When to Use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign

good afternoon everybody welcome to my stream here on the Adobe Creative Cloud channel my name is teri white worldwide design and photography evangelist for Adobe it's my pleasure to be streaming to you live here from Atlanta welcome welcome welcome we're going to be talking about a topic that I get lots of questions on all the time or kind of see you know people doing things that maybe they could be doing a different or better way and that's basically when to use Photoshop Illustrator and InDesign in other words you most people are usually learn one of those applications first I mean that's just human nature and you gravitate to the one you you really like and then you end up doing everything application because it's the one you know and and again there's nothing wrong with that other than when there's something wrong with that meaning that just because it's the tool you know doesn't necessarily mean it's the best tool for the job hello eewan thanks for joining me hello Lynn thanks for joining it as well and hello Jan and Natalie and everyone coming into the chat and glad to see you here and Natalie glad that you're a fan all right so we're gonna be taking a look at Photoshop Illustrator InDesign and show you some things that they do that the other two don't do we'll just cover some of the things that make people want to use one over the other and tend to use one more than they probably should if I had to go back in my history of learning the applications I would say that I probably learned and that's going to sound weird even though it's not a hundred percent true I learned InDesign first and I say that only because I didn't really learn InDesign first as much as I learned page layout first I started way back into PageMaker days and then QuarkXPress and InDesign and I picked up actually I take that back before that I even learned illustrator but I was learning pagemaker illustrator at the same time so I still stick to I learned page layout first then illustrator then Photoshop so I learned Photoshop actually the last but now nowadays since I'm you know doing more photography and image editing I'm using Lightroom and Photoshop more than the other two combined so it really depends on which one you start with but more importantly which one's the best one for the job yeah you use Photoshop and illustrator randomly on various projects that's great and hello and welcome from the UK or welcome UK and great glad having so many of you here know InDesign and Photoshop still realize that I'm doing everything in Photoshop yeah yeah again this is what I listen what I was saying earlier people tend to stick with that one application they know inside-out or they're learning and they're spending most of their time in and so when it comes time to do a job that's the first application they pick up whether or not it's the right application or not so without further ado let's jump over to the computer and here's what makes this a little bit more challenging because all three applications Photoshop Illustrator and InDesign they absolutely have some overlap they absolutely can do many of the same things so depending on what it is you do you're doing you could probably do it in all three you could do you know for example I could design a page like this in Photoshop I can absolutely design a page like this in Illustrator and I could absolutely design a page like this in InDesign so which one is the right one well again it depends on what else you need so for example let me let me just create a new document I'm here in Photoshop CC I'm going to go ahead and create a new document soon as I find my mouse there there it is create a new document and I just want to show you a couple of things in the new new dialog so one of the things that makes this even it kind of blurs the lines more between the three applications is that both or illustrator got it first and then Photoshop got what are called artboards so because both illustrator and Photoshop have artboards now that even makes people do more things in Photoshop and illustrator that they probably would be better off doing maybe an InDesign now are we caught in our boards for a reason although they work like multiple pages they're really not intended to be multiple pages so for example here I'm in Photoshop and I'm telling to create a 1920 by 1080 document I'm telling it to use the artboard feature so when I click create what it does is it puts that artboard name up there which of course is our port one until I change it and more importantly to put its going to put everything on that's on that artboard in a layer group called our port one so if i zoom out a little bit and i go to the artboard tool I can click and create another artboard and another artboard and another artboard I'm create as many artboards as i want or as my computer will allow and so therefore I could put one design on one artboard another design in another artboard another design another airport and that's what they're for that is what our ports are for but when you start thinking about using Photoshop to layout a brochure or a book or something that's got tons of pages then you're causing yourself extra pain and that's that's just you shouldn't be doing it that way so for example let me just while I'm here let me show you a couple things about airports a lot of people are still don't know that our boards even exist so when