Suite Inspiration: The Adobe Effect

Alan Bradbury, Adobe-Certified Instructor at Soho Editors, discusses the Adobe Creative Suite.

With over one and a half million Creative Cloud subscribers already on its books, and more joining every day, Adobe is probably basking in a cloud of told you so satisfaction. Much of it doubtless directed at detractors who thought their digitally-based subscription move ill-advised. But I suspect Adobe is not the only one who will end up with a feeling of satisfaction because of their switch to the subscription-based model.
It's safe to say that the vast majority of Creative Suite application users over the years have appreciated the suite mentality of cross platform tool commonality, but despite this, in the past it would have been a rare user who would have been inclined to fork out several thousand quid for a bunch of the Creative Suite applications which they had - on the face of it - little or no apparent need for. However, it's fairly obvious that if you've subscribed to the Creative Cloud in order to get hold of Adobe stalwarts such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Illustrator, then at some point it will occur to you, that you might as well have a look at all the other stuff that is available to you via the Cloud since you've already paid for it. You might never have been inclined to consider Adobe's Audition Digital Audio Workstation, but there aren't many of us who are at least somewhat interested in music, what with our iPods and mobile phones which can play MP3s. So it will be apparent that a high end audio tweaking application which has a layout, with which we are already familiar, is at some point going to be worth taking a look at. Likewise, the high end video-tweaking capabilities of Premiere and After Effects, means that we can go bonkers with our mobile phone-shot footage with some seriously Hollywood capabilities, and all without having to baulk at the cost of buying into such goodies. Especially since we have them at our disposal for no additional cost and probably know how quite a few of the tools and palettes work already thanks to that suite commonality.
Beyond the merely intriguing aspect this presents for personal users of the Cloud, this availability of a massive array of seriously high-end software is unlikely to be lost on companies with a Cloud subscription. I don't think you need to be Nostradamus to foresee what this is going to mean in industry terms; companies which are already in the Cloud club for the popular Adobe applications they were traditionally using, are very soon going to realise the kind of expanded creative capability this access is going to open up for them, particularly when there are apparently at least one and a half million people out there who know how to use all that stuff who could work for them.
This is good news for me of course, because I happen to be someone who is employed to train people up on all this stuff, so I should imagine there will be an upsurge in the amount of people wanting to learn advanced techniques for all these new software avenues they are going to be exploring. And if I was a betting man, I'd be putting money on the notion that quite a few of Adobe's 'also ran' applications will eventually become, if not the industry standard package, then certainly a lot more widely used in the industry than has previously been the case.

Read the article in the online edition of RFV here.
(IT/JP)