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Q&A: Deciding which program fo use for your project

Let's say you have that bakery logo there and you went in, you were in Illustrator and you changed the color from a pink doughnut to an orange doughnut, would the color update in InDesign automatically? Absolutely, and this is the great part about using the Creative Suite here is that everything integrates together so very well. So, because we don't have the editing capabilities of any of these files within InDesign because this is all part of the Adobe Creative Suite, we can very easily edit these outside in the application that it was created in and bring them right back in. So, I could just simply go in, I'm gonna show you this. I could literally go in to my logo here, and I could take my content, and I could change some aspect of the content here. Or I could go in and maybe change the stroke to be something different here. And if I change the stroke to be different, then I could go in and I could save that file. Okay, I pressed the wrong command there. That wasn't saved. That's s...

aved, right there. Nothing like doing command Z. Command Z, undo, undo, undo. I'm gonna jump back over to InDesign and it's automatically updated it for me which is great, didn't update it by using InDesign, I actually went back to the application that this was created in, I was able to edit it there. And I saved it and when I came back to InDesign, it automatically brought its new content in. So, this doughnut that we were working on, if I were to edit any one of these images, I could go in and I could open this image, and it's going to open in preview which is something we will definitely talk about. So, I'm going to go to my image and I'm going to check out this image here. And I'm going to edit the original one with Photoshop. This may seem a bit complicated, it isn't. But I can edit this image, go in here. I'm gonna invert the image. Pretty cool, huh! I know, that's what you can do in Photoshop. Don't ask me how we did it, I have no idea. Just kidding. We just choose invert, which is a great way to do it. It's just command I for invert. If I save this file and then I go jump back over to InDesign and I touch that, you can see it updated, just that quickly. Again, I didn't edit it in InDesign. I went through InDesign, I opened that file up in the application that it was created in, I edited that file there and saved it, I came back in, and it automatically updated it for me in place. So that's how great these are integrated together with each other. So anything that I put into InDesign, it's there. I can edit it outside and InDesign's smart enough to know, whenever we get a new file, it automatically brings it in. So, if we go back and put this guy back to normal, much better. Go back to InDesign. Click on it. And it'll update if I make sure I save it. There we go. I think you may have already answered this but before the days of the cloud, you could buy a suite of programs, Creative Suite. Yes. Now, when you subscribe to the cloud, do you get a suite of programs as well or individual? You get the entire suite of programs and so, what the cloud actually is and people have questions about the cloud, so up until Photoshop and InDesign, Illustrator, CS6, you actually got physical software that you can install on your machine. And you own the software and the license to it. With the advent of the Creative Cloud, all those applications still live on your machine but you actually activate them via subscription service. Okay? So, the advantage of this is, is that you could have your laptop and you could be some place, you could also have your desktop at home that's running the software and you could very easily activate your software in your laptop and have all of the applications there. Now, all of the applications in the Creative Cloud, when you subscribe to the Creative Cloud here, you get all the applications that are in the Cloud which are going to be basically every application that Adobe makes. And this is supposed to list all of the applications there with the cloud and yup ... But there is a list of probably 20 or 30 applications that show up. You don't have to install them all. You can just install whichever ones you want, but you get every application. So the only exception to that rule is you can actually buy Photoshop or Lightroom by itself. Or else you'll get the entire Creative Suite with absolutely every single application in there and there are a lot of applications that you can get in the Creative Suite. All of them. You don't have to install them, but they're all there and that's part of your monthly fee that you pay to get that. So if you belong to the Creative Cloud, you already have all these applications. They're all there waiting for you or taunting you. Either one. Jason, it turns out it is very confusing for a lot of people as to know which is the best tool to use when which is exactly why we're here and exactly why you can, by this class and be able to always know what to use when. Okay, so one question that came in is from Amanda Avery. How would