InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop - the only way to publish?
Publishing has always been a complex, specialised process. In the early days of desktop publishing, Ventura Publisher and PageMaker led the field, but QuarkXpress soon saw them both off and became the recognised standard publishing application. Adobe's never stood still - and, with its Creative Suite, Adobe is taking back its market share - with good reason.
19 July 2006
First, QuarkXpress is expensive. Very expensive. A full copy will cost you around £750 and even an upgrade from the previous version costs around £300. For that, you get a page layout program. Compare that to Adobe’s Creative Suite. The full ‘standard’ suite costs just £650. For that you get page layout (InDesign), photo editing (Photoshop) and illustration (Illustrator). On top of that you get Bridge, to help you manage your publishing files and projects and Version Cue - which is used to keep multiple versions of projects in the same file rather than keep saving lots of different files. Now let’s see - Photoshop is an industry standard, as is Illustrator, so most designers are going to buy those anyway. The cheapest way to do this is via the Creative Suite, so - hey presto - you get InDesign for free, almost. Why pay to buy Quark or upgrade to the latest version?
Faced with those kinds of costs, it’s not surprising that many companies at least evaluate InDesign. Once they work with the full suite - with InDesign at its centre, many are deciding to switch.
There’s no need to debate if InDesign is better or worse than QuarkXpress. It’s at least on a par and, if you buy the suite, represents a good cost saving. But apart from that, what’s so compelling about moving to Adobe Creative Suite?
First and foremost, it’s a suite - three products which give you pretty much everything you need to publish professional documents. But, and this is important, being a suite, all of the products work in a similar way and interact pretty closely. This consistency makes things much easier for designers. For Adobe’s products, that, above all else, means the liberal use of floating palettes. These appear in each of the packages and provide much of the control required over publishing content. These are handled in slightly different ways from application to application - in InDesign, they can be docked at the right to save on screen space, for example. We can expect these minor differences to be resolved in the next version of Creative Suite. While some people don’t like palettes, they do provide an effective and customisable way of working.
Microsoft, of course, is dispensing with palettes in the next version of Office and replacing them with the context sensitive ‘ribbon’ - a kind of super-palette which runs along the top of the document. Well, Creative Suite already has that - it’s called the control palette - and it’s used for common settings such as colours and font sizes. It can be used in place of many of the palettes, since it contains a context-sensitive route to the most used options. This is most effective in InDesign, but it’s in place in Creative Suite’s other applications.
For many, Photoshop is the cornerstone of the Adobe Creative Suite and needs little introduction. Although it has competitors, it’s not far-fetched to say that Photoshop is Earth’s favourite photo editor. Used by everyone from hobbyists to professional photographers, there’s little that Photoshop can’t do. Like all powerful tools, it takes learning - and for many learners there’s the additional learning curve of unfamiliar concepts. Photographers understand what curves, histograms, dodging and burning are - but these are alien concepts to many. The good news is that Photoshop is an excellent platform for experimentation. It supports multiple levels of undo (the number of which can be custom set) through its history palette, so it’s easy to play around and try things out. This provides a really nice safety net for new users. Indeed, this also demonstrates the power of Adobe’s interface - new users get at the features they need, without getting bogged down with things they don’t understand. As your experience grows, you use new features. And boy, does Photoshop have a big features list! Without some kind of help and training, Photoshop can take - literally - years to master, even though new users can be up and running quickly.
With Photoshop handling bitmap editing so deftly, Illustrator handles vector graphics with equal aplomb. Vector graphics are resolution-independent - curves and lines rather than pixels. Illustrator has many uses - obvious ones being logos or charts. In the right hands, it’s also capable of highly detailed illustrations - being able to handle transparent objects, layers, and smooth colour blends without a problem. Illustrator can be harder to get used to - for instance, drawing with Bezier curve tools takes some learning - but once you have learnt it, it’s a powerful tool indeed. Best of all, Illustrator and Photoshop work really well together - you can combine items from one program into the other quickly and easily, either by copying and pasting or by importing.
In a publishing workflow, Photoshop and Illustrator create design components. InDesign brings them together in a single document. InDesign can be used to create books, brochures, flyers - you name it. Typically you would manage the layout of the document and its text in InDesign, bringing in files from Photoshop and Illustrator to complete the design.
Bridge can be accessed from within each application and is used to manage your assets - images and such - providing a consistent way to manage files held on your computer, and in Version Cue. Plus, you can use it to search for, find and buy stock photography.
Finally, Version Cue can be used to save multiple versions of a document - great for making changes and submitting different versions to clients, before you track back to the version chosen.
Viewed like this, Creative Suite is more than a suite - it’s a complete working environment, and - for most designers - is everything you’ll ever need.
When you consider that you get all this power for less than the cost of QuarkXpress, it’s no surprise that it’s gaining ground over its competitor.
e-academy can help you to gain the skills needed to get the most from any - or all - of the products within Adobe’s Creative Suite. Please call us on 0845 650 6500 for more information.
