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Key Features of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

Lesson 2 from: Basics of Adobe CC: Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

Jason Hoppe

Key Features of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

Lesson 2 from: Basics of Adobe CC: Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

2. Key Features of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

Lesson Info

Key Features of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

What I wanna start with is what does Illustrator do, what does InDesign do, what does Photoshop do? A lot of people have beliefs, because they simply use the software for what they normally do, but now we're gonna make it nice and easy. So great infographic here, but we're gonna jump over to what's going to make them actually work for you, and give you some of the highlights here. And there we go. So Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator has been around for quite some time and its main purpose is to be creative. Which is a very broad overview. But really what Illustrator is used for is it's used for creating logos, logo types, editing, vector graphics, illustration, building infographics like the one that you see here, that was built in Illustrator, any type of motion graphics that you can then bring into some motion editing software, small print projects, business cards, letter head, stationary. What Illustrator is not used for is it's not used for large publications, books, brochures,...

multi page publications. That's not what Illustrator is for. Illustrator is very much a creative application where you can go in and you can edit type, you can build graphics, you can create illustrations. It's definitely more along the lines of artistic, free flowing, and one of the good thing is with Illustrator is that what we build in Illustrator can be brought into many other applications, within the Adobe Creative Suite and also outside the Adobe Creative Suite. So when you see a logo or you see a type treatment, or you see a graphic on the web, there's a good chance that it was all built in Illustrator. We can do small, little projects in Illustrator that have some type and logos in them, business cards, letter heads, stationary, that's all good. Sometimes people go in and do a brochure. We have InDesign for that. But for a multi page publication, we don't use Illustrator for that, that's definitely InDesign. One thing that we do use Illustrator for is packaging. Packaging requires a lot of ins and outs, dyelines, special effects, and we use Illustrator for doing package layout, all sorts of things. I'm not gonna get into package layout today, because it's quite intricate, but just a quick overview on what Illustrator does. Illustrator is not good for audio, video, or animation. That's saved for other applications. But for Illustrator, not what it's used for. So basically, going in and creating graphics, logo type, type manipulation, small projects, illustration, that's what Illustrator is used for. And we're gonna show you examples of that. We're actually gonna build some files in here as well, so you can get a better sense of what it does. So here's some examples of things that have been created in Illustrator. Logos, type treatment, Mr. Bacon, infographics and this chart on printing terminology that I created, shapes and fills, basic type, type manipulation, that's what it's all used for. Now the end result from what we get from Illustrator is that we can save it as an Illustrator file but we can also save these files as a pdf. And an Adobe pdf is pretty much universally accepted and you can put a pdf into almost any application out there. Which is why creating things in Illustrator works so well. And we can drop this into Photoshop for any type of web use, we can put these in an animation, we can put these in InDesign, we can print them directly often here. You can put these in any type of spreadsheet that you want or text editing document. You can send it to anybody and you can print directly from the pdf. So creating this type of artwork in Illustrator is definitely what we do. That's what we have. Then we have Photoshop. And as one person said on the chatroom today, I use Illustrator a lot but Photoshop scares me. Photoshop is a big, wide and deep application. And its main purpose is for photo editing, color correction, photo compositing, and any type of retouching that you want to do to images, special effects, filters, processing your images from your camera or your phone, creating web and motion graphics, being able to do web and mobile and user interface design, that's what Photoshop is great for. Absolutely fantastic. It's very robust, it's the industry standard for photo editing, and like I said, it's very wide, it's very deep, and can seem very daunting. But we're gonna show you some of the basics of what you can do with Photoshop so that it isn't so daunting when you begin. What Photoshop is not used for. Photoshop is not used for any type of page layout whatsoever. I wouldn't create a brochure, or a business card, or anything that I'm going to do for print or publication that's gonna require a lot of text and a lot of graphics, that's not what Photoshop is used for, okay? So if I'm gonna do a business card or a logo, I'm not gonna do it in Photoshop. Not the right software to do. First of all, Photoshop doesn't have multiple pages like you would have, so it's not well suited for that. But it's also going to be based in the world of raster. And we're gonna explain what raster and vector is so you get a better idea of when to use one application over another based on what type of output they were looking for. So any type of logos, never create them in Photoshop. Print materials, don't want to create that in Photoshop. Text-heavy items, no. So pretty much, imaging, images, compositing, color correction, that's what we're going to use it for. And some of the examples of what we do in Photoshop. We've got some photo compositing here from my photo compositing class. And then we also have this doctor, where we had the stethoscope on the right hand side, we removed it on the left hand side. And being able to go in and manipulate our images. We also can do color correction with a cupcake image here. It was shot very dark, being able to go in and color adjust our images, so that we can see the difference between what we started with, being able to adjust the color, being able to retouch. So we got this kid with a donut. We can put different donuts in there. That's what it's all used for. At the bottom we have pictures of a shirt. It's all the same shirt. But we can go through and we can adjust the color on each one of our images and be able to see the differences, change, color correct, color match, all in Photoshop. In the end, we can use these photos for just about anything. We can put them into print publications, we can use them for web, we can print directly from Photoshop for any type of photo quality output that we want. Web, motion graphics, user interface design, all the Photoshop files can be output for multiple different end purposes. Or just to have them in Photoshop and look pretty. Like the beautiful water bottle in the surrealist look that we did. So, Photoshop, image editing is the main purpose. That's what it does. Then, InDesign. So InDesign's main purpose is a page layout application. We don't create images, we don't edit images in InDesign, we don't create very complicated artwork in InDesign at all. The most thing that we create in InDesign is basic shapes, basic fills, and then we put type in. Whether we enter type in from a text document, or we type directly into InDesign. Its main purpose is to go through and create books, reports, flyers, brochures, single page, multi page documents, cookbooks, any type of publishing feature that you have. We can also create large documents, posters, multi page documents, table of contents, interactive files as well. eBooks, digital publishing, all done in InDesign. Its main feature is to be able to go in and take content, whether it'd be type, images, graphic, logos, whatever, put it all together and actually lay it out quickly and easily. Single page, multi page, huge documents, cookbooks, you name it, catalogs. That's what InDesign is used for. It's not really used for image editing. We have no image editing capabilities in InDesign. We can't really draw much in InDesign. I wouldn't wanna create a snowman in InDesign. Because InDesign is kind of self-contained. There's no way that I can really take any graphic that I create in here and actually get it out of InDesign to use in any other application. Its sole purpose is to gather content together and quickly and easily be able to layout, format, keep all my type consistent over a single page, many pages. Any type of publication you can think of, magazines, catalogs, books, that's what InDesign is used for. So we aren't gonna go ahead and use it for anything other than text, plowing it in, basic shapes, very basic shapes. Everything else that we get from to put our content, or to put in our InDesign content is going to be generated either in Illustrator or Photoshop or other sources. So here's some examples of what we can do in InDesign. We've got a multi page brochure here, we've got a poster, we've got some business cards, and we have a full on presentation as well. And these are all things that are done in Adobe InDesign. Very little content is actually created, if any, in InDesign, but InDesign is going to be used to actually put everything together into one final printed piece. Whether that be printed as a pdf or digitally published online, or printed off on your printer, or used in the presentation format, that's what InDesign is for. So anything that we've created in InDesign, we can export as a pdf, and then we have that content, and we're gonna show you what we actually do. So that's the basic overview of what each and every application does.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Color in InDesign
InDesign Basics
InDesign Images and links
Photoshop Basics Shortcuts
Photoshop Color Correction
Photoshop Layers
Photoshop Selections Basics
Photoshop Terminology
Shapes Paths Guides InDesign
Type in InDesign
Illustrator Shortcuts
Shapes & Pathfinder in Illustrator
Photoshop Assets
Illustrator Assets
InDesign Assets
Infographic

