Free Adobe Illustrator Cs3 For Mac
CS3-Fan there may be other Users who have also installed InDesign CS3 under Mac OS 10.9 in the InDesign forum. As a first step though I would recommend reviewing the installation log files for the update. Macworld July 2007 Gear to Go - 53 Road-Ready Mac Gadgets and Tools, Adobe CS3 Reviewed (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat), Aperture vs Lightroom, Final Cut Studio 2, Create Professional-Looking Layouts.
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While all owners of Intel Macs will be thrilled to finally have an Intel-native version of Adobe’s Creative Suite, Illustrator users typically haven’t had to deal with slow-moving progress bars the way that many Photoshop users have, so performance hasn’t been a primary concern for them. However, there are plenty of other reasons to upgrade to the CS3 version: Adobe has made some significant interface changes, updated some important components, and added some innovative new features, such as Live Color, a complete color-exploration environment that makes it easy to develop and experiment with different color themes. In addition, no matter what kind of Mac you’re using, you will notice some performance improvements when you’re scrolling and zooming, and you’ll see faster screen redraws when you’re working with very complex documents. But there’s still a little room for improvement, especially in the program’s basic color-picking facility.
Interface changes
Illustrator’s interface has been updated to match the rest of the CS3 programs’—its tool palettes (now called panels) sit inside of docks that can be expanded or collapsed, allowing you to better manage screen real estate.
The redesigned Control panel further reduces on-screen clutter. Introduced in Illustrator CS2, the Control panel has been expanded to include more options and tools. For example, when a path is selected, the Control panel now provides options for selecting similar objects and aligning those objects. When a point is selected, the Control panel provides all the anchor-point controls that you used to have to access from the main Tools palette. Adobe was very smart about what it put in the Control panel, and you’ll probably find that, after a while, you use it for more of your parameter selection than the customary palettes and dialog boxes.
The actual selection process has been improved by some changes in the visual feedback that Illustrator provides as you mouse around your illustration. When you pass the Direct Selection tool over a control point, the control point enlarges so that you can easily see and select it. While this may not sound like much, you’ll get accustomed to the change very quickly, and you’ll soon realize how helpful—even luxurious—it is. Of all the program’s new features, Illustrator CS3’s easier-to-see anchor-point highlighting is the one you’ll encounter most often, and it’s a great idea.
Illustrator CS3 also introduces Document Profiles, preset parameters that allow you to create new documents configured for a specific final output. For example, the Video And Film profile gives you a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel document in RGB color. This feature can save you some hassle when you’re ready to output your illustration.
The interface changes that Adobe has made are significant, but longtime users don’t need to worry about a burdensome learning process or changes to familiar keyboard shortcuts and commands. It’s easy to adopt the new features into your workflow.
New drawing tools
Illustrator CS3 is the 13th version of Illustrator, and as you’d expect after all this time, its drawing tools are very powerful and refined. Adobe has made a few significant additions to longstanding tools in the program’s toolbox.
A new Eraser tool lets you modify existing parts of your illustration just as you would in a paint program. Pass the Eraser tool over an object, and the tool will automatically alter and reshape it so that it looks partially erased. Like the Paintbrush tool, the Eraser tool makes creating organic, painterly objects easy—you use a simple painting interface, and you don’t have to think about paths and anchor points.
While Illustrator has long allowed you to align objects, the new version also lets you align individual points, a great way to align just one side of a group of objects, for example.
The new Crop Area tool makes it easy to crop down to a specific rectangular part of an image. In the past, you had to draw a rectangle and create a clipping mask in order to crop an image. If you need to quickly output PDFs and other documents that are cropped to a specific size, the Crop Area tool is a great addition.
In previous versions of Illustrator, working on a single object in a complex document required that you perform lots of locking and hiding to isolate the path that you wanted to edit. Illustrator CS3’s new Isolation mode provides a good alternative to this type of housekeeping. The Isolation mode lets you easily isolate a single group or sublayer; all other objects in your document are faded, and you can edit only the isolated element. Unfortunately, you can’t isolate an individual object; you can isolate only groups of objects or sublayers.
All of these additions are great, but I was hoping to see an overhaul of some of Illustrator’s other features, most noticeably its 3-D tools, which have hardly progressed since the old days of Adobe Streamline. And as I say about every version, the inability to create multiple-page documents is a tremendous oversight.
Live color
The most significant additions to Illustrator are new color features. The new Color Guide can automatically create entire palettes of harmonious color schemes; you can choose complementary, analogous, monochromatic, or triad colors, all based on the currently selected color.
There’s nothing better than the Color Guide for quickly creating a color scheme for an illustration. The new, radically advanced Live Color dialog box allows you to quickly apply color schemes to selected groups of objects. The live part of Live Color refers to the ease with which you can interactively try out entirely new color schemes and perform color reductions.
Illustrator’s basic color picker is still a bit of a hassle; picking basic fill and stroke colors requires more clicks than it should. But Live Color is one of the most significant additions to Illustrator in years, and it will appeal to all types of designers and illustrators, as well as to motion-graphics specialists and Flash animators.
Flash integration
Flash users will be thrilled with the new Illustrator’s Flash integration. You can now import Illustrator files directly into Flash and copy and paste objects between the two programs. You can move text between Illustrator and Flash as a vector object or as Dynamic Text, which can be scripted and animated in Flash. This lets you use Illustrator’s far more powerful tools to create content for your Flash animations.
Macworld’s buying advice
Upgrading to Adobe Illustrator CS3 is a no-brainer for longtime Illustrator users. I was hoping that some of the older tools would get some tweaks—especially the 3-D tools and the color picker, and I’d love to see the ability to create multiple-page documents. But the Live Color feature alone is worth the price of admission, and the interface improvements and better performance will make all users very happy.
