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Let's step back and look at the big picture
Look at the world of design
Look at the Adobe Creative Suite
And how these programs work together
There are many different kinds of designers
Milton Glaser is probably most well known for this logo
His style is very open and clean and direct
Lots of open space
The work of David Carson is very different, more complex, layered and textured
Graphic elements are overlapping other graphic elements
Very different from Milton Glaser's work
Both designers have one thing in common
They use the Adobe Creative suite
There are probably three main areas
That you need to be good at
In order to make successful visual communication
What I mean by successful is that your art communicates an idea, concept, theme, or message
Very clearly
And is memorable
And so
We might take a look at these three areas and relate them to programs in the Adobe Creative Suite
The programs
I enjoy most of all are Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign
And
Let's take a look at each one
And how they fit into each of those three categories
Here is the totem for the Photoshop
Application
When we talk about image manipulation
We're talking about using Adobe Photoshop
And I've drawn a
Surfboard here
With the pixels exaggerated, showing that the art has been created using square pixels
And you can see them here
And
Photoshop is really good
At showing us pictures of the real world, pictures of people, of landscapes, of seascapes
Photoshop is really good at showing photography and the bending of millions of colors
And lots of detail
But there is one drawback with Photoshop
Photoshop files are resolution critical, if we take a JPEG and blow it up really big it gets blurry
And so this is a concern of ours whenever we use
Photoshop images
Resolution is an issue
We get
Pixel-based images from
Our phones or digital cameras
We get
Pixel-based images that we download from the Internet
We can use a flatbed scanner to scan art
And we get pixel-based images
That way
And
Pixels, as I said, can show photographs really well
But they are
Resolution critical
And that means we have to think about high resolution
And low resolution
So, for high we usually say that an image
Would be about three hundred pixels per inch
And this is good for printing
Images to be viewed onscreen can be 72 pixels per inch, for printing we're using CMYK or spot color
And for images viewed onscreen only
We use red, green, and blue colors
Which is actually red, green, and blue light
And for
Photoshop files, pixel-based files, that are going to print, we usually save the Photoshop file
In the .psd format
.psd stands for Photoshop document
And that's usually the file name extension we use
With Photoshop files that are going to print
For images only viewed onscreen, we usually save as JPEGs, and .jpg is the file name extension
So we've got
High resolution and low resolution pixel-based images, or Photoshop images
High resolution for print
And low resolution for viewing onscreen
Here we can see
The Color Picker in Photoshop
And we're looking at
CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow, black
We're looking at percentages of each of those colors in order to make up
This color of blue
And if we click on the Color Libraries button here in Photoshop
We can see spot color, also known as Pantone color
Pantone colors are individual
Colors of ink
Mixed at the print shop
So, instead of
Us mixing the colors using combinations of CMYK,
In our digital files, we call out a Pantone color and the commercial print shop
Mixes that color at the print shop and uses that color for us
One of the main concepts I think it's important to know is this idea of effective resolution
And if we look in the middle here we see that we have in Photoshop, if we go into the
Image menu to image size
We have an image that is 6 x 6 inches
And a resolution of 300 pixels per inch
So, this would be a good image for printing, it's 300 pixels per inch
At this size
But if we were to make it 3 x 3 inches
The effective resolution would double, we see on the right it goes up
On the other hand
Make image 12 x 12 inches
The resolution is cut in half
And goes to 150 pixels
So, we see here the relationship between scale and resolution
If the image size is cut in half
The resolution doubles
If the size of the image is doubled, the resolution is cut in half
So, this relationship of scale and resolution
Is an important one to know about
Here is the totem for Adobe Illustrator
And with Adobe Illustrator we're talking about vector art
Art that is made up of lines
Not pixels
And you can see here the same surfboard is drawn with lines instead of pixels
The lines are nice and smooth, sharp and crisp, and will stay that way because its vector art
We've got
Curved lines and straight lines
Joined by end points, or anchor points
The true value of illustrator is that it can be scaled to any size, a JPEG blown up gets blurry