you convert hand-drawn illustrations or sketches or fonts into digital files that you can then use? Well, we're gonna show you that, because one of the great features of Illustrator is being able to take anything that you capture via scanner or photograph and actually turn that into a hand-drawn looking or a conversion from a photograph into an actual vector file. So, sketch, line art, logos that are captured by a scanner or a phone, we'll show you that. It's a great feature in Illustrator called image trace, takes anything, turns into a vector graphic, completely scalable and it's pretty amazing. Fantastic. Okay, this is from Anne Beetu. If I'm going to put some text on top of an image in InDesign, should I add the text in Illustrator first or in Photoshop? And then bring the whole thing over to InDesign? Or do I add the text on top of that image in InDesign? Depends on what kind of text do you want. So if I have an image here in InDesign, like so. And I would like to put some text over the top of this, zoom in real close here, depends on what you want the text to be. If you want the text to be purely normal text, Where I'm just gonna go in and I'm gonna grab my type tool, and I can put in some text, I can create a text container, and I can choose from my list of fonts that I have in InDesign, and pick a font that I think is going to work good with this, I can put this directly on top of my image. And be able to size that. I can change the color, I can change the opacity of this as well. If I would like to create something that's going to be a lot different, okay? I would like the type to be manipulated in some way where it's going to have a different form than just a straight line of text or at an angle, that's when I would go in to Illustrator and I would create a new Illustrator document and I would take my type tool and I would create some text in Illustrator and here I would go in and I would choose a font that's going to be fun and interesting, right there. Like I said, fun and interesting, there we go. And I would like to do some manipulation to this type. Now, if it's just this way, I could do this in InDesign. But I wanna have a little bit more fun with this, so I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna put some interesting effect on it here, and I'm going to do a little twist to it and I'm gonna have a little bit of fun with this right here and now I have something that I could not do in InDesign. This is getting into type manipulation and with that, I could outline it, and I could also stretch a little bit if I wanted to, have a little bit more fun. And now, we've created kind of a logo type or type manipulation. I can't do this is InDesign. I could do this in Illustrator. Save this as an Illustrator file, and then bring this in to InDesign very easily which I'll do. So I'll save this file as an Illustrator file, jump back over to InDesign and then, I could place this file. And find that file right there, and there's my smile file, and I'll be able to take that and put that into InDesign, like so. I can't do that in InDesign. 'Cause I can't really create anything like that in InDesign, I can set type, make it larger or smaller, put it over multiple pages, put something like that. Will I ever do this in Photoshop? No. Because the problem with doing something like that in Photoshop is this, if I have a Photoshop file and I decided to put text in Photoshop, like this, the problem with text in Photoshop is that it is all raster-based. It is all made up of little squares which means if I go in and I set my type, when I actually look at this closely, it's actually made up of pixels. Well, the whole point of doing type, is that it's nice and clean. Just type it back there, shapes and fills. So, if I were to create this in Photoshop and I were to bring this in, the bigger I made it, the worse it would look. So, really doing any sort of type in Photoshop, unless the type is actually integrated into the picture in Photoshop, whereas weaving in and out or else it's an actual integral part of a picture, I wouldn't do type in Photoshop. You can do other effects in Illustrator but doing type in Photoshop, you'll never get a clean, beautiful line in Photoshop because it's always made of pixels. And as you see here, that smooth line that looks so smooth, isn't smooth. You can't get smooth from squares. Okay? So, I wouldn't do type in Photoshop unless of course it's gonna integrate into a picture where it has to be an integral part of that picture. And to that, just, I think answered these other question that had come in. What if it's not type? How does one bring other types of vectors into Photoshop? Can they be converted as png files? So, you can convert a lot of different files and we're gonna talk about that in Photoshop but you can bring other content into Photoshop as well. In a lot of times, when you'll be working with a Photoshop file, you may want to bring in a vector graphic into Photoshop and you certainly can. When you bring a vector file into Photoshop, it's going to want to rasterize it because Photoshop is a raster-based