Getting started with Adobe applications

Description of the video:

>> Alright. Wonderful, wonderful. So, hello everybody. And welcome to getting started with Adobe Applications. I'm going to fire up my video here. My name is Beth. And I'll be the instructor for today's session. And with me I've got a couple of assistants today. I have Rachel, April, Jenn and Jason with me today to help with keeping an eye on the chat in case anybody has questions while I'm presenting. But feel free to ask questions if anything comes up. If you have any questions while I'm going through my presentation. If it's, if it's something that the assistants can answer, then they'll take care of it. And if not, they'll let me know. And then, I'll answer it for you. And I'll also be answering questions at the end of today's session. So, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. And then, get us started with today's presentation. So, one moment please. And let me fire up my PowerPoint. Alrighty. So, for today's session, as you can tell by the title of the webinar, we're going to be working with just getting acquainted with the Adobe applications. There are so many different programs available as part of Adobe Creative Cloud. And the amount of programs might be overwhelming. You might take a look at the list that's available and say well, what do I need to do what I want to do? Where do I start? How do I use these programs? So, in today's webinar, I'm going to try and help demystify Creative Cloud a little bit. And help you all get a little bit more familiar with Adobe Creative Cloud and how, and it's programs. So, first part of the webinar, we're going to focus on learning about the main programs and Adobe Creative Cloud. Learn a little bit about what each of them do. And then, after that, we're going to actually jump into using an Adobe program. We're going to be using Photoshop. And learning how to do some very basic photo editing tasks. So, first things first, let's learn a little bit about Adobe Creative Cloud. Now, Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of applications that Adobe publishes that allow you to do all sorts of creative tasks. Whether it's putting together a newsletter or making a video or recording a podcast. There are applications in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite that will do all of the, will help you with all of those tasks. And the main Adobe Creative Cloud apps fall into two main categories. Design and production. And the design apps are Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver. Photoshop you may already be a little bit familiar with Photoshop, or at least have heard it used. But you say, oh, somebody's Photoshopped this image maybe to brighten it or maybe remove some errors with an image, like scratches if it's a scanned photograph. So, Photoshop focuses on image editing. Illustrator focuses on creating what are called vector graphics. So, simple graphics with large areas of a single color. Also, like logos and some basic graphics that you might use on a webpage. InDesign focuses on creating print and also screen documents. So, like newsletters, posters, books, things like that. InDesign will help you build those things. And Dreamweaver focuses on creating websites. So, we can, if you, if you know html and [inaudible], Dreamweaver will help you get started with creating a website. And in the Production applications. There's actually an error in this next one. For some reason, I wrote Illustrator twice. While Illustrator does kind of help in production, I meant to write Audition there. So, Audition is actually Adobe's audio editing project, ahah, audio editing program. So, you can record audio, edit audio, combine different audio tracks together using Audition. And then, publish completed audio tracks. And we also have Premiere Pro and After Effects. These are two video focused programs. Premiere Pro, you've heard of that, likely, if you've heard, if you've thought about doing video editing. Premiere Pro allows you to take video from just about anywhere and edit it. Maybe combine it with other video clips. And add audio. Add voice overs. Add music. And then, create and produce a completed video. After Effects works kind of in conjunction with Premiere Pro, in that you'll be creating special effects clips that you'll then import into Premiere Pro. So, you could, you could do all sorts of fun special effects, other animations, things like that in After Effects. Then, pull them into Premiere Pro. So, you might think, you might, you might realize, alright, so the design apps, they focus on creating images. They focus on creating documents and creating webpages. And then, the production apps focus on audio and video creation. And so, here's an example actually of the interface of one of the design apps. This is actually the interface for Photoshop. The design applications. So, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver, they all have really similar layouts. They're going to have things in similar places. If you open one of those applications up, it'll, it's going to look similar no matter what application you're opening up. And they, since they all have, they all do similar tasks. Either editing images or editing layouts or editing documents that go on the web. You're still designing something even in Dreamweaver. So, these are the ones that focus on designing something, typically still images or something that's not video or audio. Now, on the other hand, this is an example of one of the programs that is in the production category. This is actually the interface for Premiere Pro. And you