I click on an artboard name first of all I get the ability to add artboards around it also I get the ability to change it from just the random sizes that I was dragging out to define sizes so you'll you'll notice that all of these if you look at the presets here all of these are screen sizes for a reason alright so for example let's say I was going to design a screen for an iPhone six-plus that will automatically give me the right size to do something for an iPhone six-plus are going to do something for maybe something a lot larger like a Microsoft I saw one in here earlier I know I saw ya Microsoft Surface pro 3 that's going to give me the design for a surround that would be bigger surface pro 3 so forth and so on so you can you can either type in your custom page size or our pore size I should say or pick one of the presets so in this particular case this artboard was 1920 by 1080 this one I dragged out manually so if I wanted that one to be 10 1024 by 768 I've just made it 1024 by 768 so you can make artboards any size you want put anything on them you want and away you go even though you can do that and that's a cool thing to do for design and mock-ups and prototyping that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do when it comes to creating layouts so it really depends on what you're going to do with those artboards so I see have a couple people in the chat hey Victoria hey Jason who else did I see pop up there a minute ago I saw Jan earlier and Michael welcome everyone so let me close this artboard document and let's get into some of the things that photoshop is good for some of the things that only Photoshop can do and the other two don't do now Photoshop for those of you are brand new is a pixel editing program that's what it's for it was always and has been from day one back in the 90s a pixel editing program so it's a the ability to change the look and feel of pixels to take an image from the background for example now although it's evolved over the years and you can put multiple documents inside of other documents you create artboards and work with text and you can do all those things that doesn't make it a layout tool but what it is strong at are things like this so for example if I double click on this part of the document I get to a multi-layered file that was embedded inside of it now I've already started some of the work on this multi-layered file so for example I'll notice here that I've added some text added his name going across but I kind of want that magazine look to it where he's standing in front of the type and an only way to really make that happen effectively is to cut him out so that he's in front of the type and the type is going behind his head so I've got another duplicate of that original background on top so that way I've got the background the type in the middle sandwiched in the middle and that layer on top now of course there are dozens of ways to cut an image out from the background but this particular image makes a great use of a feature called our select based on a focus area so in other words it's got shallow depth of field you can see him in focus the buildings in the background are out of focus Photoshop can now see that so when I go to my select menu and I choose focus area it will basically automatically create a mask based on what's in focus and so right now it's based give me a preview on white I can say show me that preview on the Stewart on layers that way that way we can see it or I could show it on black and if I show it on black I can see well while it did cut it out it didn't really do that good of a job meaning there's more work to do so one of the things I can do let's go back to our layers one of the things I can do is even though I start it with that selection and I can change what's in focus and what's not more importantly it's got selected masks built in so this used to say refine edge until we add a selected mask and now it says selected math so that take me over to the selected mask workflow where I can finish the work now it doesn't look bad right now because the other background is still behind it so actually we could get away with it but let's go ahead and clean it up let's go in first and foremost I usually turn on smart radius will increase that radius smart radius is just a hair and what that will do is soften up the edges around here and harden the edges around a sweater and jacket and things like that the next thing I want to do is I want to use the refine brush will make that brush a little bigger there we go and what that will help me do well clean up the area around remember how jagged his hair was before and so for exactly we'll see that in a minute I'll just go in and kind of just clean that area up around the hair and I already saw some of the type come through just by doing that and of course same thing down here this is getting a little weird so let's go ahead and we can also bring that back in if we choose so let's go ahead and just clean that up a little bit make the brush a little bit bigger and we'll bring back in that sweater that was being chopped up a little bit and clean that up and go back to our refine brush and just kind of refine that one little piece out just a little bit better okay so now if we look at that on black again that gets a lot better we're still not there yet but I can continue working on it here so for example I can go clean that up a little bit more and go clean this edge