program. So, it's gonna want to turn everything that you've done into squares of colors because that's what Photoshop is. Can I bring in a logo in here? I certainly can. And I can very easily open up a vector graphic in Photoshop here and it'll have a translate into vector so if I go in and I open my logo in here. Let me go ahead and I'll put my doughnut that I've created. I can open that up in Photoshop. There it is. And it's going to rasterize the entire image so this was created in Illustrator but now that I look at it it's in Photoshop and it's all rasterized. Well maybe I want to bring this in because I would like to integrate this in with something else and I can but it's now a picture. That's a full on picture. And so, if I scale it up it's going to degrade in quality cause I have a fixed amount of information that's gonna be scaled over a larger area. So, if I do that, it's gonna start to look worse and as you see it starts to get a lot more blurry as I'm doing that because it's now made up of a fixed amount of pixels. When I do that, it looks kind of blurry and now, if I wanted to I could then go in and I could integrate it into my image and have a whole bunch more fun with it as well of which I could never do in Illustrator but I can do in Photoshop. What about if we move it as a smart object? You can do it as a smart object but it's still going to rasterize it as well because you're still in Photoshop. But smart objects are awesome. We won't cover smart objects in class but just go ahead and whet your appetite with, check out smart objects, they really are quite awesome. And of course, Jason, we have many more classes here on CreativeLive that you've taught that include smart objects as well as we get more advanced. Yes. This exact Photoshop image right here is the advanced, basic and advanced compositing and I'm pretty sure we talked about smart objects in there. Absolutely, absolutely. So, another question about rasterizing, this is from Ron Git, when we print to PDF do we rasterize the file and this person had said 'cause on a slide with the raster versus vector, the oval orange seemed to pixelate, so was that because it was no longer in its pure vector form? Well, that's a pretty good catch right there and actually the reason why that looked the way it did here, I'm gonna get back to this graphic right here, is I had created this in Illustrator to give you this effect here. And then I took a screenshot of it. Because I couldn't save the graphic with the little handles on there because you can't see those handles, that's part of how Photo- or how Illustrator builds and in order to show those handles, I would have to draw them in manually so I took a screenshot of this, which is a picture and a picture is pixel-based so very good catch, but yes if you zoom in on it, that is pixelized, mm-mmm, okay? You're not supposed to know that (laughing) but yes, so that is a picture of a vector right there folks. That is not truly a vector, it's just for representational purposes. But yes, good catch because that is a photograph. I took a screenshot, okay, small disclaimer. (laughing) The question was not to call you on that. But when we, when printing to PDF or creating a PDF, does the PDF, is that rasterized? So, when we go from a PDF and by the way, we don't actually print to a PDF. A lot of applications, that's the only way you can export your file to a PDF, but when we're dealing with the Creative Suite here because Adobe Acrobat is part of the Adobe Creative Suite, when we're dealing with any file that we have here, I don't actually print to a PDF, I actually go on to the file menu and I export to a PDF because this has a full on built-in PDF writer that we can set a whole bunch of parameters and settings on. Anything that is vector in the file, remains vector. Anything that is raster in the file, remains raster. A PDF stands for portable document format which basically takes all of its content and leaves it in its pretty much its original form. So if I were to go in and I were to examine this PDF, with any of these PDFs that I have created here, I could actually see what is raster and what is vector because it keeps the content exactly the same from where it started. In Photoshop, I can save directly to a Photoshop PDF. In Illustrator, I can save my file to be PDF compatible. In InDesign, I can export my file to a PDF, all of which gives me universal access with those files to be put into virtually any application out there or to be viewed virtually on any device, any web browser, no matter what it may be. Great, thank you. Another great question that just came in about what to use when, this is from Kim McDuggal. What about creating graphics for a website, what program would you, would work for creating type as part of a graphic for instance, that might be on a webpage header, to keep that type crisp? Yes, so this is an age-old question when it comes to being able to do stuff for the web. So, as a generalization here, when we put stuff up on the web, it's going to be image-based. So we're going to create it and the end result is going to be in Photoshop. We