can see here, this looks a lot different than Photoshop. It looks a little bit more complicated. But that's okay. Now, the applications in the production group, they all have slightly different interfaces from each other. That's because each of these programs focuses on something a little different. Premiere Pro works on editing video. After Effects works on creating special effects and animations. And Audition focuses on editing audio. So, the, the apps that are in that production group are going to have slightly interfaces. But every app in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, they all share some similar interface elements. And even if they're in different places, they're all going to have some of the same pieces. Like, for example, you'll have a tools, you'll have a tools panel. Like, over here on Photoshop on the left-hand side of the screen, there's our tools panel. And then, in the middle here in Premiere Pro, there's the tools panel there. Now, when you're working in Adobe Creative Cloud apps, depending on what you're trying to work on, you might actually be using a number of them at the same time to create a finished project. For example, if you're putting together a brochure, you might be laying the brochure out in InDesign, which is our print layout program. And then, the images that you create that you'll be putting into your brochure in InDesign, you might have created those in Photoshop and Illustrator. So, you'll be using a couple of. You'll be using these applications together. Or say, with Premiere Pro, you're trying to put together a video. You might put together your footage, the recorded footage that you've recorded from your camera or from your cell phone. You might edit that in Premiere Pro. You might create some animations that you might want to add over the top of some of those scenes in After Effects. And then, if you wanted to do a voice over, you would record that in Audition. And then, combine it all together in Premiere Pro. And then, publish your video. So, these programs work really well together. In fact, even, you can even take images that you've created in Photoshop and Illustrator and pull them into Premiere Pro or After Effects. So, they all work really well together. Now, when you're, when you want to use the Creative Cloud applications, you might think, well, how do I get them on here? Well, one of the things with Creative Cloud is that. If you remember back to the old days of Adobe, before we had Creative Cloud, you used to be able to download a big package of all of the apps that you might need. The design, the design group and the production group. Now, there's just one application that you download. And from there, you get to choose which programs you want to install. So, let me actually show you that application. So, this right here, this is Creative Cloud. This application I've got up here on the screen. And the first step in getting the programs from Creative Cloud is to download that Creative Cloud desktop app. And then, from here, you can see the list of the applications that are available to you. And you can download whichever, download and install whichever ones you want. So, for example, this right here up at the top of this list here, these are all of the programs that I have installed. I've got Photoshop, Illustrator. All sorts of them. And then, there are also even more applications. More than just the ones that I've touched on at the beginning of this presentation. These are ones that work together with some of the other apps. Like, for example, InCopy works with InDesign. But you can pick and choose which applications you want to install. So, if you say, well, I just want to do, I just want to use Photoshop. All you need to do is install Photoshop. If you want to make. If you want to create and edit videos, you can download and install Premiere Pro and After Effects. And then, maybe Audition to edit some audio. So, this is where you can get these applications where you can down, where you can install them from. And then, anytime you have updates, it'll tell you over here, hey, these need updating. I've got a bit of updates. But I'll run these updates later, so that way we can still use Photoshop. So, to get to that Creative Cloud app, let me jump back into my presentation here. To get to that, to get to that Creative Cloud app where you can download and install everything, for IU students, faculty and staff, you'll want to visit Adobe.IU.edu. That website will bring you, will show you, not only where to download the Creative Cloud app. But it'll also walk you through getting the applications installed if you need a little extra assistance there. So, that's Adobe.IU.edu. Now, if you're not an IU. If you're not affiliated with IU, well, you can subscribe to Creative Cloud and download that Creative Cloud desktop app. And then, the other apps just by visiting Adobe's website. The URL that I have on the screen takes you right to their Creative Cloud website where you can learn more about Creative Cloud. And learn about subscriptions. Alright. Now, we're at the point where we're going to explore a little bit of how to work with Photoshop. Photoshop is probably one of the, one of the programs people think of most when you talk, when you think of Adobe programs. It's even become sort of a verb. People will say, oh, I've Photoshopped that image to say make your cat look like they're walking on the Moon, for example. So, Photoshop is one of the most popular and most well-known Adobe applications. And what we're going to do with Photoshop today is we're going to learn about Photoshop's interface. And