What's possible with Adobe Creative Cloud?
The Adobe Creative Suite is a whole host of software for creative digital production and beyond.
The Creative Cloud is Adobe’s solution to the increasingly popular subscription-based model and has varying levels of access depending on what you might need for your business or personal project.
It can be overwhelming working out what each piece of software does and how it might apply to your business. At Elevate, we’re all about empowering businesses to create and get themselves online.
To this end, we’ve broken down some of the key software within the Adobe Creative Suite, and how we use them in our business.
First created in 1998, Photoshop is the most popular creative tool Adobe has to offer. Now an industry standard for raster graphic editing and digital art in general. Now on it’s 21st version, the sheer versatility of tools on offer means amateurs and veterans alike can create professional design work.
Here at Elevate Agency, we use Photoshop for a huge number of reasons. Creating graphics for content, visualising website designs, and general design work. The beauty of photoshop lies in its approachability for new users to produce great quality end-products. Adobe continues to update the software while providing invaluable help articles.
While there is so much that you can do in Photoshop, some of the major uses are:
Using powerful in-built photo manipulation tools like camera raw filter to retouch or completely transform photos.
In combination with a graphics tablet, Photoshop allows the creation of graphics using a multitude of brushes. Anything from basic icons to full artistic renditions can be created in Photoshop.
From simple poster design to fully-fledged graphical mock-ups. Combining imported photos, text, shapes, gradients, and much more to create professional graphics. These then can be exported in every output needed, ready for reproduction on the web, in print, or anything else you can think of.
Illustrator is a more graphics-focussed software than Photoshop, reserved more for the creation of graphical elements, typefaces, and vector art.
With a higher ceiling of entrance, Illustrator requires a bit more design know-how, but in classic Adobe fashion is still remarkably approachable and has fantastic help articles built into the software, as well as online.
For us at Elevate – Illustrator has been essential for creating vector SVGs and logos that need to be scaled for different media like web and print. Illustrator makes it simple to convert previously created graphics into vectors as well.
Some of the great things you can do in Illustrator:
Create or convert drawings, logos, typefaces, or anything else into scalable vectors.
Adobe’s brand-new AI powered feature. Extract colour from a photo and add to your design, automatically trace a sketch, and turn it into a vector. The possibilities are massive.
The video editing software of choice here at Elevate Agency. Adobe’s Premiere Pro is another industry stalwart much like Photoshop. With powerful video editing tools, compatibility with a huge number of visual formats, and able to output video, animation, and even GIF.
We’ve used Premiere Pro to create short promotional videos with effects, animation, and layering. It’s the tool of choice for recorded content to be edited and exported for the web. We’ve even used it to create GIFs for our communities.
Premiere is another bit of software in the Adobe suite that has an incredible amount of depth, but right out of the gates you can expect the following:
A user-friendly interface that takes inspiration from traditional cutting rooms but also incorporates ‘modern’ editing workflows, Premiere Pro shines in its ease of use for quick edits.
Adobe’s brand-new AI powered feature. Extract colour from a photo and add to your design, automatically trace a sketch, and turn it into a vector. The possibilities are massive.
Often overlooked as a mere tool for viewing PDFs, but with the latest version Adobe Acrobat DC, so much more can be done. The compatibility with mobile is a big plus, as viewing PDFs with full Acrobat abilities is helpful for businesses constantly on the move.
At Elevate, we use all aspects of the software in daily business use. Some highlights of Acrobat DCs many uses:
Combine many PDF files (they could have been created in Photoshop) into one PDF folder. At Elevate, we use this feature a lot to create learning documents for clients.
Open an existing PDF and edit images, text, add hyperlinks. On both desktop and mobile, make significant edits to PDFs.
A key feature we love, secure electronic signatures on legal documents, all done through Adobe Acrobat. This not only saves on time and effort of doing this physically but has been invaluable during the pandemic to keep business flowing.
