As you probably know, adobe has way way more to offer than just photoshop. I’ve been fortunate to be able to learn and use a good handful of them over the years. Sometimes it can be a bit daunting to look at the huge list of adobe programs available and try to remember which one does which. This post will cover a short description of most of the main adobe programs used in creative industries today. This will by no means be fully comprehensive, adobe has some products that are so specific few people outside of a certain area of work would even know what they are. These apps are the more broad ones, that can be used by a multitude of professions.
Photoshop – Advanced Image Editing
Okay so we all basically know what photoshop does. Image editing on a deeper, more complicated scale, some text features, some drawing capability. Photoshop is the most well rounded and most used of all the adobe programs. Whatever you need to do, it can probably help you in some way.
Lightroom – Batch Image Editing
Lightroom is a photoragpher’s dream. Though its editing isn’t nearly as in depth as photoshop, it can handle batch processing much more efficiently. It has great camera RAW support and the ability to edit a photo once and copy all changes to another. Pretty much, if you need to edit a bunch of photos use lightroom, if you only need to edit less than 5 use photoshop.
Illustrator – Vector Design
In my opinion the hardest adobe program to learn, and my sworn mortal enemy, illustrator is a vector creation software. Vector images (.svg .pdf .ai) can be resized infinitely and don’t compress like raster (.jpg .png .gif) images do. This is good for logo design and things that may need to be printed vastly different sizes. If you have an image that needs to be printed at a booklet size, but also work for a billboard, this is where it needs to be made.
Indesign – Publishing Design
Indesign is a page creation software used to make layouts for both print and digital publications. Remember desktop publisher, that old microsoft program? This is today’s much better version of it. You can easily create templates, layout text, and integrate images and other media into spreads for whatever your needs are. We use this extensively at the newspaper.
Premiere – Video Production
These next two are really easy to confuse and basically are worthless unless used together. Premiere is a video editing software that is good for splicing clips and audio, getting the correct order established, and adding transitions. You want to use this first when making a video piece to get the skeleton of your video ready and all the extra footage clipped away.
After Effects – Video Effects
After Effects is like photoshop but for video. Once you have your basic video made in Premiere, you’ll want to open your project in after effects to complete any color correction, filters, layers, text effects, basic animation, etc. If premiere is used to make a video skeleton, after effects is used to put clothes on the skeleton and dress it up all nice for the skeleton party.
Audition – Audio Editing
This program is sort of similar to audacity but is more focused on assisting with audio recording and then remixing. I honestly don’t have much experience with this one so I don’t have much to say about its nuances. If you’re doing sound production, you may run into this software.
Dreamweaver – Web & Mobile Design
Dreamweaver is a web and mobile design platform that has both a code editor as well as a live surface to view the project you are currently working on. It’s a more visual way to work with code and create products for the web and mobile devices.
Of course, these 8 programs just barely scratch the surface. Other professional geared adobe programs include incopy, animate (previously flash), experience design, and speedgrade. Additionally, adobe has several more general user geared programs such as adobe muse and adobe spark. There are also countless programs which have come and gone over the years. If you want to look at their comprehensive list of the adobe programs available to use today you can find it here.
Tyler B
This is a good summary of all of the Creative Cloud options. It’s cool to know that they offer all of these products and also to see how a lot of them supplement each other. This is a good description of how all of the products function by themselves and in relation to each other. I knew that Adobe had a lot to offer, but I never realized they had quite this many programs with this amount of productivity potential available. It seems like for someone composing any kind of digital media, Adobe has a program that will cater to what they’re doing.