Adobe Illustrator CS6 for Mac is a powerful and agile program that gives you all the tools you need to complete any type of graphic design project. Changing Illustrator CS4 artboard orientation I recently received an email from a fellow Mac user asking how you go about changing the orientation of an Adobe Illustrator document once you’ve already created it. Adobe Master Collection CS4 Upgrade with Master Collection CS3.so you'll get the FULL CS4 Master Collection! Adobe has ditched the physical versions to move to the Cloud subscription model.
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If you’re someone who started out with Adobe Illustrator back when it was called Illustrator 88, then you’ve seen lots of changes over 20 years. Illustrator is one of a handful of powerful vector drawing products aimed at graphic artists and illustrators, and it’s always been elegant and production-ready. Even if Adobe has sometimes been slow to add cool new features, you could always count on Illustrator’s stability and its color and output engines to perform well in a professional production environment.
Illustrator, as a high-end professional app, doesn’t really have any competition on the Mac anymore (CorelDraw is Windows-only), which might explain why Adobe is only now getting around to adding some features that the program has needed for years. If you’re a Mac user who needs a vector-based drawing tool, Illustrator is the biggest and best player around, and the new CS4 version is a solid, impressive upgrade that adds some cool new tools.
Multi-page prowess
One of the features that Illustrator has always lacked—incredibly—is the capability to create multi-page documents. Because Adobe has had a strong vested interest in its long-document publishing tools, such as the current flagship, InDesign (), putting multi-page support into Illustrator may have meant flirting dangerously with unwanted overlap in the product line. Still, Adobe finally had to give in to the fact that many illustrators create documents longer than a single page—the front and back of a brochure, for example. InDesign, with its complex copy flow and page management features, is overkill for such simple projects, and it lacks the core drawing tools that illustrators need.
By far the biggest change in this version of Illustrator is the addition of multiple artboards. This feature allows artists to create documents of up to 100 pages in length. However, Adobe’s implementation will be unfamiliar to anyone who is used to other multi-page publishing tools that manage pages for you. In Illustrator, you draw or place numbered rectangular containers right on the workspace. These boards can be dragged around like sheets of paper on a work table, can have any orientation, and can be copied with or without their contents. There is no facility for managing artboards, so the effect is a lot like pages spread around on a desk, with both the convenience of easy access and the potential for disarray. By default, each artboard will print on a separate page, and when exporting an Acrobat () file from Illustrator, each artboard is placed on its own PDF page in its numbered order. Similarly, Flash () files can be generated by exporting all or a range of artboards as individual SWF files.
Many features of the interface, such as alignment tools, and Illustrator’s newly upgraded Smart Guides, have been modified to work within the context of artboards. For example, you have the option of aligning objects relative to one another or to an artboard.
Artboards can be different sizes within a single document, so they can be used as containers for design elements of any size. For example, you can now manipulate and store a poster, a brochure, and a business card in the same Illustrator file. One issue I have with this capability is that there is no separate page setup for individual artboards, so if you do have different size boards in a single file, you can’t create the necessary page setup and printing preferences for each one individually. That means if you have artboards with different printing requirements you’ll need to manage multiple versions of the file for output. I also think the printing preferences could offer more flexibility, such as the ability to print thumbnails or storyboards with captions.
Artboards do not make Illustrator a full-fledged replacement for a desktop publishing package, even for short documents. Though you can flow copy from one artboard to another, there are no document-wide style sheets, and there are no automatic page numbering features, indexing, or multi-page copy fitting tools. (In Artboard Edit mode, each artboard is numbered on the canvas, and if you delete an artboard, the numbering is adjusted accordingly). Still, this is a good solution for illustrators, and it adds a ton of flexibility to the application. Designers can place and manage multiple versions of a single illustration in one document–something that art directors and clients will truly appreciate–and they can easily work on closely related documents within the same workspace, sharing styles and symbols across multiple designs.
Adobe has updated the rest of the CS4 suite to be multi-artboard aware, so you can place multi-page documents into Photoshop (), InDesign, or Flash.
