Today, I'll show you when to use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. If you liked the video, then please click like. If you want to see more content like this in future, click Subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification. If you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content, become a patreon visit my Patreon page. See you next time. [MUSIC PLAYING]