up a little bit more if I choose actually I kind of liked it better the other way so let's do it with a brush just clean that area up just a hair there we go getting around it of course you take your time zoom in do a really good job of this but you get the idea all right so now again we can show that on layers there we go and now that we've got that in place I can output that and still continue to work on it if I choose to so output it as a new layer with a mask now once I've done that I've still got the type layer and the move tool and I can move that around and even see it through the hair and see how good of a job that is doing all the way around and if I still need to fix something I still have the original mask to work with that to clean that up just a bit those are the kinds of things flatout InDesign can't do illustrator even if you try to do it with masking would be very very difficult if not impossible to do and that's a perfect job for Photoshop that's what photo shops for for doing things that you are going to need to do to at the pixel level to an image that no other neither of the other tools can do so when it comes to editing photos cutting photos out adding adding special effects filters things like that whether you do it non-destructively or destructively those are the kinds of things that Photoshop can do now let's switch over briefly and head over to illustrator so here I am now an illustrator CC and illustrator the different biggest difference between illustrator and Photoshop is illustrator often or is more often used for vector work even though yes you can put vectors now in Photoshop it doesn't have anywhere near the drawing capabilities of illustrator illustrator is a vector drawing tool with all kinds of tools for drawing like perspective grid like the the shape builder tool for combining shapes together the width tool for creating variable widths on your path so forth and so on those are the kinds of things that Photoshop just can't touch it doesn't have anywhere near the tool set for now for doing this kind of work so for example I want to just show you some of the improvements even if you don't draw that have been done along the way to make drawing a lot better so here's what I've done so far I'm on a blank layer I'm on I'm using a white stroke I can actually use no fill but I'm going to use a white stroke and I'm going to switch to a tool that many of you probably if you ever used it you used it once and you forgot about it you never wanted to use it again because it was so bad and that tool is we actually now become one of my favorites it's the pencil tool although the pin is great for doing Bezier curves and perfectly mathematical curves it's hard for beginners to grasp how that tool works I've got videos on it there's a video here on the Creative Cloud channel that Paul Trani did on how to use the pen tool I've got videos on the pen tool but when you show that to a beginner they're just like scratching their head I don't get it I don't why it works that way and is it a great tool for what it does yes is it an easy to learn tool and probably not so here's a tool that is easy to learn because it works like your finger or your pin but most people don't like it and I'll show you why most people don't like it let's switch over so we can see my canvas here now I'm going to switch to my stylus so I'm even going to give it best-case-scenario I'm going to use the pencil tool I'm going to try and draw a path that's like the shape of her hair down at the bottom there so a vector path here we go using a stylus on my Cintiq I'm going to do the best I can here we go and you look at that line you pause for a second you delete it and you never use that tool again because the results are so bad in other words it was it's too much like what I did worth it it everywhere I paused everywhere my hand shook it put a point down it put a pause down hit put a path down and it's just not a smooth line so that way that's the reason why people hit delete immediately or undo and they never use that tool again because for many many many years it was that bad so pencil tool people just wrote it off never used it however pencil tool got some new life a couple versions ago if you double click on the pen tool pencil tool options you can go from fidelity accurate meaning do every little hesitation and every little notch I do or basically it will suck to smooth this is what you really want and you will never go back to accurate again I can't ever think of a reason why I would put it back on accurate but anyway let's go in now just just basically use the same tool change the setting and now we're in do the same thing here we go best I can look at how much smoother that line is there's no jagat it's half there one one-tenth the amount of points and I even if I need to adjust it I can because I've got those points to make the adjustments and also one of even though photoshop's pencil tool is you know back in the 90s you still have the ability to even create that variable width so I can have it be thin and thick along the way based on that variable width tool that we have in Illustrator so for people that are doing drawing vector art resolution-independent i can use yeah use type but i can use any any way of drawing that i like i can make this happen and use any colors in any formats and you know two dozen tools for drawing that's where illustrator comes in now illustrator photoshop really