After Effects CS4 now allows you to search your timeline for different plugins, so that you can much more readily adjust things.
After Effects CS4 now has a whole slew of new ways to easily keep track of things. The 3D cameras in After Effects can now be mapped directly to your different mouse buttons, so you can rotate around in 3D space much easier. (Just like most designated 3D programs.) There’s a nesting navigator that’s been added to After Effects which allows you to navigate through multiple precomposed elements in a single timeline. (For all of us who nest timelines incessantly, this is a real timesaver. There’s actually a similar feature in the new Dreamweaver CS4 for .CSS tags, as well.) Another useful feature in AE CS4 is the ability to search for plugins and filters that have been APPLIED to your layers. This is an amazingly efficient way to find out where exactly you applied Trapcode’s Starshine or the AE Glow effect so you can quickly adjust it! Another great new streamlined ability is that After Effects can now generate a brand new file-type called .XFL, which Flash can import directly. This allows you to import the timeline you create in After Effects directly into Flash, minimizing the amount of animation you have to do in Flash. (This setup behaves very similarly to the 3rd party plugin AutomaticDuck, which converts timelines between FCP to After Effects.)
Photoshop CS4 Extended now has far more ability to create video and to work with 3D elements. The car in this image had a simple Illustrator logo dropped on it and the program laid it seamlessly on the top of the car..
All told, Photoshop probably got the most polishing in this release, as all of the things that were introduced in CS3 Extended, like video and 3D, were polished and corrected. For example, in CS3 Extended, you could paint on textures which were laid on 3D models through a complex series of steps. Now, you can paint directly on the textures in 3D space on the object. Additionally, you can drop logos and illustrations directly onto the surface of 3D objects, which can be a great way to add decals to cars and the like. Once you like your 3D model, you can now export out the 3D model as an .OBJ or the industry standard COLLADA format, an ability that CS3 did not have. Additionally, you can animate the model as video inside of Photoshop CS4 and export it out as a Quicktime without having to go into After Effects! Other improvements occur in the way you create adjustment layers, by creating a simpler panel on the right hand side that makes creating adjustment layers much more streamlined.
Another impressive feature in Photoshop CS4 is the ability to take a stack of pictures, like this photo of books, and have it look for all parts that are in focus and clear. Once it has this information, it can combine them to make one crystal-clear image.
Finally, in the last release, you could stack images together and Photoshop could remove or augment certain elements. (The notable example of this involved a video stream from the Golden Gate bridge where Photoshop CS3 combined a stack of still captures and removed all “non-omnipresent” objects. With essentially one set of commands, all the cars and people on the bridge vanished.) Well, in CS4, they’ve refined that ability to even deal with elements that are out of focus. Most of us use our high resolution cameras for a variety of purposes and we tend to use the burst feature to hopefully get one picture that’s not blurred by our own shakiness. However, sometimes, you’ll get 10 pictures that all have one element blurred or out of focus. Well, you can now import that stack in Photoshop and Photoshop will find all the common parts and combine them into a single picture that is in focus and bright enough to easily see. (I’ve included a picture that shows how a stack of unusable images of a stack of books has been combined to create a stack of books that is completely in focus, with the text easily able to be read.)
