I’ve had access to Adobe CS3 for some time, but initially was too busy doing practical stuff to experiment with any of it’s new features. Here’s a list of 5 things I’ve found useful so far.

Import .psd’s into Flash
Finally I can make a mock-up in photoshop or illustrator and import it directly into flash. Why’d that take so long. Oh yeah.

Easy 3d [Photoshop]
Photoshop now allows you to import 3d objects into your workspace. You can then rotate those objects to suit your purpose render them into 2d images. This is a great feature for designers that have to continuously freshen ads but don’t have the time/resources to create/find/scavenge new materials every time. Just rotate and recolor and you’ve got something fresh.

Layer Comps [Photoshop]
The new layer comps feature is kick-ass because you can basically create endless snapshots of compositions and revert back to them at will. I used to accomplish this by saving different versions of a file but it’s a nightmare to manage and completely unnecessary for smaller jobs.

Text Layout Tools [Illustrator]
I like InDesign, it’s just great. But for smaller projects (as in one page) I’ve always preferred to stay in Illustrator. Now Illustrator comes with some of my favorite InDesign features like text threads, paragraph/character style palettes and much more, making it easier to scale your project resources appropriately.

Import InDesign into InDesign
I always hated Quark and I’ve always loved InDesign. However it was frustrating placing multiple objects on the same page for printing because you couldn’t re-import your project into another project. Well, they fixed it. There are a lot of workflow improvements to InDesign that bring us much closer to the mythic single source publishing.