworks CS4 Interface
Fireworks CS4 now shares a common interface with the rest of the Creative Suite, which makes it easier to move from application to application. Jim Babbage explores the updated Property inspector, the new panel layout and how to create and save custom workspaces.
Watch the New Adobe Fireworks CS4 Interface Video (link opens a new window)
Free Fireworks CS4 Video - Prototyping A Web Design
Fireworks can play an important role in website production. In this movie, Jim Babbage explores new layout feature enhancements added to Fireworks CS4, including pixel-precise guides, the new smart guides, tooltips, which contain X and Y coordinates to help you place elements in your design. He also reviews changes to the Pages panel, the new ability to wrap text using the Text In Path feature and lastly, using symbols and nested symbols in your web design.
Watch the Prototyping A Web Design - Fireworks CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Free Adobe Illustrator CS4 How-To Guides
Adobe has posted some nice free resources for Illustrator CS4 created by leading designers. The "Illustrator how-to guides" explore new features in Adobe Illustrator CS4. Here are the 6 how-to guides that are posted at the moment.
Local Fare by Nick Zegel
His inspiration for "Local Fare": "While art directing an upcoming surfing film in South America and the Caribbean, I became attracted to the vibrant colors and the hand-painted, weathered signs there."
Shell City by Matt Huynh
His inspiration for "Shell City": "For me, comics are the clearest means of engaging audiences. I use the medium to find surprising ways to connect with audiences, both on a purely visceral level and to challenge conceptions of personal and communal identity."
Living on a Heart Grunge by Dhanank Pambayun
His inspiration for "Living on a Heart Grunge": "These days, my influences include Tim Burton, Mati Klarwein, Raden Said, and Isaac Newton — they all inspire my taste, ideas, and style. I really love mysticism and computer graphics, so I mix them into my artwork."
In the Cradle of the Deep by Jory Dayne
His inspiration for "In the Cradle of the Deep": "I love the lines of comic books and the colors of old Disney cartoons. Sometimes a good idea feels like it's something you have to really fight for, something you have to snatch and run."
Loyal Order of Wormwood by Von Glitschka, Glitschka Studios
His inspiration for "Loyal Order of Wormwood": "I never know when or where inspiration will come. Most often it's captured initially via a simple doodle. Then at a later point in time I take that doodle and flesh it out into a refined sketch. Once my drawing is exactly the way I like it, I simply scan it in and start building my vector art."
Magic Paintbrush by William Chua Tiong Keng
His inspiration for "Magic Paintbrush": "The magic of inspiration is that once it strikes, the idea flows smoothly from the artist's brush. Hence, it is my hope that every artist finds their inspiration easily, and with a wave of their brush, the creation turns out as magnificent as the dragon symbolizes."
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom In A Book
This thorough guide to Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of Adobe's powerful vector drawing
software. Using clear, step-by-step lessons, each chapter contains a project that builds upon the reader's growing knowledge of the software, while review questions at the end of each chapter reinforce key concepts and skills.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book will get you up to speed. Adobe Illustrator CS3 is jam-packed with new features and enhancements, including Live Color, a new environment that enables users to explore, apply, and save custom color configurations; improved integration with Adobe Flash CS3, which ensures that your vector illustrations import effortlessly to Flash with their anchor point positions, layers, and paths intact; a new Eraser tool, which lets users quickly modify objects or create entirely new shapes; a new Crop Area tool, which lets users set up a workspace so that it's automatically primed for the type of media that will display their design, whether it's print, Web, video, or film; new document profiles, newly improved drawing tools and controls, and much more.
Whether you're brand-new to Adobe Illustrator or are looking for a project-based tutorial to familiarize yourself with Illustrator CS3's new features, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book provides you with the key techniques and tips you need to get the most out of this software.
SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
Review by Jennifer Apple
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
So how does it work? Think for a second about the normal flow of work for any web design project. You'll spend a great deal of your time designing the visual appearance of your website in Photoshop, only to turn around and spend even more time working with a code editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive, going through the labor-intensive process of reconstructing these designs for the web.
Not to mention that fact that your creativity is often significantly limited when you're using a design program that's completely separate from the program that's used to prep everything for the web. Not everything that you design will be functional when it's translated to the web, nor will it be compatible with all web browsers period! As such, you'll often find yourself not going that extra creative mile just because you know that your web developer will have to re-work your designs just to make sure that they can be used online.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
SiteGrinder 2 throws all these considerations to the wind. By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
With SiteGrinder 2, you can easily convert Photoshop Type layers into CSS styled web text. Virtually all of Photoshop's character and paragraph styles are supported by CSS, so you'll be able to ensure a smooth transition from workspace to web browser. This includes everything from bold and italic to paragraph spacing and alignment. Even hyperlinking is made easy, as SiteGrinder 2 will automatically turn any HTTP and e-mail URLs into hyperlinks.
Create Buttons, Rollovers, Popups & Menus
Likewise, SiteGrinder 2 will convert image layers to web graphics, generating automatically the HTML needed to display your images on your website exactly where you had positioned them in Photoshop. All the basic elements of any standard website are also easy to achieve by using SiteGrinder 2 with Photoshop, which allows you to create buttons, rollovers, pop-ups and menus. Pretty much all you have to do is tell SiteGrinder 2 about special layers by including "hints" when you name the layers – simply include "button", "rollover" or "pop-up" in your layer name and SiteGrinder 2 will create your preferred interactive feature automatically.
No Tables Here — SiteGrinder Produces Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS
It's also a breeze to create a multipage website from a single Photoshop document, by using a Photoshop tool called the Layer Comps palette. Often overlooked, this incredibly powerful little tool lets you save and name particular document states, including the position and visibility of every layer. To create multiple pages, all you have to do is make the document look the way that you want a page on your site to look, and then make a layer comp — then set up the next page and make another layer comp, and so on. SiteGrinder 2 will then use these comps to figure out what to include on the web pages that it will generate for you. It's as easy as that!
SiteGrinder 2 effectively functions as your very own web technician, who knows all there is to know about CSS, HTML and other complex web formats.
You don't need to spend precious time and money learning the intricacies of web-speak when SiteGrinder 2 can do all this work for you, leaving you with much more time and freedom to explore the limits of your creative potential in the Photoshop world you know so well.
Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - PhotoshopCAFE Video Training
Even if you have no prior experience, Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration by Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE.com fame will teach you what you need to know to create websites that will blow the competition out of the water.
Based on the book Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration, this 2 1/2 hour DVD ROM shows you how to plan, design and launch your website.
Combining the 2 most popular web design tools, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, you’ll learn the workflow that the pros use. In a simple step-by-step, plain English approach, Colin will show you exactly what you need to know. This one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional web sites.
• Set Photoshop preferences
• Create eye candy
• Use repeating patterns
• Make a final design comp
• Create roll-over effects
• Optimize gif, jpg and png
• Define a site in Dreamweaver
• Convert Photoshop designs to HTML
• Understand and use CSS
• Use Dreamweaver templates
• Embed Flash in Dreamweaver
• Improve Search Engine ranking
• Create remote rollovers
• Add Drop-down menus
• And more...
The simple-to-use interface lets you jump to any lesson with complete control over the playback. All the lesson files are included, so you can easily follow along.
About Colin Smith
An award winning designer, best-selling author and trainer, Colin is founder of one of the world's most popular Photoshop resource sites, PhotoshopCAFE.com. Colin is also a regular columnist for Advanced Photoshop, Computer Arts, and Photoshop User Magazine.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Special Discount Price
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - $44.99 - (DVD version)
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Download - $44.99 - (instant download)
