Today, I'll show you when to use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
or InDesign.
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Now, most people are pretty familiar with Photoshop
and what it can do.
People that use Illustrator, however, are far rarer.
Even rarer so, are those that use InDesign.
In this video, I'm going to go through an overview of each one.
So you know which one to use for which application.
Let's begin.
Alrighty, let's get started.
And in the most common program out of the 3
and that is Photoshop.
So I've pasted in a standard Chuck Norris picture
off the internet, and I'm going to show you
how the image is made up.
Photoshop is what we call raster-based,
which is a fancy word for saying that it's based on pixels.
If you weren't aware, zooming in will show you
exactly what this means.
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Pixel images are made up of a grid of different squares,
and each one of those has a color.
As you zoom out, they start to blend together
and that's how the image is created.
Photoshop is number one for image editing.
Photoshop is perfect for taking an image
off your phone, your camera, or even the internet
and touching it up.
In this example here, I'm going to play
with the black and white balance by changing the curves.
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One of the real strengths of Photoshop is using the layers.
You can see here I have David Hasselhoff and Chuck
Norris on two separate layers, so I
can move them around independently of each other.
By using the Transform tool, it's very easy
to resize, move, skew, and add perspective
to different objects.
This is what makes Photoshop so popular for those funny image
edits, where people swap the head from one thing
onto another.
Before we had Instagram filters, we had Photoshop filters
and there are heaps of them here.
There's a huge range of effects that you
can achieve with these filters.
Here's an example of one.
This is Liquify.
Liquify enables you to morph an image
around using very little skill.
The presets are very powerful and not
much time, having never done it before,
you can get something that looks pretty crazy.
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Another really prominent use for Photoshop
is retouching fashion images, whether it's needed or not.
So in this example, I'm going to use the Clone tool.
So basically, I can hold down the Alt key and set my target.
And then when I come back and paint,
I will transfer that piece of texture into its place.
So this is commonly used to get rid of imperfections
and little marks and things like that.
And it adds to the effect that people
describe as being airbrushed.
So we've established that Photoshop is the number one
program for editing images, especially when it
comes to print and web.
So why do we need Illustrator?
Well, let's revisit that concept of Photoshop being pixel-based.
Here I've got a simple pattern where I've
drawn a rectangle and a circle.
Photoshop stores this information
by recording the color of every single pixel on the grid.
When we zoom in, we'll see the problem with this.
We can see here that our circle is
beginning to become pixelated.
The way to get around this is to draw all of our shapes
in an enormous resolution.
So that way we have to zoom in for some time
before it starts to pixelate.
This, however, makes a really big file sizes,
which isn't quite ideal.
If we switch to Illustrator and have the same type of pattern,
we can see the difference between raster and vector
graphics.
Every time I zoom in here, it simply redraws it,
and you can see that we never lose quality.
If I hover the mouse over, I can see
that the vector is highlighted.
Whereas Photoshop stores the final image
in a series of pixels on a grid, Illustrator
stores the instructions to create the image.
In this example, it will keep instructions
to know that there's a rectangle here and a circle here,
as well as the proportion and relative positioning of each.
Every time we zoom in or out, it simply
follows those instructions to redraw it on the screen
and create it perfectly.
For this reason, Illustrator is perfect for doing things
like logos.
If we visit our teaching tech logo here and zoom in,
we can see that all of the little shapes that make it up
are made out of vectors.
The advantage here is that I can blow this up
to the size of a building, and it never lose quality.
I can also shrink it down really small for something
like a business card, and it'll look great there too.
I face it in a picture of the Hof
to show that Illustrator, in fact, can
handle raster graphics.
It doesn't automatically convert them to vectors, however,
so if you Zoom in, it still will become pixelated.
Illustrator is particularly good for quickly moving and placing
different elements to create things like posters.
It's important to note that Illustrator
does have a range of raster-editing capabilities,
but it's not really anything compared to Photoshop.
In fact, it calls it the Photoshop effects,
but it's still vastly cut down from what
you'll find in Photoshop.
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Despite being vector-based, the fills in Illustrator
are quite powerful.
Here we have two examples of different fills.
The one on the left is a straight gradient.
You can bring up your gradient panel, select your object
and then change a range of parameters
to do with the gradient.
You can also change from linear to radial and include
extra colors if you wish.
This example on the right isn't as well known.
This one uses the mesh tool.
You can see when I hover over, it's
divided the shape up into a bunch of segments.
If I come up with the White cursor tool
and click on one of the segments,
I can set the color for that segment
and it will try and blend it into the other ones around it.
Here's an example of a poster made as an instruction sheet
using Illustrator.
All of the individual shapes are vectors,
and gradients have been applied to make
different parts stand out.