do have scalable vector graphics which allow us to do vector online, Flash does that as well, but I'm just gonna do a blanket generalization saying, "okay, images that go on the web" "are gonna be done in Photoshop" and that's exactly what we do. So we have two, basically we have a couple different ways we can do graphics. Any image that we save for the web will always going to save an image for the web. If it's gonna be a photographic image, we always wanna save them as a JPEG, and a JPEG is going to allow us to have the full range of color in our image and it's going to provide the best overall reproduction for any type of photographic image. It's gonna be compressed. It's gonna be fast to load. We can show thousands or millions of colors, but it's horrible for graphics, it's horrible for type because JPEG's main purpose is to display full color images, full color range. So if I were to do that, I would have a real issue especially if I took a logo, but logos pop up on websites all the time and it's not because you can go ahead and upload an Illustrator file to a website, it doesn't work. Websites don't display Illustrator files or PDFs. They go in and they're going to take the logo like we have here and if I wanna put this up on the website, I could also save this for the web but if I save this as a JPEG, you'll notice that we get some not so nice looking kind of, edge quality on it here that just doesn't look very good at all and it's kind of hard to see but it gets really crunchy and jibbly and ... those are technical terms by the way. And it's, so any type, any logo, any graphic, any solid color saved as a JPEG, the quality is really not great. So, I'm sure you've heard of PNGs or GIF files, that's what those are used for. GIFs and PNGs are primarily used for any type of solid color, logo, graphic, or type and that's gonna be the best way that you can reproduce that type of file on the web. So, don't use a JPEG if it's gonna be for a logo, solid color, type. Use a JPEG for images, so full color images, full tonal range, that's what it's used for. On the flip side, you don't wanna use a GIF or a PNG for an actual full color image because Photoshop, when you save a GIF or a PNG, limits it to a maximum number of 256 colors. So a beautiful color image made up of only 256 colors is going to be quite compromised and we will talk about that in the Photoshop one because that's very important when it comes to outputting content from Photoshop because we use a lot of web and device imagery, logos, graphics, type, absolutely. Alright, great. Shout out to Philip who says "PNGs are awesome." (laughing) They are, they are, they're more awesome than most people now, especially PNG-24s. Oh. Oh, yes. Oh boy (laughing). Oh, yes, people are like, "I've never heard of that" and it's like, "cause you haven't watched CreativeLive as much" (laughing) I'm sure we've talked them. I do have a safer web course out there. You do? I do, using this exact logo and it's all coming back to me now. (laughing) From Janella and there were actually multiple questions about a lot of people using the iPads or the iPad's Pro and using these programs on there or the apps and so, can you talk a little bit about how utilizing the apps to, into this workflow works or are there issues, biggest issues or just kind of toss your point of view on using those as well. So, a new theme that's coming out is being able to use your Surface, your touchpad, or your iPad or any type of mobile device to be able to do a lot of the things that Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator does. So, there are a few features in each one of these applications that can do these, but Adobe actually has specific apps, Adobe Capture, Adobe Create, a whole bunch of them specifically made for touch devices and these will allow you to go in and capture pictures, create vector objects, do sketching, do basic shapes, basic layouts, and then you can then take from that app on any device that you're using and bring them in to the appropriate application. So if you're doing some sketching, you can bring it into Illustrator and it'll convert it right to vector. If you're doing some basic layout, with going ahead and kind of scribbling it on the tablet with some basic shapes, it'll go ahead and allow you to bring that into InDesign or you can capture an image, do some very quick basic Photoshop, retouching right on the app, right on your touch device, bring into Photoshop and then edit it further from there. So there's a lot of content out there. There's a lot of apps out there and Adobe has really started to push all of those. I was down at Adobe Max last year and they were showing some really great content that's coming out. I have all the apps on my phone that I use and it's really quite awesome. And it goes beyond just being able to sketch, layout, and retouch, but you can also do a whole bunch of other cool effects with this stuff. Adobe Capture allows you to take pictures of color and you can bring those into your libraries and use them across all the Adobe applications so I would definitely check that out.