at the iHubNairobi

Every FOSS allied geek has his/her cryptonite. Mine caught up with me a week ago when I had to indulge in the forbidden drink, ‘wine-doors’. Since I went *nix about five years ago, I’ve managed to do almost anything under the sun comfortably under Linux except, yeah right, design. Gimp is the only software that has not really filled that void. So when my graphics designer went AWOL on me last week, I had to get down and dirty with old faithful, Adobe CS3.

Soon after successful presentation of my web templates, Rahim of Elite Degital Solutions invites me to the Adobe CS5 Launch. I coulda sworn they colluding to ring me back into the fold! Hmmm, let’s see.

Highlights of CS5
(you’ll forgive me if some ain’t new, actually the last I was 100% familiar to was Adobe PS6, 0_0 )

Background Content Fill
CS5 Extended takes a big step into the world of 3D, and adds some extra video features, but from a designers point of view I’m focusing on the standard Photoshop CS5 and the most outstanding feature is Content Aware Fill. If you thought the Clone tool was good, and were later impressed with the more advanced Heal tool you’re likely to be blown away by the Content fill options.
This Content feature allows you to paint over any content you don’t want and fill the chosen area with matching pixels automatically sampled from multiple areas around to give an intelligent seamless heal.

Intelligent Edge Selection
The next awesome tool is the refined edge selection options that assists making complex selections. This is just the next best thing since they invented the magic wand. Edge Detection with smart radius does a better job of working out what you’re actually trying to select and with stuff like hair, so it makes the job much easier. Now one thing that’s never worked fo me well, especially in GIMP is getting the magic wand tolerance right. With CS5 it seems so much easier.

Puppet Warp
Next, Puppet Warp a kind of spider web grid thingy, provides an advanced warp on localised element. You can bend and shape pixels as much as you like with this tool using anchor points to fix or move areas. It’s probably more for graphic designers and image compositors, but it may come in useful for photographic projects where some shape shifting is required. Now this got a-bit of a comical reaction from the crowd. I just thought this feature would lend itself very well to Stop-Motion animation.

Indesign, Flash, Web
Now for all-o-yall-CMS-code-o-phobic web designers out there, the seamless intergration of InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver in InDesign CS5 is to die for, they say. I’ll have to try this out to beleive it! Much as I love quick-and-dirty CMS jobs, the ability to dis-assemble the mash-up completely is key to providing so-called ‘low-level’ customization.
Other nifty products to look out for are the Business Catalyst, Adobe Omniture

and for lots more watch Adobe TV.

Now for the Zillion-Zim-Dollar question. How much will it cost me to get it locally? According to Rahim, they are discussing a much friendlier cost for this region than the 2000USD that would buy me 4 net-books/i-pads. We’ll just have to wait and see. Until then…

PS: Other than GIMP, Flash4Linux is also one buggy disappointment in *nix design tools. WINE portability will be one thing to look for in CS5 though.

[sneaking back copy of Wine-doors into virtual reality...]