Frequently Bought Together
Product DetailsPlatform: PC
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Product Description
From the Manufacturer
Adobe Illustrator CS6 software is the industry’s premier vector-drawing environment for creating graphics that scale across media. Capture your vision with shapes, color, effects, and typography. Experiment freely with perspective, image tracing, gradients, brushes, and strokes—all driven by the Mercury Performance System so you can make fast work of your most complex designs.
Illustrator CS6 Highlights
- Work fast and with rock-solid stability—Handle the most complex artwork with speed and stability. The new Mercury Performance System includes native 64-bit support for Mac OS and Windows to power tasks that were often impossible previously, such as opening, saving, and exporting large files and previewing elaborate designs.
- Efficiently drive daily tasks and favorite features—Work more efficiently and intuitively with a modern user interface. Familiar tasks are now streamlined, from inline editing of layer names to precise color sampling from the Color panel. User interface brightness is smoothly adjustable to match other Adobe applications or your personal preference.
- Design intuitively and with precise control—Express your vision fully and more easily with refined creative features. Designing and editing seamless patterns, once difficult, is now direct and intuitive. A new image-tracing engine delivers clean, accurate vectors with easy-to-use controls. You can even apply gradients to strokes.
| Illustrator Comparison Chart | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pattern creation | x | |
| Image Trace | x | |
| Gradients on strokes | x | |
| Mercury Performance System | x | |
| Efficient, customizable interface | x | |
| Inline editing in panels | x | |
| Enhanced Gaussian Blur | x | |
| Dockable hidden tools | x | |
| Adjustable user interface brightness | x | |
| Multipage output | x | |
| Clean, sharp graphics for web and mobile | x | x |
| Variable-width strokes | x | x |
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Illustrator CS6 and who is it for?
A: Adobe Illustrator CS6 is the industry-standard vector graphics software, used worldwide by designers of all types who want to create digital graphics, illustrations, and typography for all kinds of media: print, web, interactive, video, and mobile.
Q: What are vector graphics and why are they important?
A: Vector graphics are one of the two most commonly used graphic formats in design, the other being bitmap (or raster) graphics. Vector graphics, like those created with Illustrator CS6, are resolution independent, which means they can be resized infinitely with no loss of quality. For example, the same logo design created with Illustrator can be used on a business card or an outdoor billboard, always maintaining the accuracy and detail of the original design.
Q:Does Illustrator CS6 still support 32-bit operating systems?
A: Illustrator CS6 supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems, but only supports 64-bit operating systems for Mac OS. The lack of 32-bit support does not affect the majority of Mac computers that use Intel processors. The only Mac users affected by the lack of 32-bit support are those using Intel based Mac computers with Intel Core Duo (single-core) processors.
Top New CS6 Features
Mercury Performance System—Work with precision, speed, and rock-solid stability on large, complex files due to native 64-bit support on Mac OS and Windows with RAM and overall performance optimization.
Pattern creation—Easily create seamlessly tiled vector patterns. Experiment freely with different types of repeating patterns that can be edited at any time for maximum design flexibility.
Image Trace—Convert raster images to editable vectors with a completely new tracing engine. Get clean lines, accurate fitting, and reliable color results without using complex controls.
Efficient, flexible interface—Take fewer steps to accomplish daily tasks in a new, streamlined interface. Enjoy inline editing of layer names, precise color sampling, and user interface brightness that's smoothly adjustable to match other Adobe tools.
Gradients on strokes—Apply gradients to your strokes—along the length, across the width, or within the stroke itself—all with complete control over gradient placement and opacity.
Inline editing in panels—Efficiently edit names in layers, swatches, brushes, artboards, and other panels directly in the panels themselves without using intermediate dialog boxes.
Gaussian Blur enhancement—See that Gaussian Blur and effects such as Drop Shadows and Glows are applied significantly faster than before. To improve accuracy, preview directly on the artboard rather than in a dialog box.
Color panel enhancements—Sample colors faster and more precisely using an expandable color spectrum in the Color panel. And now, copy and paste hex values into other applications more quickly.
Transform panel enhancements—Quickly access the popular Scale Strokes and Effects option, thanks to its new availability in the Transform panel.
Product Description
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
"Illustrator is the most advanced vector based Illustration program available." If you want simple, this fact should scare you. If you want to create vector graphics without limits, this fact should excite you. If you don't know the difference between pixel based and vector based graphics you need to familiarize yourself with those topics (Google 'pixel vs vector') before trying to make a purchasing decision.
"Illustrator is highly specialized for the task of creating graphics, not page layout." If you need a single tool to do both illustration and page layout, for budget or simplicity reasons, Illustrator is probably not your tool. Illustrator's multi-page functionality have actually made a lot of progress lately. I routinely create multi-page documents in Illustrator, often with different sized pages which Illustrator does perhaps better than any other application now. However, you won't be getting table of contents, footnotes, complex tables, GREP styles or other great page layout features that come with InDesign.
"Illustrator is the standard for professional vector based images." This fact means that if a professional graphic designer created a graphic for you there is nearly a 100% chance they used Illustrator. If you are buying an illustration tool for the purposes of editing professional created vector graphics you should buy Illustrator for compatibility reasons. Other software may say they open .eps or .ai files, but there will be problems. If you need to edit graphics created by people on a low or zero budget you could probably just used what they used - a solution that will probably cost a lot less than Illustrator.
"Illustrator seems complicated, at first." You weren't born knowing how to draw with Bezier curves. There are some concepts that you will need to learn. Once learned, you will find Illustrator is remarkably well designed and organized. It has tools that allow you to manipulate graphical objects in some amazingly power and efficient ways. Once proficient you will see Illustrator as the least complex way of building many graphics.
"Drawing in Illustrator can be more time consuming than alternatives." Illustrator is a "low level" drawing tool, more like a pencil than a box of rubber stamps. You will be able to draw diagrams faster with specialized tool like Visio. You will be able to draft architectural plans faster with a dedicated CAD program. These specialized tools have palettes of pre-made "higher level" objects, and features to use them, like auto-rotating a door object to align it with a wall object. That being said, I draw a ton of diagrams in Illustrator. I find that many diagrams benefit from custom built visualizations that would be difficult or impossible to build in a diagram tool. The few extra minutes spent in Illustrator often makes a huge difference. For CAD tasks, sometimes Illustrator is faster. I recently needed to verify a Steinway Model B grand piano would fit in a room in my house. Googling the dimensions for a Steinway Model B and drawing it in Illustrator took less than 2 minutes. Finding the pre-made object for a Steinway B in a CAD tool would have taken longer and may have cost money.
Hopefully I've characterized Illustrator in a way that will help you make a sound decision to either buy...or avoid...Adobe Illustrator. Feel free to send questions.
|
|
|||||||
|