Top 5 Picks of the New Adobe CS5

Adobe’s new CS5 has been out a few months and you may or may not have upgraded yet. I have found a good video demonstration by Terry White that highlights some of the new features. Terry does a great job of showing how some of the new features work. I picked and highlighted my top 5 favorite features to give you a taste of what’s new.

1. Photoshop: Refine Selection Tool and Content-Aware Fill

It has been very time consuming and cumbersome to get a clean edge in the past when selecting an object you want to isolate and/or move or extract from a image file. Now you can do a quick selection of an object. With the new refine edge command turned on, Photoshop can detect the edges and refine your selection to pick up the details that were missed. You can then output this selection into a new layer within the refine selection. Then when you extract an image, you can select content-aware fill and Photoshop now calculates what most likely would be behind the object and fills in the void. This makes it faster and easier when using the Healing brush for retouching within an image. When you want to remove unwanted parts of your image but you do not want it to be detected, this tool works like magic!

2. Photoshop: Puppet Warp

After you have an isolated image, you can select the puppet warp and pinpoint the areas where you want to adjust the angle (like a puppet..thus the name) and move without affecting the rest of the image. No more cloning, moving and all the things we had to do before to get this effect. Its a fun tool that quickly helps you get the exact positioning of elements within a photograph after it was taken; Photoshop’s own “Bend them like Beckhem” kick.

3. Illustrator: Perspective Drawing Tools

Now you can leave the perspective to the computer to keep. When the perspective-drawing grid is selected, you can adjust this to the size, angle and vanishing points you want. Then when you draw objects or bring in objects, they will automatically adjust in perspective if the perspective-move tool within the panel that is selected.

4. InDesign: Multiple Page Size

This is the feature we have all dreamed about and now we’ve got it. You can now create multiple pages (on the same plane) with different dimensions, so all those flaps and gate-folds can be created on the same plane. This can help you when you are designing to get the full view affect.

5. InDesign: Interactive Document Creation

This has got to be my all-time favorite new feature in CS5. Love it. You can be a designer (not a programmer) and develop an interactive file that can be saved as a SWF file and uploaded on a browser. This interactive document can be created 100% within InDesign. You can preview and flip through it to test the interactivity. You can add sound, animations, roll overs, slide shows and even add flash video directly into the document (with the same ease as you would adding a photoshop file) all without writing one line of code. Yahoo!!! This feature alone makes the new CS5 exciting for me.

Check out the Terry White’s video demos. If you have not upgraded yet, this may convince you to do so.

What do you think about the new CS5?