about the same level of learning meaning you will never really learn both tools to their fullest like you always be able to learn something new but I don't really think look at one is being that much harder than the other I think it really really depends on your background for people that like to draw illustrator is probably easier people that don't like to draw photo shops probably easier so it just really depends on what you're doing now again if I do new document I just hit command in I get that same ability although even though stray lets me create my artboards on the fly so I just said give me five artboards create and there are my five artboards so this is why a lot of people tend to want to do full-blown designs and page layout and brochures and all kinds of things in Illustrator because now they've got the ability to do those artboards and yes your our boards can be different sizes and custom sizes but that doesn't make it a great layout tool even though yes it can do layouts just like it doesn't make it a great photo editor tool because it can't really do a lot of photo editing and just like photoshop's not a great vector drawing tool because it doesn't have a lot of drawing tools so it hands-on what you're trying to do now let me show you one more advantage since a lot of you are getting into touch and abled devices so I've got a again I'm on my Cintiq here before I switch off of it let me switch to a tool that we introduced in Illustrator or a while back called the touch type tool and this is a tool that lets you design based with type based on your touch so let me turn on touch on the display and now touch the letters and here I'm able to go in now and physically interact with my fingers for the design so if I want to make that bigger or I want to rotate it a little bit more I want to tap on this letter I want to bring that letter in closer and kind of curl it in I'll make it a little wider or a little thinner I can do those things with touch controls because illustrator is enabled for touch and that's great for anybody with a tablet or anything that has a touch and able like for the surface books and all that stuff this would be great for so create your own custom designs this way I'm not saying that I'm doing a great job here but you get the idea touch enabled illustrator exclusive Photoshop doesn't have that not for type anyway InDesign doesn't have that so this is where illustrator strengths really come in for people that want to do design work okay next up let's take a look at I'm going to switch off be us and take care let's take a look at InDesign now InDesign again like I said I started learning page layout before anything else and InDesign has always been my tool by go-to tool whenever I need to layout more than a couple of pages or actually more than one page I'm usually going to go to InDesign to do it because InDesign is designed to do pages each document can contain up to 9999 pages per document so where illustrator can have smart boards and Photoshop can have some artboards InDesign lives to have pages and yes now even in InDesign the pages can be different sizes in the same all right so here we've got a multi-page document the pages are always designed to go top to bottom and where InDesign comes in to the workflow is basically look at InDesign as the tool you would use to bring it all together you've done your photos in Photoshop you got everything looking great in Photoshop you've done all your vector work and illustrator and now you want to lay it out effectively on a page that's where InDesign comes in so for example if I choose new document just like we've been doing now I don't get artboards I get how many pages do you want because it's a page layout tool do you want those pages to be facing or not so let's say I want cut sorry wrong wrong button let's say I want to make a 10 page document will make a 10 page facing document we can choose whatever page size we want or make it custom and notice it's designed for more of a print workflow but it can do web and mobile so it will give me screen sizes instead but let's say we're gonna do this one for print and we'll click OK and now that's going to give me my 10 pages they're all there ready to go all laid out like a book and so unlike a word processor or unlike even working with artboards and illustrator and Photoshop I'm designing this at any given stage of the design process I can jump to page 5 and say I know what's going on page 5 there's an ad that goes in the middle of the book and I need to put that in add in right now because I've got it or I can go in to do a top-down approach go to page 1 page 2 page 3 whatever I can rearrange the pages I get the pages like I said earlier it could be different sizes I can do whatever I want with page layout so how does this work how do I get things on to the page from the other applications well one of the easiest ways nowadays to do that is using libraries so for example now and that's again this presupposes that you were diligent enough to put your illustrator and Photoshop designs into libraries but if you were you can always go up to your file menu and choose place and go find those native files where I'm so used to not doing place from the menu you can do place from the file menu and go grab your illustrator native files your Photoshop native files and bring those right in that's right you don't have to save JPEGs you don't have to save tips you don't have