Adobe in a Nutshell: A Quick Guide for Digital Imaging Newbies

By Rose Catherine Khan

Today I'm installing Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, the latest upgrade in the illustrious line of Adobe software. This series of image editing programs has rocked the commercial art world in a way that few could have predicted. If you're an outsider to the world of design, you probably don't realize how far Adobe reaches. I would venture to say that 90% of the printed and digital images you encounter have been produced by some portion of Adobe Creative Suite.

Today I'd like to introduce you to the Adobe family. I'll be starting a series of tutorials relating to each of these applications and felt I should take a moment to compare them as a whole. Let's begin with the heavy-hitter, Photoshop.

Photoshop

Photoshop is to Adobe as Mickey Mouse is to Disney. It's the undisputed star of the show. Created in 1990, this software has systematically stomped out the image editing competition. If you don't know Photoshop, it highly unlikely you will ever find work as a modern graphic artist.

Why is Photoshop so unique? The original version of Photoshop, known as ImagePro, had the ability to display the grey-scale values of a photo. We take this for granted today, but it needs to be remembered that once upon a time we lived in a world where monitors only displayed a few solid colors.

Throughout the 90s, Photoshop grew in strength due to its ease of use, and its .psd file format. Unlike other image file types, such as jpeg or gif, Photoshop files retain their edibility. Each file contains numerous Layers, allowing the artist complete control over separate components of their image.

Photoshop is used by multiple segments of the arts industry. As the name implies, it's used by photographers for correcting photographs. Less commonly thought of is its extensive use by illustrators and designers. Photoshop also plays very nicely with the pressure-sensitive line of Wacom drawing tablets. It enables artists to create robust images that appear to be made with traditional drawing and painting tools. For example, I created the strawberries below without any real media nor photography.

More recently, Photoshop has grown to incorporate 3D features. It allows you to paint on 3D models and influence lighting and materials. For a 3D newbie like me, having these tools in the comfortable Photoshop layout is a blessing.

Illustrator
Illustrator actually pre-dates Photoshop by a few years. Released in 1988, it was one of the first user-friendly vector editing tools.

What's a vector editing tool? There are two major types of images– raster and vector. Photoshop is primarily a raster tool, it generates images via pixels with assigned color values. A vector image is created by a series of plotted points. A vector image can be scaled without any loss of image quality and overall retains a very small file size.

Illustrator is loved by graphic designers who create logos and do basic typographic layout. If you want to be a graphic designer, you must learn Illustrator. That being said, I'd also like to point out that there are many features of Illustrator that have been incorporated into Photoshop and InDesign. I would venture to say InDesign and Illustrator could easily merge into one, but I think Adobe is wisely keeping certain features separate in order to increase revenue streams. I don't imagine Illustrator is going away for a very long time.

InDesign
Speaking of InDesign, this software is the least well-known of the big Adobe products used by graphic designers. I get more questions about InDesign from Photoshop users than any other piece of Creative Suite. InDesign is the successor to Pagemaker, and is meant for multi-page documents, whether it be a two page pamphlet or a 1,000 page catalog. InDesign is not meant to create graphics, but to link photos and art within page layouts. InDesign is certainly capable of vector editing, which leads me to believe it could meld with Illustrator without much trouble.

As a graphic designer, I use InDesign more often than Illustrator. InDesign also has many tools for easily changing layout elements across multiple pages at once, and importing data like price charts. InDesign, traditionally a print-program, has now started to develop some interesting features for web export.

Flash & Dreamweaver
If I mention web, I suppose I should move on to Flash and Dreamweaver. Adobe bought out the Macromedia Corporation in 2005, taking over these two popular web applications. Dreamweaver allows for the creation of websites via code or graphics. Its a nice tool to learn web design, but most hard-core web developers, (like RedBottle!) prefer to code from scratch. Using Dreamweaver is sort of like using a boxed cake mix, it does the job, but doesn't give you much flexibility, and your cake tastes the same as every other boxed cake.

Flash is very different from Dreamweaver. Flash has dominated the web in the area of animation, providing a great method to make interactive vector graphics that are bandwidth-friendly. Flash is a powerful little beast. If you're familiar with the syntax of JavaScript, you'll find Flash's Actionscript fairly easy to write. Many popular online games are created with Flash ranging from Farmville to Bejeweled.

Flash's animation tools have improved greatly over the years. However, Flash did take a hard hit when Apple chose to ban Flash player on any of its iPod, iPhone and iPad devices. It was quite a nasty move on Apple's part, but one that made business sense for a company that was growing the concept of Apps. If Flash existed on Apple devices, then the revenue on the App Store would plummet because users could have web-based animated applications for free. It will be interesting to see where this war ends up.

I'll need to end on Flash, otherwise I'll be listing Adobe software for a while. Please don't send me hatemail over failing to mention software such as Premiere, Lightroom, and Audition, because honestly, I'm just not as familiar with those components of Creative Suite. Graphic Designers tend to stick to the big five. You can visit Adobe themselves for complete descriptions of all their products.

I leave you now to do some RedBottle design work with my shiny new Creative Suite 5.5.