The last in our review series on Creative Suite 2, Adobe Illustrator CS 2 is by no measure the weakest link in the chain. Illustrator CS 2 has context-driven control palettes. These become apparent when you select objects with the Direct Selection tool.

The control palette will change with each different selection. Workspaces as well are now customizable. These are probably the least interesting new features in Illustrator CS 2. They will, however, streamline your workflow.

More spectacular is the Live Trace capability. It works great. The best way to try out this new tool, is to place a photograph with some easy to see boundaries between light and dark. For example, I took a photograph taken from New York skyscrapers, holding the camera on ground level and pointed to the sky. This gives a sharp contrast between the dark of the buildings and the light of the sky.

Live Trace will do a wonderful job on such images. It will trace the outlines correctly. But what’s more, even the details in the shadows are immediately traced accurately. Live Trace gives you a a number of presets to choose from. Simple lineart is one option, high-resolution photograph is at the other end of the spectrum.

The beauty of the latter is that, when I tested the latter, I thought I was still dealing with the original photograph as Live Trace’s tracing process came to an end. The result was the original photograph with different, more cartoon-like colours. Very impressive, and way off what I remember from previously available tracing software. 

By the way, the “Live” stands for the link between the original and the traced artwork which is preserved while you experiment with the tool. This link stays in place until you click the Expand button to commit the changes to the Layer.

But even when Live Trace has finished, you can still tune the result. With Live Paint to be exact. Live Paint is something completely new. In order to understand how it works, I first ran the live demo. This demo explains that Live Paint is meant to quickly and intuitively paint areas which could not be painted previously.

It showed me how the three intersections of intersecting circles could be painted without further ado. Just convert the areas in Live Paint areas and you can paint them. When later on, you change the position or size of intersections, the paint flows with the change. In other words, it behaves as if it “knows” that you want to paint the area in-between the circles and not something else, either larger or smaller.

The Live Paint tool may be easily explained with a few circles, but I couldn’t really figure out it’s use --except for being able to paint areas that have gaps; yes, even that is now possible, so you can draw a cartoon-like object and still be able to paint it-- until I Live Painted a traced image.

Especially full photographic traced images benefit from the Live Paint capabilities, because the tool gives you the ability to rapidly change the mood and colours of a complete scene in minutes whereas this used to take many hours.

Another new capability of Illustrator CS 2 is its support for Photoshop files. You can place not only Photoshop files, but also select which Layer Comp you wish to place in your file. Spot colours can be added to grayscale images. And printing has been improved as well, with support for customized overlapping tiles. Finally, Illustrator CS 2 supports PDF/X for commercial printing.