Adobe Photoshop
While at college I dabbled in Airbrushing and while fascinated with the photo-realistic possibilities I soon grew impatient with the necessary mixing of paints and cleaning.
A few years later in the workplace a new Mac arrived loaded with version 2.0 of Adobe Photoshop I was instantly hooked, and had to take it in turns to take the instruction manual home.
A few years later in the workplace a new Mac arrived loaded with version 2.0 of Adobe Photoshop I was instantly hooked, and had to take it in turns to take the instruction manual home.
Although this was before the program acquired layers or editable type, I still managed to give myself R.S.I trying to 'paint' with the mouse before acquiring a graphics tablet.
The addition of vector capabilities and editable type enabled me to utilise Photoshop as a means of producing quick and effective digital visuals that could later be worked up in to finished artwork and Photoshop remains my primary software to this day.
Adobe Illustrator
My first encounter with computer software of any kind was in my second year of college in 1988 where the engineering annexe were attempting to use Illustrator for CAD. Every Friday afternoon we were let loose on some early colour Macintoshes but despite the fact we couldn't save or print or print anything we took to them like ducks to water. Despite this early exposure to what would become the industry standard vector editing program I spent many years using its main competitor Aldus/Macromedia Freehand before it was bought out and subsequently discontinued by Adobe. While Photoshop has gained impressive vector editing capabilities over the years, Illustrator is still king of the heavy lifting vector tasks.
Adobe Indesign
By the early 1990's the desk top publishing revolution was well and truly upon us.
I spent my post college years in technological purgatory grappling with many soon to be obsolete machines all using incompatible operating systems. Then the agency I was working at acquired a second hand Macintosh loaded with Aldus Freehand & Quark Xpress. It didn't take us long to work out it was quicker to wait our turn on the Mac than persevere with the soon to be antiquated typesetting and paste-up techniques.
Quark Xpress was the dominant name in page layout software and when a decade later Adobe introduced InDesign like many of my colleagues I tried it out, found it to be at bit buggy and pretty much ignored it for another decade. When it came time to start up on my own, the fact that InDesign was practically given away with the Adobe Creative suite prompted me to give it another chance and I discovered it had matured in to more than a match for its more costlier competitor.
I spent my post college years in technological purgatory grappling with many soon to be obsolete machines all using incompatible operating systems. Then the agency I was working at acquired a second hand Macintosh loaded with Aldus Freehand & Quark Xpress. It didn't take us long to work out it was quicker to wait our turn on the Mac than persevere with the soon to be antiquated typesetting and paste-up techniques.
Quark Xpress was the dominant name in page layout software and when a decade later Adobe introduced InDesign like many of my colleagues I tried it out, found it to be at bit buggy and pretty much ignored it for another decade. When it came time to start up on my own, the fact that InDesign was practically given away with the Adobe Creative suite prompted me to give it another chance and I discovered it had matured in to more than a match for its more costlier competitor.
Adobe Premiere
I have dabbled in digital video editing over the years, mainly with Final Cut so when the Adobe Creative Suite subscription plan was announced, the software equivalent of an all you can eat buffet, downloading Premiere Pro was a no brainer. I actually found it easier to use than its Apple counterpart and was soon able to put it to work before signing up for a training course.
Adobe After Effects
After getting to grips with Premiere I decided to take a course in After Effects. Bearing in mind this is the pixel equivalent of Flash or Animate I found it to be far more intuitive to use despite coming from the same company.
Adobe Animate
Formerly known as Flash, which I had to go back to college to learn as I couldn't believe how much effort it took to do animations that the Powerpoint could do with one click. After falling foul of iOS, Adobe launched Edge Animate to produce HTML 5 compliant animations but have now absorbed it in to the newly launched Animate.
Adobe Acrobat
Around 1995 I first witnessed the creation of a PDF in the office of a much respected former IT manager, now sadly no longer with us. I watched in amazement as he shrank a huge Postcript file down to less than a tenth of it's former size. He then explained how it could now be transmitted much faster and output on any device flawlessly.
Full digital workflows were still in their infancy then, fraught with late nights and early morning calls from concerned production managers with stuck RIP's (don't ask)!
Of course nowadays PDF files are everywhere; most desktop publishing software can generate them but it's important to use the correct profile for each output device.