Adobe Creative Cloud: What is it and is it Right for You?

Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC is a powerful and versatile assortment of applications and services that is ideal for photography, videography, design, web development, and digital document experiences. This comprehensive digital toolkit is considered the gold standard in professional design software. It includes more than 20 industry-leading applications and mobile apps such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, Acrobat Pro, InCopy, Behance, and Lightroom.

Almost every department in your company – from sales, operations, and customer communications management to web development, engineering, digital marketing, and content management – ​​relies on creativity and design to achieve its goals.

But to effectively harness the power of creativity, the right tools are crucial. Adobe CC offers a wealth of tools that bring creativity to your fingertips. Plus, it's available as a service (hence "cloud"), so there's no need to purchase expensive individual software licenses. Simply pay a monthly subscription fee to take advantage of the Adobe CC Creative Suite, plus get extra storage and access to Adobe's extensive font library.

What is Adobe Creative Cloud?

Adobe Creative Cloud is a suite of various applications that work together to enable you to design, edit, manage, publish, and share your work. Adobe Creative Cloud also offers features that allow you to create on the go with access to your work from anywhere. Essentially, it gives you all the necessary tools in one place and leads your business to a streamlined workflow.

Adobe Creative Cloud Apps

Adobe Creative Cloud includes several applications and services that allow you to be creative, make changes to your work, and collaborate with others. Some of these applications include:

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is a powerful application that provides you with editing features for photos, illustrations, and design. You can use Photoshop to edit images in several ways, including removing backgrounds, changing the crop, and adding special filters.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is an app that enables you to edit vector artwork. It is a great solution for creating sketches and illustrations. While Photoshop enables you to edit existing images, Illustrator permits you to create new images from scratch.

Adobe InDesign

InDesign is a page-type layout software that enables you to create layouts for magazines, brochures, newspapers, and books. You can also utilize InDesign for advertisements, posters, and flyers.

Lightroom CC

Lightroom Creative Cloud is a photo-management application that permits you to organize, edit, and share your photos. The application also enables you to create a library of your work accessible on your mobile device.

Adobe Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro is a video editing application that allows you to edit multiple types of media—video, audio, images, and graphics—into one coherent piece.

Adobe Acrobat DC Pro

Adobe Acrobat DC Pro enables you to create and edit PDF files. You can also capture, reuse, and repurpose content from a variety of sources, including images and text, or create and edit forms.

Now that we’ve shared some of the most popular applications in Adobe Creative Cloud, let’s take a look at some of the things they can help you accomplish.

5 Creative Things to Do with Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud is so comprehensive and feature-packed that you can do hundreds of things with it. Here are five things the creative geniuses at WayPath suggested!

1. View, sync, and modify your work with the Adobe CC mobile app

With the Adobe CC mobile app (available on iTunes and Google Play), you can modify your existing designs and incorporate new ideas into existing projects.

You can sync your files, view them across multiple devices, and share them with others to collaborate. When you need to make changes or improvements to a project, you can use the Adobe CC mobile app to view your work from any device.

2. Find the perfect font to reflect your brand personality

With Adobe Fonts, users can access, download, and use thousands of fonts in any project or application. Choose from different font packs to build your brand, enhance your social media presence, or improve your UI/UX design. You can also use the font offline (once activated). All your edits will be visible when you're online.

3. Review your brand content in real-time

With Adobe CC, users can easily review everything from written content and photos to videos and website designs. Collaboration is a breeze, and the suite allows for real-time review and feedback so you can quickly make any necessary changes. You can see all changes, edits, and commentary immediately after they're added.

4. Modernize your creative assets with animations

With Adobe CC, you can easily create animations to increase the "wow factor" of your website and other creatives. Sketch out shapes or backgrounds using Photoshop or Illustrator, or use the in-built templates. Try After Effects or Animate to create vibrant characters or 3D objects to enhance your brand's presence for web, TV, film, or mobile.

5. Tell memorable brand stories with professional-quality photos, videos, and audio

Capture your audience’s attention with powerful brand stories, adorned with stunning photos, videos, and sound effects. With Lightroom, one of the most popular tools in the CC suite, you can easily create and share vibrant photos on any device, at any time. If video is your storytelling medium of choice, use Premiere Pro or Premiere Rush – two great tools for transforming raw footage into stunning films and videos that stand out from the crowd. Then harness the power of audio content with Adobe Audition. With its comprehensive feature set, you can speed up video production workflows and audio finishing and deliver a perfect mix with great sound output.

Which Creative Cloud plan is right for you?

Deciding which plan is right for you depends on what you plan to do.

If you focus on photography, the Photography plan makes the most sense and is also the most affordable.

If you need another program like Premiere or After Effects, given the choice between the Single App plan and the All Apps plan, it makes more sense to choose the All Apps plan.

You get thousands of dollars worth of apps for an annual subscription difference of around $650 per year. If you plan on learning new skills, this is the smarter move.