then, how it's interface is similar to other Creative Cloud applications. So, I'll be pointing out the different pieces of the Photoshop interface. And letting you know what applications have these same interface elements in the same place, which can be helpful. Especially, with the design programs. They're all laid out very similarly. So, you can easily move from Photoshop to Illustrator. Or from Illustrator to InDesign. We're also going to explore some very basic image editing techniques. Some of the things that I'll show you how to do today involve maybe doing some basic healing of images that you might have scanned. Some old photographs, for example. Like, removing red eye from old photographs. Healing some issues that you might have with images. And maybe cropping an image. And just a couple of other things depending on how much time we've got. So, I'm going to jump us right into Photoshop now. So, let me jump out of PowerPoint. And bring us into Photoshop where I've already got an image loaded. So, that way we can jump right into exploring the interface. So, when you open Photoshop for the first time and open up an image, this is what the interface is going to look like. This is what you'll see when you first get started in Photoshop. It looks like there's a lot going on here. But I can point out the different pieces of this interface to you, all the different elements and what they do. And then, that way when you jump into Photoshop on your own, then it's not going to be quite so overwhelming. So, let's start from the top. At the. Literally, at the top. At the very top of the screen, right up here at the top, I have my menu bar. The menu bar is just like you've seen in just about every Window's program or many Mac programs. You have all of your menu options here. It'll help you work with images that you're editing in Photoshop. Every Adobe program makes use of the menu bar. And while the options might be different depending on what program you're working with, it's always going to be right there at the top. Over here on the left side of the screen, we have the tools panel. You can see that there are a lot of tools over here in the tools panel. In fact, Photoshop has so many tools that some of them actually have to be grouped together with, to other similar tools. Otherwise, I think the tools panel would be all the way out to here if we showed all of the tools that were available in Photoshop. So, in order to find out if there's a tool that has, that has tools grouped with it, we'll have to take a close look at the individual tools icon. And then, if you look at the lower right corner of the tools icon, you might notice that there is a tiny little, a tiny little triangle there at the bottom right corner. That indicates that there are grouped tools together with that one tool. And to access those grouped tools. So, let's say, I want to see what's grouped with the brush tool. I can just click and hold on that tool. And it'll bring out a menu of all the tools that are associated with that tool. That there, they all share similar functions. So, with the brush tool, we have the pencil tool, the color replacement tool and the mixer brush tool. Because they all do similar things. They all work in similar ways to the brush tool. Now, these tools. One thing that helps us give, it helps give us more options for working with our tools. Up across the top of our screen, just under the menu bar, is the control panel. It's also sometimes called the options bar in some Adobe programs. But this control panel is context sensitive. What that means is that if you choose a tool over here in the tools panel, the options that are up here in the control panel are going to change based on the tool that you've got selected. So, let's see here. If I select the paint bucket tool. If I click on that. Now, I have options up here that focus on working with the pain bucket tool. And then, if I decide to switch to the rectangular marquee tool, which will allow us to select parts of an image. Well, now I have different options that are based on working with the rectangular marquee tool. So, these are just going to be different tools that, different options for working with specific tools. They'll all be up here in the control panel. Over here on the far-right side of the screen, we have the panel doc. The panel doc's actually rather large right now because we've got not just the learn and libraries panels over here. But then, the typical panels we would have that are specific for Photoshop. Like, our color panel, our properties panel, our layers panel. And a number of other panels. Now, to switch back and forth from available panels, all we need to do is just click on the tab of the panel we want to switch to. So, say, I want to load the swatches panel. I can click on that. And then, it'll show me the swatches panel. And all of my swatches are grouped by colors and different, you know, or different types of colors. So, light colors, here we go. And if I want to switch back to the color panel, just click on that and it jumps me back to the color panel. Now, the learn panel and the libraries panel, these are, these are available in almost all the Adobe programs. And the learn panel just helps you learn a little bit more about Photoshop. The libraries panel is actually connected to your Creative Cloud account. So, anything that, any. For example, any assets that you save, like maybe images, for example. There might be some images you might be able to save in your Creative Cloud library. You can see here, I actually save a lot of colors in my library. And most of these are actually IU