to save EPS illustrator and Photoshop native files can be brought right in now but like I said if you use libraries then it's just a matter of literally dragging things from a library onto the page now it hasn't placed it yet it's just showing me where it would go and then I could say oh you know what that should really be on page three I can drag it down on page three and tell it that that item goes there you know let's go back up to page one I need some text in page one and we're just going to put out a text frame there we're going to type the word design and I can of course use keyboard shortcuts to Center that to make that larger and of course then I can use whatever fonts and styles and whatever I want so at this point let's go ahead and use I will use Masayo sans and we'll just actually want to make that even bigger let's go ahead and make that pull it down a bit give it some more room to play I'm just going to go ahead and make that fill up that frame okay so now that I got that text in place that text is an object so I can pick that object up move it around current rack the type do whatever I want to the type this new open type options here that if this had open type properties we'll go ahead and choose it I can duplicate that just like any other object I could change what this one says change the font for this one let's make that one a bit heavier and of course change the colors and do whatever else I want to do so InDesign and illustrator are very similar to the way they work illustrators got more drawing capabilities and design basically has very few if any drawing capabilities and no photo editing capabilities yes it has a few filters yes it has a few things can apply looks too but it doesn't touch a pixel it doesn't do any editing whatsoever what else I was going to say so again if I want if I decide later that hey I need to move that down I want to drop in a graphic in here I go to my library and pull in just playing around here but let's go get one of these let's okay we'll use this one I've used this one a couple of times before but we'll use this one it works here too I pull that in now of course that one came in on top of everything I can choose to keep it on top of everything or just right-click and send it to the back I could also rearrange it by putting it on a layer that's behind everything just like we do with layers inside Photoshop and illustrator we've got layers inside of InDesign the difference with layers and I know I'm getting into a lot of just random details the difference with layers in Illustrator and InDesign they are document wide whereas layers in Photoshop are more specific to the actual individual pixels themselves so for example I could make this layer and call this one background and I can make another new layer and we can call that one text and now of course I want to take the text and move it to the text layer so it's on the text layer and take that text move it to the text layer so it's on that text layer and so now when I turn off the text layer of the text goes away if I twirl down the text layer I can see what text is on it so again layers are all the way across all the applications working with type all the way across all three applications but and again I could I could design this page that we're looking at right now in all three applications it just really depends on where you're going to go from here if it's just a simple one-page design and it's for you great make it in whatever application you're comfortable with but once you go beyond that you really have to evaluate what's the best tool to use but I'm going to do a lot of drawing a lot of vector art probably going to do it in Illustrator if I'm going to do a lot of editing with the photos and things and designs and knocking things out probably going to do that in Photoshop if I want to do something long for more than a page I'm 99% of the time going to jump in it jump in the InDesign because even though I can make multiple artboards chances are if I'm talking pages I want to do that in a page layout tool that extends the benefits of oh by the way one more benefit real quick and this is probably the biggest benefit for InDesign is that across those multiple pages so let's create a text frame here and let's create one here and let's create one here is that text can easily be linked between those multiple pages so I'd click here link to that one click here and link to that one and if I say show my text threads or show extras and then show text threads we'll be able to see that linkage so now if I want to put in some a quote of course fill that with regular text but let's go ahead and just put in some placeholder type for now and we're just going to go to our type menu or is it under edit I was forget I think it's under type o we're going to fill with placeholder text there it is fill placeholder text and that will fill that with sample lorem ipsum text and of course now if I decide that I want this one to be multiple columns I can make it multiple columns so let's for example turn that into three columns and now that's three columns of text page layout tool much easier to do page layout things I want to make this bigger or smaller pull it down a little bit make that a little bit smaller expand this one out more make that one shorter you know what I decided that the graphic the text should be next to the graphic instead so changing my mind much much easier I couldn't imagine trying to