The ABCs of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign
Adobe’s Creative Suite (CS) products have been around a long time – the first commercial CS program, Illustrator 88 (logo above), launched in 1986. Technology has come a long way since rat-tails, cassette tapes, and New Kids on the Block were in style. Like the New Kids, Adobe CS has grown with the times. Today, there are over 15 CS programs, offering tools for digital media, print, video, multimedia and more to create anything from basic graphic designs to the avant-garde.
read moreAfter Effects Can Help Build Better Business Graphics
As our visual culture continues to grow and video content becomes more important to your business’ sales and marketing efforts, you should become familiar with software tools to help your business grow. Adobe Creative Suite has become well known for its photo editing and vector graphic applications over the past decade or so, including Photoshop and Illustrator. Today, Adobe After Effects has emerged as an industry leader for creating motion graphics. And for good reason. According to Adobe.com, After Effects allows you to “deliver cinematic visual effects and sophisticated motion graphics using the industry standard for animation and compositing that offers you complete creative control while delivering unparalleled performance.” In other words, you can now create the same sleek, modern video designs that you often see in professional commercials at your home or office computer. As with any software program, there are some preferred practices when using After Effects that can help you be more successful. First, you should always remember that After Effects is intended for short video sequences and animated text graphics. Typically, this means less than five minutes of video. After Effects helps you create the visual 2D and 3D graphics, but be sure to use the proper tool to put your whole video together. Once you have all of your pieces ready, from After Effects and video clips, I would suggest that you use a video editing software such as Premiere Pro to put your whole project together. In addition, while you could incorporate audio into your video sequence within After Effects, you might want to look for an audio tool such as Audacity to do a better job and allow you more control. In After Effects, there are more than 200 presets and effects you’ll want to dive in to. The more experience and knowledge you can gain on the built-in features, the better you will be able to create professional sequences. Learning After Effects can be difficult to start, but I promise that you’ll enjoy the results of a little bit of hard work. As the visual culture continues to grow and more video content becomes necessary for your business, you should consider After Effects as a good tool to keep you ahead of competitors. [Originally posted in the Coloradoan on...
read moreDWC & Adobe
Digital Workshop Center is the ONLY Adobe Authorized Training Center in Northern Colorado and second in the state.
Technical Support
