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Adobe Illustrator CS4

Application Overview:
Adobe Illustrator CS4

Adobe Illustrator CS4 includes support for placing Adobe Photoshop layer comps and for applying Photoshop filters and effects, custom stroke placement and options for colorizing grayscale images. The context-sensitive Control palette makes it a snap to find the tool you need for the task at hand. Customizable workspaces enable your work to flow smoothly along with support for the latest Wacom drawing tablets.

Adobe Illustrator provides two ground-breaking tools to expand your creative possibilities and improve your productivity. Live Trace converts bitmaps into fully editable, scalable vectors in seconds. Live Paint enables artwork to be colored quickly and intuitively. Together, Live Trace and Live Paint break down the boundary between drawing and painting, removing the obstacles between your first ideas and final results. Also new in Illustrator is direct access, within the Filters menu and the Effects menu, to the Photoshop Filters and Effects and the Photoshop Gallery. Here you can preview, refine, and apply Photoshop filters and effects such as Fresco, Gaussian Blur, or Mezzotint to any Illustrator artwork, text or placed image. Photoshop filters and effects behave in Illustrator the same as Illustrator effects: effects are live, which means they are non-destructive. You can continue to modify the effect's options or remove the effect at any time without altering the underlying artwork, text, or image.

Users: Creative, Web, Engineering, Finance, IT, Legal, Marketing and Admin Professionals as well as anyone who needs to create, edit, assemble, publish and distribute electronic illustrations, imagery and presentations.

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Adobe Illustrator CS4
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Course Information

Duration: Two-Day Course
Platform: Windows and Macintosh
Fee: $765 CDN (+HST)

This class is limited to eight people.

*As of April 2009 DPA Communications will offer Adobe Acrobat, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash courses on version CS4 (Creative Suite 4).
If you are currently using previous versions see the CS3 version of this course outline for any differences in training course content. Please contact DPA for more details or to have an instructor contact you.

Course Overview

Experienced Adobe Illustrator CS4 users will benefit from the many time savings tips and tricks covered in this course. You will work with the appearance, style and transparency palettes. Improve your skills with the gradient mesh tool, brushes palette and the Symbols Palette. You will apply enveloping and warping to text and will cover colour trapping, overprints and knockouts.

Course Content

  • Illustrator General Preferences
  • Review of Artboards
  • Appearance panel and attributes
  • Styles panel: creating, editing and deleting
  • Practical smart guides
  • Working with multiple artboards in a document
  • Key object alignment
  • Vectored artwork with the Pen Tool
  • The Transparency Palette: changing an object's opacity, applying blending to an object, isolate blending
  • Blending modes, creating and editing opacity masks, editing an opacity masking object
  • Applying Effects versus Filters
  • The Appearance Palette and appearance attributes
  • Using the Styles Palette: guidelines for use, applying styles, creating editing and deleting a style
  • Gradient Mesh tool: deleting, moving and editing mesh points & mesh lines, adding colour, applying transparencies and more
  • Creating 3D objects: extruding objects and type, extrude and bevel options, revolving artwork, lighting and surface shading options
  • Working with the Brushes Palette: brush options, scatter brushes, pattern brushes, calligraphic brushes, creating swatches and colourization options
  • Using the Symbols Palette: create, interchange, redefine and delete symbols, use the symbol tools (sprayer, shifter, scruncher, sizer, spinner, stainer, screener, styler) and changer the properties of these tools
  • Creating Graphs and applying graph designs, using column features
  • Using the Pathfinder Palette and the shape areas button
  • Drawing inter-twining circles
  • The Offset Path and Outline Path

Calendar Dates:

Sep 28/29, 2010

Dec 22/23, 2010

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