Attack of the Blobs
One problem with older versions of illustrator has been its implementation of brush-based painting. For some time now, Illustrator users have been able to “paint” with brushes that resemble rough ink scrawls, watercolors, and other stylized strokes. However, these paint effects have always been applied one path at a time, with a new path laid down for every stroke of the brush. This approach sometimes results in noisy, chaotic-looking painted areas, instead of smoothly filled forms. The alternative has been to use pen-based drawing tools to arduously manipulate vector outlines, or to draw out a path that defines the boundaries of an object.
Illustrator’s new Blob Brush Tool looks like other brush tools, and responds appropriately to a pressure-sensitive tablet (if you have one) and stroke direction. But rather than stroking each path of your brush with a textured painterly shape, as you lay on strokes, the tool automatically melds any overlapping paths into a single outlined form, no matter how scribbled or chaotic your painting. This lets you paint in an area alternating between large, billowy strokes and small detailed fillets, and end up with a single, solidly filled object that can be re-filled, outlined, and treated with styles, like any vector object. As long as the strokes you’re painting over have the same fill and stroke style as the current brush, Illustrator welds the overlapping surfaces together. This means you can even use the Blob Brush to modify the shape of primitive objects like circles, rectangles, and type outlines.
I had great fun using the tool to add dripping puddles to some Halloween text, and then filling the whole thing with a bloody gradient, for example. This is a huge improvement over other methods of painterly expression in Illustrator. While it may not be the most production-oriented new capability, it’s easily the most immediately satisfying, intuitive, and fun to work with. And if you often work with gradient fills, to define the shading and contours of objects, for example, this feature is a huge time saver.
Passing gradient
Adobe has done much tweaking to streamline Illustrator, making it faster and easier to use. Gradients have received significant attention. You can now use transparency in gradients, so, for example, a sky gradient can fade from purple, to orange, to 100 percent transparent at the bottom to blend with a foreground. (This is another one of those features that’s so useful, it’s hard to imagine why it wasn’t added years ago.)
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There are several places where Adobe has given Illustrator better in-context editing, and editing gradients is one of them. In the past, you could apply a gradient with the Gradient Tool, but it could only be modified in the Gradient panel. Now, if you click on a gradient fill with the Gradient Tool, a widget appears that allows you to modify the gradient right in place on the object. This makes it much easier to blend surfaces in pleasing ways.
Smart Guides have been upgraded to offer more in-context functionality. When you drag objects around on the screen, green guidelines pop up to let you know when an object is aligned to other elements on the page. Smart Guide preferences can be set to make the guides appear during certain operations, such as while transforming objects, and to appear at specified angles of rotation, for example. And Smart Guides are now aware of their location relative to artboards.
Adobe Illustrator Cs4 Mac For SaleDegrees of separation
While Adobe has been a bit slow to add new toys to the Illustrator toolbox, it has compensated by maintaining an efficient, reliable production environment suited to the tasks at hand. This release is no exception. The capability to quickly preview color separations in the new Separations Preview panel is particularly helpful for identifying unwanted spot colors and avoiding costly printing mistakes.
Another powerful performance enhancer is the new ability to manipulate appearance elements within the Appearance panel. For example, you can click on an effect, such as 3D Extrude & Bevel, within the Appearance panel to modify its settings. Complex appearances can take a long time to render, and they may need to be updated with every change to your artwork. In this version of Illustrator, you can hide appearance elements to dramatically improve Illustrator’s performance.
Adobe has also updated the graphic styles functionality in Illustrator, so it’s now much easier to save and apply sets of attributes, such as fill color, stroke style, layering, and graphic effects. These graphic styles make fast work of repeatedly applying effects to multiple objects.
Macworld’s buying advice
Adobe Illustrator CS4 is a time-proven production drawing tool with a clean, efficient interface, and well-thought-out tools that work seamlessly with the rest of the Adobe creative suite. The addition of multi-page capabilities and the Blob Brush Tool make it must-have upgrade.
[Ben Long is a San Francisco-based photographer and writer.]
Now that macOS 10.12 Sierra is available from the Mac App Store, you’re probably wondering whether your Adobe software will work in the new Mac operating system.
