Adobe Illustrator review - I will be reviewing the software from the point of view of stock photography. Most stock photography company’s only accept illustrator 8.eps and before this causes a problem when new software is introduced as most of the new features are not backwards compatible and Illustrator CS3 is no exception.

So before I tell you what doesn't work I will tell you what does.

Live Colour - This could be useful if you were doing a series of illustrations all based around the same theme or use the same objects but in different colours.

Flash Integration - Although not directly useful in the day to day needs of a stock illustrator but with the increasing amount of site accepting Adobe Flash files, you will have a ready supply of base documents/elements to start your career in animation or navigational elements from illustrations already created.

Improved drawing controls - A row of buttons have been added just under the menu bar that allow you to control a path or anchor point that you have just created. It basically gives you the ability to cut, connect, move, align and convert part of or multiple bits of a stroke with just a click of a button. Rather than being a ground breaking feature its more of a tidy up, bringing all of the features all into one place...if only I could get into the habit of using it!

Control Panel - Again not really a ground breaking feature but basically a evolution of previous versions. A panel appears below the menu bar with a strip of buttons that relate to the tool and object that you have selected. The idea is that it will do away with the need for lots of pallets running down the right hand side of the screen, a nice touch but with many people having larger monitors (thus a bigger work area) this is a feature that was needed a couple of years ago and feels like a bit of an over kill as you tend to still use the pallets down the side as well as the control panel, leaving you with less work space.

Eraser Tool - What can I say about an eraser tool, it works just as if it would in photoshop but with the added benefit of still being editable. This a something that I thought I would hate and have no use for but it has come in quite handy for cleaning up my illustrations. Zoom into a document, find the offending stroke or object that is hanging over where it shouldn't be and simply rub it out.

New document profiles - Not a feature I have a great need for but I guess if you had a bit of work on the side for a magazine printers that used a particular colour palette and page dimension it might well save you hours.

Crop area tool - With a simple click of the mouse you can crop your document down to different dimensions, again not really relevant to the stock world but it could be handy if you wanted to put elements of your work on a website.

Isolation mode - How many times have you got annoyed when you cant get at part of an object because it is buried below other elements. Well fret no longer because all you need to do now to edit those pesky errant points is...double click on the object you want to edit and edit away. All of the other elements in the group will be grayed out and none of the changes you make will effect the previous layers that the object was on or how it interacted with other elements within the group.

So no ground breaking features, especially not where us stock illustrators are concerned, so should you upgrade/buy it. Yes if you have an intel mac (sorry haven’t tested it on a PC) and you have been waiting for a speed increase also Adobes acquisition of Macromedia really brings the integration between Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver to another level.

A word of warning because of the Illustrator 8.eps needs of the majority of the stock sites many of the flashy features will be off limits to you, mainly things like drop shadows, transparencies and certain blend features. There are ways around this problem such as just uploading a jpeg version of the artwork, remember to save a CS3 (ai or .eps) version of the file or you artwork will become uneditable. This is a bit of a cack-handed way of working and defeats the object of producing editable illustrated work and (I believe) limits the market. Obviously there is always the exception to the rule and that is Fotolia which will accept SVG files. SVG files will leave all of your artwork editable but to my frustration I am still to find a way to make Fotolia’s upload system pick up the IPTC data!