brand colors. Some of them are also colors for, for like, for example, there's a conference that I'm on the conference committee for. And I'm the public issues chair. So, I have the conference's colors in my libraries panel. This not only will show all, show all your library items in Photoshop. But it'll show them in every Adobe app. So, you can get to everything there in any Adobe app on your computer, anywhere you're logged into Creative Cloud. So, it's really helpful when you're working in a number of different applications. But you need something for, like say, you're working on one project in a number of different programs. You can get to what you need, what colors you need or anything else that you've got saved to your library. Now, for today, I'm actually going to close these panels. Because they're taking up a little bit of extra room here. And I'd like to be able to see more of what I'm working on here. So, to collapse some of the. Blah. So, to collapse some of the panels, we're going to go up to the upper right corner of the right side of my panel doc here. There's a little tiny icon. It looks like double arrows. And when I hover over it, it says collapse to icons. And I click on that. It shrinks everything down to icons. So, that way, if I need to, I can access it later. But it's not taking up quite so space on my screen. Alrighty. And before I jump into editing things, I just want to point out the different pieces that we've, I've gone over, where they might be in other programs, or if they're in other programs. So, the tools panel and the panel doc, these are going to be in the exact same positions in Illustrator and InDesign and in Dreamweaver. The tools that we have contained in there are going to be different for each application because they all do slightly different things. But that tools panel is going to be on the left side of the screen. And the panel doc will be on the right side of the screen in all of the applications. Dreamweaver is actually the only design app that does not have that control panel across the top. But all. But in addition to Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver also have this context sensitive control panel. And just about every Adobe app is going to use panels as part of its interface. And they'll all have a tools panel, even though some of them might be very small because they don't have a lot of tools to work with in that specific application. But all of the Adobe apps are going to make use of a lot of the same pieces. Even if in the, in the Production group. Those might be arranged a little differently. Alrighty. Now, that I've talked a little bit about the interfaces, I'm going to jump into doing some editing. So, first things first, to do a little bit of editing, what I want to do here is I want to remove the red eye in this image. And in order to do that, I want to zoom in a little bit, so I can see things better. So, I'm going to click on the zoom tool that it's, it's almost at the very bottom of the tools panel. It looks like a magnifying glass. And when I click on it, the cursor changes into a magnifying glass with a plus in the middle of it. That indicates I'm ready to zoom in. I can just click a couple of times. And I've zoomed in. But what if I zoom in a little too far? I want to zoom out a little bit here. Well, what I can do is on my keyboard, I'm going to press and hold the alt key. When I press and hold the alt key, you'll notice that now my cursor has changed into a magnifying glass with a minus sign in the middle. That means I'm ready to zoom out. So, while holding down the alt key, I'll just click and zoom out. And there we go. Now, let's learn how to remove that red eye. So, to do that, if you take a look at the tools panel, there isn't anything that explicitly looks like it's a red eye removal tool. That's because it's grouped with some of the healing tools, with the spot healing brush tool, to be precise. So, I'm going to click and hold on the spot healing brush tool. And then, click on the red eye tool. And the red eye tool is really cool. The way it works is when we click on an eye that has that red reflection, Photoshop is going to look for any of that red color there. And it's going to turn it to black. Like it just did right there. So, let's do this again. I'll click once more. And it's turned all those red pixels to black. Same here. Isn't that awesome? So, yeah, if you have old photos that have red eye in them, you can remove that red eye. And it's a lot easier than the way my mom used to do it, which was blacking them out with a permanent marker. This is much easier to do than fixing red eye with a permanent marker. Now, you might also wonder how to remove blemishes in photos. For example, you might have old photos that have scratches in them. Or you might have had a photo taken of yourself. And you might say, oh, well, there's a blemish on my face that I'd really like to remove. Well, I'm going to go ahead and click and hold on my red eye tool. And switch back to the spot healing brush tool. This is going to allow us to remove any blemishes or issues with images. And what Photoshop does is when we have our cursor pointed at a specific thing we want to fix. So, let's say we want to fix this blemish on the man's lip here. Photoshop is going to look at what's inside of our little brush area. And then, look at everything outside and around it. And say, okay, what doesn't match? What's inside my brush, inside my brush area that doesn't match what's around it? And it'll replace that color with what it thinks should be filled in that area. So, if I go ahead and click on this