With every Mac system upgrade, information about compatibility is often not available on the first day the new system is available, and emerges over time. If you use your Mac to run a business or as a serious hobby, do not upgrade to Sierra until you’re prepared to recover if things don’t work out. (That applies to any operating system upgrade on any device.) Wait until you are confident that all of your software and hardware is compatible, then back up everything, then upgrade. With that in mind, here’s what I know so far about the state of Adobe software in Sierra.
The next section is about the Creative Cloud versions. If you’re looking for information about older versions, jump to:
Official statements and verified reports
The short answer is that the latest updates are the most compatible with Sierra. In most cases that means the CC 2017 versions, which are now available. Install them using the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop application.
Adobe posted a general statement about application compatibility (macOS Sierra (10.12) compatibility FAQ | Creative Cloud), but for now it links to the Photoshop and Lightroom statements below. It also claims that other most Adobe applications do not require updates to be compatible, and that any problems can be reported using the Adobe bug reporting form.
Also new this year, Elements Live: a dynamic channel within the software that's designed to spark creativity and improve user skills. 'Our customers don't always have the time or the know-how to get the results they desire,' said Shanmugh Natarajan, senior director, engineering, core technologies and products at Adobe. Adobe photoshop elements 13 for mac.
This section is updated as new information becomes available.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
According to the system requirements for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC, it requires “macOS 10.12, 10.11, or 10.10” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra. This applies to the most recent version only, which at this time is Lightroom CC 2015.7/6.7 or later.
The Lightroom team posted a more specific Sierra statement (Lightroom and Sierra | macOS 10.12). It says “Adobe recommends that customers update Lightroom to the current version prior to updating macOS 10.12 (Sierra).” It lists a number of compatibility issues, especially with Lightroom 5 and earlier, saying:
In order to provide the best platform for continued innovation, Jive no longer supports Internet Explorer 7. Adobe photoshop cs3 updates for mac. Jive will not function with this version of Internet Explorer.
To avoid these compatibility issues on macOS 10.12 (Sierra):
Earlier, “Lightroom Queen” Victoria Bampton published a blog post with similar findings about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom in Sierra (Lightroom and macOS Sierra Compatibility).
The Tone Curve may be difficult to control in Sierra. (Lightroom 6: Tone curve is Insensitive to MacBook Pro Touch Pad). Adobe said this was fixed in Lightroom 6.8 / CC 2015.8, but there are reports that variations on the problem still exist.
The panel and filmstrip areas may black out at times. This is apparently related to macOS graphics issues. macOS 10.13.2 should fix most of the occurrences, and for other versions the Lightroom team has attempted to work around the problem as much as possible. To best avoid the problem, Adobe says:
…make sure your macOS is updated to at least macOS Sierra 10.12 and at least Lightroom Classic 7.0 or Lightroom 6.13. The best combo to avoid this issue is being on macOS High Sierra 10.13 and Lightroom Classic 7.1 or Lightroom 6.13. The team has worked pretty hard with Apple to get this issue to stop appearing with macOS Sierra 10.12 and macOS High Sierra 10.13. Improvements were made in 10.12 and iterated upon for 10.13.
Adobe Photoshop CC
According to the system requirements for Adobe Photoshop CC 2017, it requires “macOS version 10.12 (Sierra), Mac OS X version 10.11 (El Capitan), or Mac OS X version 10.10 (Yosemite)” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra.
For Adobe Photoshop CC 2015, the Photoshop team posted a document (Photoshop and Sierra | macOS 10.12) which they update with known issues. Most are minor, except that some users have encountered a crash when printing. (Update: Adobe says the Sierra print crash is resolved for some users in macOS 10.12.1, and resolved for all users in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.)
If you find a problem with Lightroom or Photoshop in Sierra, report it at the Photoshop Feedback site. If you run into a problem with other software such as Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, or After Effects, try posting about it in the Adobe Forums.
Adobe InDesign CC
According to the system requirements for Adobe InDesign CC 2017, it requires “Mac OS X 10.10, 10.11 or 10.12” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra.