do this info shop nowhere near as fast because as much as I love Photoshop its strength is not doing page layout so if you need to do this kind of work that's what InDesign is for InDesign is world's greatest page layout tool Photoshop is not and I see people doing page layout in Photoshop and illustrator every day and I just have a moment of silence for them alright so let that sit let's see I'm sure I've missed some questions but I think the moderators were in there jumping in answering them - what about web pages using InDesign and design is really not a web design tool with how we really want to do web pages I would do them in um in Adobe muse that's what muses for now could you design a page in InDesign and export it out as HTML and have a mess on your hands and then clean it up yes but that gets back into it's not the best tool for this InDesign has had attempts of making web pages in the past and they've just never been good enough so the InDesign team kind of shied away from making it do more web stuff now it does have a web publishing feature for putting a document online in other words converting this to a a non reflowable non the word I'm looking for non fluid design non-responsive page on the web so it would take this and make an HTML page out of this and it would make a document that's the publish online feature which I've also covered in a previous broadcast yes it can do that but that's a specific feature that's being hosted by Adobe that blah blah blah it does not for creating HTML pages that you're going to host on your own side mix with your own site so for pensall it's for putting documents online all right well thank you Rupert glad you were here live and glad you selected tutorials best tool for poster design um I would probably do that poster in InDesign because then I can pull together everything no matter what second choice would be illustrator choice vphotoshop if it's a one page design I would like I said before you pretty much get away with any one of the three whichever one you're most comfortable with but for poster design I'm probably going to still go to InDesign first because when you say poster that means I'm going to have typography I'm going to have images I'm going to want to be able to quickly and easily change my mind move things around and so forth and so on so yeah I'm probably still going to do it in InDesign alright my day is going great drew how about you it's been a busy day here at the Home Office yeah it does depend on the poster and yeah you can do the poster in all three apps so probably going to start with whichever one you're most comfortable in but it really depends on you know if you if you saying what's my advice I'm going to say InDesign alright well good I'm glad I was easy to follow for you as well just making sure I don't miss any other questions here before I sign off and I've got tutorials on InDesign and Photoshop and illustrator on my youtube channel as well as here on the career cloud YouTube channel there are lots of things to go watch well not necessarily as many pages as you want it depends on the application so even InDesign has a limit it's 9999 so there is a limit if I wanted 10,000 pages and I would at least have to break it up into two documents and has nothing wrong with that either because it does have a book feature for managing multiple documents all right text layout effects it depends on what you mean by the layout effects all three applications have text effects it just depends on how elaborate you want to go [Music] which program am i most comfortable with overall usually is to want to spend the most time in and that's probably Lightroom I'm the most comfortable in Lightroom I'm probably second most comfortable in InDesign and third most comfortable in Photoshop and that doesn't mean I'm afraid of any of them it just means of all the applications that I can think of those are the ones I've spent the most time in and doing the most things and therefore kind of feel like I have a good handle on them illustrators the want to spend the least time in because I don't draw so therefore when it comes to illustrator I always have to refresh myself on oh yeah where's that feature and what is that down to where's that tool again so illustrator is probably my weakest okay well thank you for that Jan and with that said I'm going to sign off I'll be back on I think again Friday not on YouTube but on Facebook I believe Friday yes I'm doing something for Ellie I'm doing a spark on a spark page for Facebook so facebook.com slash Adobe spark the event is already there you can go and set up a reminder for it and of course I'll be back here on YouTube next week so cheers everybody thanks for watching and if you have a topic you're interested in put that in the chat let me know let us know what you'd like to see in these ongoing streams what kinds of tips and tutorials and things you would like to do alright so what that's it cheers everybody take care of thanks and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 68,467

Keywords: Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe, Creative Cloud, Adobe CC, Adobe Cloud, photograph editing, photo editor, graphic designs software, photograph editor, software, Adobe systems, Adobe creative suite, #MakeAdobeCC, #AdobeCC, #ACCTags, Terry White, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator

Id: 2NrP690oqKA

Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2017