In this program, it's extremely easy to move things around
and to place them.
Here's another example of some more advanced editing
in Illustrator.
Zooming in might make you think that this is something that's
been done in Photoshop, but hovering the mouse over
reveals that everything is, in fact, vectors.
This section on the front here we can see is a gradient mesh.
And we've also used some of the filters from the dropdown menus
to get the drop shadow and the texture.
Because this is in Illustrator, every time we zoom in or out,
it's redrawn and it should never pixelate.
Because Illustrator is vector-based,
it's also good for making files for laser cutting.
You can see here the pieces for my heart puzzle from
my Valentine's Day 3D printing special.
Each one of them is made up of vectors,
and this is the type of path that the laser
cutter needs to follow to be able to cut something out.
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So we've established that Photoshop
is great for single images.
Illustrator is good for logos and single page layouts.
And that brings us to Adobe InDesign.
InDesign is what you switch to when you've got
to create a lot of something.
Here, I've set up an example page
to show you some of the ways that InDesign can work.
Here's some features that might be of interest.
If you come to either of the rulers
and click and drag across, when you let go,
it'll leave a guideline.
Now when you're moving things around,
you can easily snap to that guideline.
The text boxes are a little bit different to other programs.
You can see that we can resize them
and there was some text hidden underneath.
You'll notice there's a red plus here,
which is telling us this text that's not fitting.
When we hit the plus, it'll prompt
us to drag another text box, and then the text
will continue in that.
If I resize the original one, the text
will flow between them as it needs to.
Now, images in InDesign are a little bit different as well.
When we click on them, we have two functions.
Generally, resizing will resize the box
and effectively crop the image.
If you double-click, now you can resize the actual image,
but that doesn't resize the box.
If you click on an image and hold down Shift and Control,
now you're resizing the bounding box as well as the image
in the same go.
If we examine the components of our design,
we can see that InDesign supports both raster and vector
graphics.
Zooming in on my Chuck Norris image
shows me that it is, in fact, still pixels.
If I come over to my logo and zoom right in
can see that the vectors that make it up
are still traced around the outside.
Despite this crest being a vector from Illustrator,
you'll notice that the quality doesn't look that great.
That's because InDesign, where it can,
keeps a reference to the original file
and then displays a preview quality version only.
That means if I update this design in Illustrator,
it will instantly update in InDesign,
saving me a lot of time.
If I come up to view overprint preview,
it'll transform to the highest quality possible to show you how
it's actually going to print.
Like we touched on earlier, the real beauty of InDesign
is when you need to do a lot of something because
of its templating system.
You'll notice under my Pages panel
that I have my master up the top, and then
my actual pages down below.
Let's make a copy of my logo and set it up as a watermark.
I'm going to double click on a master
and it turns black up here, and the pages look blank.
I'm going to paste in my logo.
I'm going to resize it and move it up
to the top left-hand corner.
I'm going to make a copy and put it in the top right hand corner.
Now, you would never actually place this
without white space here, but as an example, for now
it'll do the job.
Let's double click to come back to our page.
You'll notice that it's been applied because as this page is
labeled with A which corresponds to the A master at the top.
As I add in New pages, you'll see
that each one automatically Bears the image
that we set up in our master.
If I want to come back to my master at any time
and edit the way this is positioned.
When I come back to the page, it'll instantly
be updated there as well.
We also have some really good templating
for our paragraph text.
If I come to this text box here and then
make sure I have paragraph styles open,
I can add a new one from the button down below.
If I double click on it, the control box will come up.
What I'm going to do is rename this one with whatever I feel.
In this case, I'm going to call it heading 1.
Now, when I'm editing other text,
all I need to do to apply this formatting here
is to click on heading 1.
In a complicated document, you're
going to end up with probably five or six different paragraph
styles.
This means you can write and edit your text in a program
with spell check, and then when you paste it in,
it's very quick to come back and click
single time to set the type of style that you want.
Just like with the master layout,
paragraph styles can be edited very quickly
by double clicking them, and then changing whatever we want.
As soon as I hit OK, everything in the document
will come through and update.
I can see this one here has turned accidentally
to the heading 1.
So all I need to do is put my cursor somewhere
in the paragraph, and then do a single click to revert it.
Let's do a little recap.
Photoshop, excellent for image editing
that includes the images off your camera,
and as well as graphic designs and single pictures
that you're making for a variety of applications.
Illustrator, excellent for logos, and in some cases,
single page graphic design layouts.
And finally InDesign, which is set
for making long documents where you can use the templating
to make sure everything stays consistent.
Well, that wraps it up.
I hope you found this overview and comparison very informative.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.
Good day, it's Michael again.
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