Reunited With Adobe, And It Feels...?

End Of 2023

Adobe Creative Cloud: Notes going into 2024

Part of my current regimen of online classes is a neat perk: Paying for Adobe Creative Cloud at the student rate, e.g. what it's worth. So I once again have a couple of years to turbo charge my portfolio and justify paying for this service, maybe?

I'm updating all the stuff and I also read these books for class:

       

Again, if you're looking into online classes....basically buy these books. (I'll be posting publicly available materials that I used for class in a later post.)

So what's different? Let's look.

What's New In Photoshop?

Whooooah ooWOAH ooh WOOOOah....

(If you're singing now, you're elderly too! LOL)

Ahem. So there's things like Liquify, which is a really fancy Smudge tool. It uses "AI" (yawn, groan) to recognize faces and assist with making "improvements", along with letting you use the included tools to make other "improvements". Why download a plug-in for your Instagram or filter for your Tiktok when you can do it yourself? That's good, I think.

Also, Photoshop has been an animation studio for a while, and now it's a video editor. Which is cool, I guess...

...but Premiere is right there, and Davinci Resolve is right over there. What advantage does Photoshop bring to this elbow-to-elbow crowded table? 

Same thing with artboards, which continues Photoshop's popularity with cheap UI design shops that consider it to be a UI design tool...even after Adobe bought Figma for the equivalent of the entire economy of Syria. Figma and XD are right there, with exactly the tools UI/UX designers are using.

Photoshop has always been so overstuffed with features that it has inherited a bit of a learning curve. And the trend is hardly slowing down.

Why? I'm guessing it's because at this point, Photoshop is Adobe's ultimate cash cow because there is simply nothing else that can do everything it does, and I'd imagine there are millions of users who pay only for Photoshop. (I have contemplated this option.)

So they might as well throw all the kitchen sinks in there. If you're going to pay $24 a month for Photoshop because you HAVE to have it for work, why not include the other things and give designers a break for once? 

That's a good strategy. Put a motion graphics workspace in Illustrator, then? Please?!?!?!

Which brings us to:

Animate vs. After Effects: Which One Should You Lease?

Flash is still dead, but Animate keeps plugging on as a cartoon/character animation powerhouse, while After Effects is positioned strongly as a motion graphics and VFX industry standard. 

I've been practicing human faces and figure animation in both, and I pledge not to show my work here ever because I'm kind of bad at figure drawing. It will be fun to do more VFX things like motion tracking and ad-centric motion design in After Effects to see how it stacks up against Davinci Resolve, which is great at those tasks.

My impression so far: turning your sketches and cartoons into animated action is far better in Animate than After Effects, and drawing with a bezier pen is far better than Blender's grease pencil. Regarding drawing in Animate, I see they copied some tools from OpenToonz such as the line thickness tool. Use that one, it really gives your drawings some flavor and character. They didn't need to copy their keyframe copy system, though, where you have to repaste keyframes into the timeline. Insert Pose is the greatest.

After Effects isn't terrible at drawing characters, though, and I find using pins together with path keyframes to move characters gives you better control than Animate's bone tool. (Both are easier to use than Blender's bone tool, though.)

Rigging is still hard, though. If you don't extensively plan where your pins or bones are set up, making a character move will be a horrible mess. For a lot of it, it might be better to just animate the pen anchors? Get ready to spend a lot of time practicing.

One more thing: After Effects has been hyping it's Lottie plugin. Lottie is that ubiquitous animation framework (for lack of a better term) where you can basically import your animated characters anywhere on the web, set up for interactive interactions and such. (Rive is getting better in this department as the go-to animation platform for games and online interactive experiences.) I'm still trying to figure out why this is so great, and will get back to you when I do. (I'll do a comparison of the different animation platforms soon.)

Why Inkscape is still after Illustrator's lunch

One word: AI.

That screaming you heard is the sound of the aspiring logo creators of the world seeing their expertise, their hard work making companies look better and get more customers (which means more, better paying customers for them) all destroyed by two chilling words:

"Generate AI".

Imagine the delight of dilettante entrepreneurs and clueless "founders" (unemployable bros) to learn that they can dump $23 on a logo that the software makes for them. Eat that, Adobe nerds! Who cares that they are once again choking off any and all entry-level and newbie opportunities to, you know, eat, so long as they can do their...stuff, whatever that is.

Which somehow leads to....

Figma Out At Adobe

As I write this, it seems Adobe has changed their minds about assimilating Figma into their subscription borg. Do they get their $20 billion back?

I guess the massive pushback and rallies to boycott Adobe over this had a chilling effect? Or maybe they figured Xd is fine and Figma had nothing to add, so cut them loose?

Who can even say anymore?

All I know is, please stop using Photoshop for UI/UX design. These new tools are far better for this task, and they even export to React Native and Flutter. This is the way.

Still worth it, or no?

Whatever you do, you have a powerful tool with Adobe...but there's lots of tools that are just as good, or at least good enough to level up to where you can do much more with Adobe. Only Photoshop is really far enough ahead of the pack to comfortably dismiss any competition.

As for paying full price, if you use more than two Adobe apps professionally, you might as well lease the full Creative Suite which stands currently at $60 a month, while each app is basically $23 a month. If you can make $60 a month with Adobe products, well...you already know the answer to this question.

Good luck creating!