Ratings and Reviews

user 1398976626171314
 

Such an important overview that clarifies and simplifies each piece of software and its role in achieving a beautiful and organized end result. Love Jason's brilliant and funny style and I appreciate his going into the "whys" of the software design evolution so it's not just memorizing methods but truly understanding what you can do even with a eye to the future changes. Fascinating, fun and empowering! My first Creative Live purchase!

Renee Hamilton
 

Enjoying this class immensely. Havent used illustrator properly for a while but this class is refreshing my memory. Its so awesome and it makes illustrator seem so easy! Wow wow wow! Thank you Jason and Creative live

Corrine Radergraham
 

WOW!! Jason is a very engaging instructor. It's obvious that he knows the programs inside and out. He imparts a tremendous amount of excellent material in a very short time, he makes sense and he is well-spoken with a sense of humor and he doesn't get lost in the materials and have to bungle his way out, very well prepared. I've been using PS and IA for the past several years on and off and currently have 6 on my computer but looking at going to CC in the near future. Even with that experience, he provided tips and tricks for both that were very enlightening in using them more productively. I'm not so familiar with ID and I now feel that I have a working knowledge of all three programs. I've taken Adobe classes taught by other instructors and found them rather boring to drag myself through. Jason is not boring in the least! So if you aren't familiar with these programs or are even curious about them and want an excellent overview, I totally recommend that you take this class. You will definitely not be sorry and will get your money's worth. I took this when it was offered on air free of charge. The only down of taking it free is that there are downloadable materials that are only available by purchase which sound excellent and I would like to have them, but I want to take one of Jason's other classes and can't justify the expense of this class only for the downloads, because I am familiar with the programs and would be unlikely to actually watch the class again, and there is his interactive pdf class that I am really looking forward to......5 stars and all thumbs up for Jason's instruction!

Student Work

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