There is apparently an InDesign CC 2015 startup crash on Sierra when using a RAID with Adobe InDesign CC 2015 (11.4.1). The solution is to roll back to 11.4. The details are in an Adobe Forums post (InDesign crashes after start since Sierra update).
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According to the system requirements for Adobe Illustrator CC 2017, it requires “Mac OS X versions 10.12 (Sierra), 10.11 (El Capitan), or 10.10 (Yosemite)” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC
According to the system requirements for Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017, it requires “Mac OS X v10.10, v10.11 or v10.12” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra. If you’ve been having problems with Apple Metal GPU acceleration, some were resolved in the Premiere Pro CC 2017.0.2 (11.0.2) update.
There have been some long discussion threads about Premiere Pro issues in Sierra on the Adobe Premiere Pro user forum. Probably the biggest verified problem is an issue related to automatic graphics switching in Premiere Pro on the 2016 MacBook Pro, which runs only Sierra or later. That specific issue turned out to be a macOS bug, fixed by Apple as mentioned in their release notes for macOS Sierra 10.12.3. If you still experience GPU-related problems, Adobe is asking users to report them so that they can be fixed.
I haven’t seen an Adobe statement about Sierra compatibility for Premiere Pro CC 2015.
Adobe After Effects
According to the system requirements for Adobe After Effects CC 2017, it requires “macOS X versions 10.10 (Yosemite), 10.11 (El Capitan), or 10.12 (Sierra)” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra.
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
According to the system requirements for Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, it requires “Mac OS X v10.9, 10.10, 10.11, or 10.12” so it claims to be compatible with Sierra.
Adobe PDF
Many Mac users prefer to view PDF files in Apple Preview instead of Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. However, in macOS Sierra, Apple rewrote the PDFKit framework and this rewrite is apparently very buggy. Apple has been fixing these bugs, but some remain in macOS Sierra 10.12. An article by Mac veteran Adam Engst at TidBITS (Sierra PDF Problems Get Worse in 10.12.2) describes some of these bugs, which can result in data loss in some cases. In the article, developer Christian Grunenberg says makes a statement that has always been true to some extent, but even more so in Sierra:
Apple supports only a subset of the PDF specification, and that support has always been buggy.
For maximum compatibility and reliability with all PDF versions and features, you’ll want to work with PDF files in Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Pro, or a third-party application that does not rely on Apple PDFKit.
Update: Apparently the macOS 10.12.3 and 10.12.4 updates fix many, but not all, of the bugs mentioned in the TidBITS article. TidBITS has published an updated article, PDF Problems Continue in 10.12.4, but Primarily Affect Developers.
Older versions of Adobe software (CS3–CS6)
I have upgraded my test Mac to the release version of Sierra. So far, various versions of Adobe Creative Suite (CS) applications I tried (the oldest being Photoshop CS3) are at least able to launch in the Sierra beta. As in El Capitan and earlier, older Adobe applications are able to launch after you run the Apple installer for Java for OS X 2015-001. If you see the alert below, clicking More Info takes you directly to the Apple download page for Java for OS X.
Adobe software older than the Creative Cloud (CC) versions are not officially supported on macOS 10.12 Sierra. That doesn’t mean they won’t work; it just means that if those old versions have any new issues related to macOS 10.12 Sierra, there won’t be any updates to address them (that is, you’re on your own). After doing some quick tests, Adobe application compatibility with Sierra appears to be comparable to their compatibility with OS X 10.11 El Capitan, with very similar limitations and conditions to those we’ve seen with the past few OS X releases. If Adobe does what they’ve done in the past, they will not be testing most older (pre-Creative Cloud) software at a level that can confirm which specific features do and don’t work; you’ll have to do that testing yourself (see “How to test macOS 10.12 Sierra yourself” below).
Photoshop CS3 and up will run in macOS 10.12 Sierra after Java is installed.
With that in mind, here are a few things I’ve seen since trying out some older versions in Sierra.