[ Ben Long is a San Francisco-based photographer and writer. He is the author of the recently released Real World Nikon Capture NX (Peachpit Press, 2007). ]
You can use the new Color Guide feature to automatically generate entire color schemes based on a selected color.The Live Color dialog box lets you quickly change the colors of multiple objects, so you can easily employ the new color schemes you’ve explored with the Color Guide feature.Adobe Illustrator Cs3 Software
Want to learn how to use Illustrator but don’t want to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud? Or need to access its features on the go while using someone else’s computer? With Gravit you get a lot of the key features offered in expensive standards like Illustrator or Fireworks.
Best of all, Gravit is completely free. You just have to sign up for an account to use it. Gravit includes basic vector tools: a pen tool, line tool, and a Bezigon tool, as well as shapes including a rectangle, ellipse, triangle, polygon, and star.
Beyond creating shapes, Gravit also has tools similar to Illustrator’s pathfinder and alignment tools, as well as layers, and you can add text and images to your design.
When creating a new document, you can choose the size (including handy presets like Facebook and Twitter covers, standard print sizes, and more) or you can select from some pre-existing templates. These templates, together with Gravit’s showcase, give a great idea of how much you can get out of this web app.
Once you’re done creating your image, you can export it to your computer as JPG, PNG, or SVG. You can also save it online in your Gravit account with the layers in tact and come back to it at a later time.
For an introduction to Gravit’s features, check out the video below:
Have you tried out Gravit? How do you think it compares to Adobe Illustrator? Let us know in the comments.
Explore more about: Adobe Illustrator, Image Editor.
Hi There & thanks for this article very helpful! I was in a rush to find a good alternative to Illustrator as I needed to draw few logos and I have to say that, after few trials on Vectr and Youidraw, some tears of joy nearly came up when I read this article and once I tried Gravit!
This is an excellent free alternative to Illustrator using the same commands so easy to very quickly handy, used online without any bug, very friendly environment and I can't believe this is bloody free - so it's not even a 30 days trial!
Of course, depending on which version you use of Illustrator, Gravit will provide the essentials - but professional essentials for free are hard to find - so for me this is amazing!
Thanks for sharing this article Nancy, and thanks Gravit for your great work on this! Cheers, CedPeople are getting frustrated since adobe started to rent out their product, but there are no possible replacement yet. I don't mind paying for a great product with a reasonable price.
Give Inkscape a try. Many research and reviews say it is an alternative to Illustrator (these research and reviews are done by professionals who switched from Illustrator to Inkscape.) I also find it great.
I have not tried it yet but will soon thanks for the tip though Ill be back with a review!
Chalres
This article is incredibly misleading and shows an incredible lack of knowledge. If you want to learn to use Illustrator for free, how about using the free version of Illustrator that Adobe gives out? You can download any of the Adobe CS2 products for free. They have been free for years. You will not learn how to use Illustrator by using a free alternative, that notion is preposterous and incredibly misleading. That's like saying learn to use Photoshop or Illustrator with Corel Draw. Doesn't work.
They don't exactly give that out. The serials were released by mistake and by the point Adobe found out it was already all over the web.
Granted it asks, but it's more than obvious selling the point of 'Free'. Though some of the key features this is offering, very similar to Adobe's, it is selling an alternative without having to subscribe. Nothing misleading about this article. Key Point in this article is 'Free Alternative'. Not Adobe Illustrator guide.
To say that Gravit is an 'alternative' to Illustrator, is like saying that a skateboard is an alternative to a car.
If you used AI for any length of time, you probably know that it has features and toolsets that were developed for nearly over three decades (first release being in 1988)! You can't simply say that a browser based app that can draw a few boxes and ellipses is an 'alternative' to such a robust program.
You might say that Gravit is an alternative to Method Draw (http://editor.method.ac) or Janvas (http://www.janvas.com/site/home_en.php) - which are both browser based vector tools, but they are not even the same league as Adobe Illustrator just because they have a Pen Tool.
For anyone asking, Gravit supports EPS and SVG import along with standard image formats. We are working on adding PDF export to our already existing SVG, PNG and JPG export.
Can Gravit open all files created with Illustrator and vice versa?
The problem with Gravit vs. Illustrator is the same as GIMP vs. Photoshop. The free products may suffice for the casual user but the pros need Adobe products.
Inkscape is great, and I use it all the time, but as a technology instructor for an elementary school that is equipped with Chromebooks, this is a very welcome app. Inkscape cannot be used on Chromebooks due to the fact that it needs to be installed on a local hard drive. Previously, Vector Paint was the only option I could find. Will be trying this one out today!
I just tried inkscape and it SUCKS! Click on a tool in the toolbox and nothing happens. I got stuck in the node tool and no matter how many times I clicked on the select arrow tool, nothing happened, I was still in the node tool. only reason I got into node tool was I used F2--clicking on it did NOTHING. After a few hours of going thru the tutorials only to have option boxes ignore being clicked on to change everything from stroke width to whatever, I gave up and uninstalled it. what an enormous piece of crap and I used Illustrator for years before it became a rent instead of buy cash cow. 50 a month to RENT it?!?!? puh-leez. still trying to find a decent replacement and inkscape is not it.
If you are on a Mac, you could give Affinity Designer a try.
40 €, no rent, many features and professionally developed.Or PC now :-)
Affinity is also on PC now :-)
I already use Inkscape, but this does sound like a great entry level way into illustrator. I will give it a shot to try it. Thanks Nancy
For those interested, also check out Inkscape. Very capable piece of cross platform software.