But you can enlarge a vector-based image created in illustrator
To a very large size and it will stay nice and sharp
Now
Illustrator is good of course for making illustrations
We can make an illustration showing a person, but it's never going to look as good as a photograph
However, it will be scalable
And we also make logos, professional designers use Adobe Illustrator to make logos
We know we're probably going to put that logo on a business card, but it's also going to
Maybe appear on a billboard or something much larger
So we create logos in Illustrator so they're scalable
And we can also use Illustrator to create
Other kinds of vector graphics like diagrams and schematics
And charts and graphs and flow charts
And a maps of the world
Would be created using Adobe Illustrator
So, Illustrator is vector-based, not pixel-based, which means it's scalable
And in Adobe Illustrator we can use any of these color modes, cyna, magenta, yellow, black
Spot color, or Pantone color
And we can use RGB color
When it comes to Illustrator files
The file format we use is .ai, which stands for Adobe llustrator
So we save our Illustrator files in this native file format
.ai
And
We can take our Photoshop files and Illustrator files
And import them into a page layout program
We can print from Photoshop and Illustrator
We can do page layout in either program
But the program used most often for page layout is Adobe InDesign
And here's the totem for InDesign
And InDesign
Is used for page layout, we've got a front cover and a couple pages from a magazine
And this layout was done using Adobe InDesign
You can see that photographs have been imported into InDesign
You can see a photograph on the front cover of the magazine
We've got those raspberries on the other two-page spread and that's pixel-based art
We've got a
A fork and a worm and apple and a worm and a little truck
Those are probably made using Adobe Illustrator
And then imported into
Adobe InDesign
So the
Blue background color
And the type were probably created in InDesign
So, while we can use Photoshop and Illustrator for page layout
Most commercial print shops prefer that we use Adobe InDesign
And with InDesign
You can import both pixel art and vector art, Photoshop and Illustrator files
We can use CMYK color modes, spot or Pantone colors
And we can use RGB colors in InDesign
The file name extension for InDesign files is .indd
And that's how we save
InDesign files
And the same issue we talked about before applies to InDesign
If we look at this idea of effective resolution
Once again
In the middle here we see we've got
An image
On a page in InDesign
That is six inches square, 6 x 6 inches
If we look at actual pixels per inch, versus effective pixels per inch, they are the same, 300 ppi
But on the right there if we change the size of the picture
On a page in InDesign, to 3 x 3 inches
Then we can look down and see the effective resolution
Doubles, changes to 600 ppi
And on the left-hand side here
If we take our picture in InDesign
And we make it 12 x 12 inches
We look down at the effective resolution, effective pixels per inch
And we see it's 150 pixels per inch
The same thing applies here, we're not changing the Photoshop files at all when importing them
But when we scale them smaller and larger we do affect the resolution
And so
Another program
Often used with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign
Is
Adobe Acrobat Pro
Acrobat Pro is used to modify PDF files
PDF stands for portable document format
Anybody who has the free Adobe Reader program can read
A PDF file
But with Acrobat Pro we can open a PDF file and modify it, for example we can add
Fields that people type in
And we can set the initial view
And that sort of thing using Acrobat Pro
So, what often happens is, when we're working in
Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign
We sometimes save or export those files as PDF files
So that someone who does not have Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, can open PDF and look at art
And so
Once again
With PDF files
We can have PDFs that are high or low resolution
If emailing the PDF file to somebody to approve a design, we don't need high resolution
But if sending a PDF file to a commercial printer, we do need high resolution
And so, once again, 300 pixels per inch is generally considered
To be high resolution, and 72 pixels per inch to be
To be low resolution, so we can save PDF files this way as well
And if we look at the export options here
From InDesign, we can see that
The downsampling is
Is set to 300 pixels per inch
So any pixel-based images imported into InDesign will be downsampled to 300 ppi
To make a low resolution PDF file, we can change that 300 pixels per inch to 72 pixels per inch
And then we would get a low resolution PDF
So, there's a quick overview of the world of design
Of the Adobe Creative Suite and how the programs fit together
And look at digital art