Be prepared to uninstall and reinstall if needed. Adobe applications were already installed when I upgraded my test Mac to Sierra. After the upgrade, some older Adobe applications had licensing errors. I was able to fix these by uninstalling and reinstalling those applications, and the lesson here is to always make sure you have all of the information you need (such as license keys or registration numbers) to reinstall any of your key software.
“Installer Failed to Initialize” error. Some Adobe installers may fail to launch with the error “We’ve encountered the following issue. Installer failed to initialize. This could be due to a missing file. Please download Adobe Support Advisor to detect the problem.”
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Unfortunately, Adobe Support Advisor no longer exists, but there is an immediate workaround that should get the installer going:
Make a note of this workaround, because any pre-CC installers are unlikely to be updated.
[Update: A few days after I posted this, Adobe published a help document that confirms this workaround: Installing Creative Suite on macOS 10.12 (Sierra)]
Adobe Illustrator CS4. When starting the application, you may see an “Error loading plugins” alert which mentions PhotoshopExport.aip and PhotoshopImport.aip. This has been a problem for several OS X versions, and there is no fix that I know of. You can only work around it by clicking “Don’t show again” in the alert.
Adobe Illustrator CS5. Illustrator CS5 may crash on quit; this problem also existed in El Capitan so try the solution offered at the Adobe forums (Illustrator CS5 crashing on exit), specifically the part about renaming
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5.5ServiceManager to /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5.5ServiceManager.bak
Registration servers, update servers, and activation servers. If you get a message saying that a registration or update server is not available in an old Adobe application, that won’t stop the application itself from working so it’s not much of a concern. A missing activation server may keep an application in trial mode, but I had no problems maintaining activation in the Adobe CS3 through CS6 applications I tried.
Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) compatibility
This question comes up during every recent OS X upgrade: Some users moving up from older Macs running 10.6.8 or earlier to new Macs with the latest OS version may still be using the Creative Suite 2 (CS2) version of Adobe software, such as Adobe Photoshop CS2. As with the last several major Mac OS X upgrades, macOS 10.12 Sierra requires that software be written for the Intel processors that have been running Macs for over 10 years. CS2 applications were written for the PowerPC processors that ran older Macs. The last version of Mac OS X to run PowerPC software was OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.
There is no way to run Adobe CS2 software on macOS 10.12 Sierra. The only option is to use a newer version of the software.
How to test macOS 10.12 Sierra yourself
While online compatibility lists are useful, the advice of others can only go so far because it may not reveal problems related to the specific combination of applications and hardware you use. A better way is to test the new macOS upgrade yourself. But be careful: You want to test the new OS without compromising your current working production system, and you have to pay attention to licensing and activation issues. To understand how to do that, read another article I’ve written: How to test a macOS upgrade with your Adobe software
Other aspects of Sierra that may affect Adobe softwareFlash
One upcoming change affecting Adobe software is that Safari 10 will disable the Adobe Flash plug-in by default. You can still enable it if you want.
APFS
Sierra will be able to use the newly announced Apple File System (APFS), which is being designed around security, reliability, and the ability to work across macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. APFS will replace HFS+. From an Adobe user point of view, an interesting thing about APFS is that it is case-sensitive only. Currently, Adobe Creative Cloud applications cannot be installed on case-sensitive file systems on the Mac. It’s not yet clear how much of an issue this will be, because APFS cannot be used on the startup disk in the currently available build of Sierra. Apple says APFS will not become the default for Apple products until some time in 2017. Presumably, by the time APFS becomes the standard, Adobe will have ensured compatibility…at least for the latest versions of its installers. Whether older versions of Adobe software can be installed on an APFS volume will be a question until it can be tested.
Wondering what Sierra is all about?
For the most in-depth Sierra review you’ll probably find anywhere, read the macOS 10.12 Sierra review at Ars Technica. As with every major release of the Mac operating system, the Ars Technica review not only evaluates the visible features that Apple promotes, but goes under the surface to explain changes to some of the underlying technologies in macOS and how they affect your Mac experience.
This article was originally posted on June 16, 2016 but has been updated throughout the macOS 10.12 Sierra public beta and final release.
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