Compare Adobe Platforms
Colortech Creative Solutions utilizes the Adobe Creative Cloud for designing and setting up documents. Between our creative, prepress, and printing departments, it is an incredibly important service we couldn’t work without! For this purpose, how should you compare Adobe platforms to one another?
If you’re interested in what Adobe Creative Cloud does but are unsure of where to begin, we’re here to help! Here is a basic guide on how to compare the Adobe platforms we use here at Colortech.
InDesign
Adobe defines InDesign as “the industry-leading layout and page design software for print and digital media.” For this reason alone, InDesign is crucial to producing a majority of Colortech’s materials. This service consists of incredible professional layout and typesetting tools that streamline the process for our prepress and digital printing departments. It allows them to lay out exactly how the documents should be printed. After that, they send the printed materials to our bindery, mailing, and other departments.
Our creative department benefits greatly from InDesign as well due to the ease of designing printed and digital materials that InDesign provides. They can put together flyers, brochures, magazines, and about as much else as you can imagine.
To learn some of the basics of InDesign, we recommend this free course by Envato Tuts+. It is a little over two hours long and will cover many of the basic concepts you will need to know. To view our own video on how to change a photo link from RGB to CMYK in InDesign, check it out here.
Photoshop
Adobe claims that with Photoshop, you can create anything “from social posts to photo retouching, banners to branded merchandise, eye-popping images to amazing artwork.” Arguably the most well-known of all of Adobe’s services, Photoshop is an essential tool for cutting out and adjusting images as well as creating interesting compositions. Artists will find the most benefit from using this service as well as Illustrator.
Given its complexity, Photoshop can certainly be daunting to look at at first. However, there are many tutorials online to help you with exactly what you want to accomplish. To learn about the tools most often used, check out this short video on YouTube from Vince Opra. To view our own video on how to change a PDF from RGB to CMYK or Greyscale in Photoshop, check it out here.
Illustrator
Adobe describes Illustrator’s reach: “Create professional designs, icons, and more — then use them anyplace at any size. Design packaging, logos, web graphics, and more. The possibilities are endless, just like your imagination.” If a designer asks you for a vector logo, this means the logo can be sized to any proportion and still look crisp. It will not fade out or look blurry when expanded or condensed. For this reason alone, Illustrator is an important tool for designers to have. Likewise, there is also no limit to what can be created by graphic artists.
To learn how to get started with Illustrator, check out this video on Youtube from Matt Borchert. It goes over many basic tools for beginners to easily understand. To view our own video on how to change your document from RGB to CMYK in Illustrator, check it out here.
Lightroom
Here is how Adobe describes Lightroom: “Your photos don’t always match what you saw. Make them look just the way you want with the powerful, easy-to-use app that lets you edit, store, share, and organize your photos anywhere you are.” Our sister company, Blue Cardinal Photography, utilizes Lightroom on a regular basis to touch up photos and keep them organized. Due to the sheer number of photographs taken as well as the variety of events, it is an essential tool for our full-time photographers to use.
To get a basic rundown of how Lightroom works and how you can edit your photos in just a few minutes, watch this video from Sawyer Hartman on YouTube.
Premiere Pro
Adobe defines Premiere Pro as “the leading editing software for creating incredible videos fast.” In general, we would say this is undoubtedly true for the videos we edit. We have only begun to offer video editing services in the past couple of years. Therefore, we have found Premiere Pro to be easy to navigate while learning its many incredible features. To name just a few, Adobe offers free animated templates, closed captioning, and custom music tracks.
To learn some of the best ways to edit videos in the latest version for 2022, watch this video from Justin Brown on YouTube.
Conclusion
In the meantime, here’s a summary of how we can compare the Adobe platforms Colortech uses:
- InDesign – Design layouts and prepare for publishing
- Photoshop – Create and edit photos, graphics, and artwork
- Illustrator – Create vector art and illustrations
- Lightroom – Edit, organize, store, and share photos
- Premiere Pro – Edit videos and films
There are many other services Adobe Creative Cloud offers through its many platforms. Be sure to check them out and learn more about what you can create.