Adobe Cloud: An Overview

I've decided to pick up Adobe Cloud to further my interests in design; it would provide a great asset in assessing the role of color, contrast and depth in my exploration of design concepts. I've used Photoshop before, but I haven't even scratched the depth of what it's capable of. Instead, I've been mostly a user of layers and transparency to achieve the effects that I want. However Photoshop isn't just about design; it's also about having the ability to manipulate photos; not only real-life ones. Of course, Photoshop is also notable for being used a tool for stunts like this:

Joking aside, I'm not trying to learn Photoshop to do cool things like that, but rather some serious material. I will be focusing on how to use the different tools in the Adobe Cloud suite. Adobe Cloud is Adobe's attempt at reducing the costs of Photoshop so that more people can access the versatility of the Photoshop suite. I will outline the different kinds of tools that are available with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

Adobe Photoshop CC:

This is the main program that is used to dynamically edit photos. The use of layers is one of Photoshop's great abilities because it allows the user to edit photos on one layer without affect the entire picture. These layers can also include special effects such as contrast, transparency and other modifiers that increase the complexity of a photo.

Adobe Illustrator CC:

This is Adobe's line of illustrating software with enhanced capability that allows digital artists to create complex digital illustrations with dynamic tools like 3D perspective drawing or even Windows 8 touchscreen support.

Adobe Indesign CC:

This is Adobe's page design suite which allows designers to design different page layouts for things like brochures and other types of printed documentation including features such as precise font management features, dynamic hyperlinks and instant font previews on the working document. 

Adobe Dreamweaver CC:

This is Adobe's Dreamweaver software which allows the user to incorporate dynamic webpages and the design for them. Enhanced CSS designer allows seamless CSS functionality for richer styles. Despite being design focused, it also includes support for all of HTML, CSS and Javascript to form the triple most essential elements of a webpage.

Adobe Premiere Pro:

The video production suite by Adobe, which includes dual functionality between it and Adobe SpeedGrade CC for correct color calibrations when viewing videos. It also features advanced support for increased video formats and up to 4K compatible formats, allowing for hi-resolution video editing. It even includes multiple camera editing and precise audio controls. Furthermore, Adobe Premiere Pro is designed to take advantage of GPU-processing such as Nvidia CUDA for faster video processing.

Adobe AfterEffects:

This adds cinematic effects to an otherwise mundane project; lighting and gamma can be adjusted through this program. AfterEffects can also be used to add effects to 3D rendering, giving users the ability to apply manual anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, reduced blur to create additional effects that the 3D rendering software doesn't provide. This only affects static 3D images, as the 3D renderer and hardware would have to provide dynamic anti-aliasing.

Adobe Muse:

This is the companion tool for Dreamweaver, which attempts to create dynamic websites without the explicit use of code. 

These are the different Adobe programs that I hope to using in the following months as I learn how they work together. I am excited to use Adobe Creative Cloud and I hope to use it to a fuller extent.