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It’s well known that the Adobe Creative Suite is an industry standard for creatives across multiple disciplines, whether it be graphic design, photography, or more. Adobe’s apps are geared more towards the creatives, but I bet you didn’t know that there are more than 50 adobe apps on the market today. Which ones do creatives tend to lean more towards, you may wonder, well let’s dive right in.
First off, try to think of the top apps that come to mind you may have used or heard of. We’ve got our most popular creative apps being Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, and Lightroom. These tend to be the more well known apps of adobe. There’s a few others that creatives use as well. For example, Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, XD, Media Encoder, Dreamweaver, Behance, Aero, Animate and more. These are some of the lesser known apps, we won’t be diving into all of them but we will cover a few.
Let’s start off with the most famous app among all Adobe’s apps, Photoshop.
Photoshop
Photoshop is a great tool when dealing with anything regarding photos, like it says in its name. Whether you are a professional or amateur, this is a great tool for making posters, thumbnails, advertisements, wallpapers, and digital artwork. Artists use it to draw, sketch and even paint. Photographers use it to enhance and retouch their photos. Photoshop has become the industry's standard for photo manipulation, from small edits to large composites. So if you’re looking to create a mockup of a product or edit/enhance qualities of a photo, photoshop is the program for you.
Illustrator
Next up we’ve got Illustrator, this program is the most famous in the graphic design world. At first glance, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop may seem to be quite similar, as it is also used for designing images, but the key difference is in how they store the artwork. Illustrator is more focused on specific tasks, geared more towards drawing. It is based on vector graphics which are composed of lines, curves, and geometric data. Since vectors are not size dependent, a design could be used on a small card but then scaled to the size of a billboard without a loss in quality. It’s used to create vector art, web design, 2D illustrations, logos, business cards, and all sorts of graphics projects.
InDesign
InDesign is a publishing software, primarily used for print layouts, but can also be used for digital. It excels at projects that require multi page layouts like newspapers, magazines, books and presentations. This tool is primarily used by graphic designers and production artists to create flyers, brochures, presentations, magazines, and eBooks. Making a magazine or even an eBook is a tough job that requires the collaboration of several professionals from various fields including editors, writers, photographers, and designers. The reason designers use this program for layouts is due to the precision of the typography but it has less capabilities with graphics.
Lightroom
Lightroom is the fun and easy to use sister of Photoshop. This is another photo editing software similar to Photoshop but it is specifically designed for making more minor edits, like color balance, brightness, or contrast. It doesn’t have the pixel level of control like Photoshop but it makes it far easier to learn for amateurs and professionals. Lightroom also helps with photo organization, as well as a good tool for a studio or photographer to handle a large amount of photos.
Next we will be covering a few of the lesser known apps like Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
Premiere Pro
Premiere Pro you can cut and edit videos to be arranged later on the timeline where you can add effects like audio or text. This tool is widely used by the film and TV industry, as well as Youtubers, Marketing studios and design studios. Premiere Pro is a complex tool to learn and is used in conjunction with other Adobe apps like After Effects, Photoshop and Audition.
After Effects
After Effects is a popular tool for visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing. It has been the leading program in the video compositing industry since the ’90s. After Effects is also used in the post-production process of film making and television, for tasks such as keying, tracking and compositing, and creating visual effects such as explosions and lightning strikes. It’s basically Photoshop for videos.
Now to wrap it all up, we did not cover all 50 and more of Adobe’s apps. Just a few of the more creative apps that graphic designers use on a daily basis or every now and again. Adobe has a large number of applications in its stock. It continues to develop new applications and discontinuing apps that Adobe considers are less important. Adobe has been helpful for artists and creators around the world. It keeps on building apps that make life easier and increases the productivity of people along with helping in creating brilliant pieces of work.