blemish here. Now, it's gone. Isn't that cool? So, you can do this with scratches. You can do this with blemishes. I have used it to remove entire birds from a photograph. Like, just one single, solitary bird flying in a, flying in the sky. Sometimes it's fun to play with the healing brush tools. So, I'd suggest maybe experimenting with that if you, if you feel brave. Now, I'm going to zoom out and show everybody how to crop an image. Because that's one of the other things you might want to do in Photoshop when editing images. So, to zoom out, I'm going to go ahead and click on my zoom tool. I'm going to hold down my alt key. And then, I'm just going to click until I can see the whole image inside of my screen. Now, to crop an image, I'm going to click on the crop tool, which is the fifth tool down from the top. It looks like an actual cropping tool. And then, when I click on that, now you can see I have these handles around the outsides of my image. Where if I want to, I can just click and drag on one of those to resize that area. Anything that is inside of this area is going to be saved as part of the image. And as I press and drag here, you'll notice that part of the image is gray. That means that this part of the image isn't going to be saved when I finish my crop. It's going to get rid of that. So, this can be helpful if you've got an image. And say, there's something that you want to crop out. Like, a beautiful landscape. But there's a car on the side of the road somewhere that you just want to get rid of. And you just want to focus on, say, the sunset. Or in this image, we have this date stamp here that for time's sake, we just want to cut it out. We could actually heal this using the healing tools. And the Photoshop, the Basics Workshop, will actually show you how to do that. But for today, we're just going to crop it out. So, once we've figure out what we want to focus on, we can, we've got a couple of different ways to finish our crop. And I'll show you one of those ways right here. So, if you remember, I mentioned that the control panel gives us options for working with a specific tool. And up here, at the very top, right in the middle of the screen, there are a couple of options for what we want to do if we're done with cropping. If we, if we decide, oh, maybe I want to reset this, and I want to start from scratch. You can click the first icon. The middle icon says, nope, I don't want to crop anymore. And it will cancel the current crop. It'll just stop this. And then, allow you to go do something else. The last one. This checkmark. That allows us to accept the changes that we've made. And then, it'll resize. It'll crop our image. And then, off we go. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And our image is now cropped. Now, we just have all of this image here. We don't have any of the extra space off to the side. We don't have all this empty space with the rocks over here. So, now, we've just got our zoomed in image a little bit. And it looks pretty good. So, this, the, the things that I've demonstrated to you so far as part of today's session, they're actually all part of the Photoshop, the Basics Workshop that we have on IT trainings website. So, I'm going to go ahead and show you all where to find that information. So, just as a quick reminder, all of IT trainings workshops are free not just for the IU community. But for everyone, everywhere. So, feel free to share our courses with your friends, your neighbors. Anybody who might be interested. But. So, to get started with finding Photoshop, the Basics, you'll want to be on our website, which is ittraining.iu.edu. And we can type that in the chat. And April is adding those links to the chat right now. From here, to get to our courses, you want to go to explore topics. Now, we have a lot of different, a lot of different courses on all sorts of different topics. But the Adobe programs are all located in Design and Media. So, I'm going over here in the menu here on the left. I'll click on Design and Media. And then, so here, we have a whole bunch of resources that focus on design and media. You can find some quick get started guides from Adobe. You can watch a quick interface video, well, it's not super quick. It's about 10 minutes long. But it's a deep dive into the interfaces of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver. You can also get some training based on specific tasks. Or if you just want to jump into a specific program, if you scroll down here, here's all the workshops that we have on Adobe, on Adobe programs. So, for Photoshop, we'll just click on Photoshop, the Basics here. And so, from here, you get a little introduction about what the course is about. And to register for our courses, you'll want to click on the view course in Expand button. Because our courses are all hosted in IU Expand. So, we click on this. And this loads up the page on expand for Photoshop, the Basics. When you want to enroll in a course, all you need to do is click on the login or signup link that's right here. And Expand will ask you to login or create a guest account. Now, this is where things get a little bit different if you're an IU person compared to, compared to a non-IU person. If you're, if you are a member of the IU community, you'll want to click the login button here. And login with your IU username and passphrase. If you are not a member of the IU community, all you need to do is create a guest account. It's free. And once you create your guest account, just fill in this information. Hit submit. And when you get the confirmation email, follow the steps in that confirmation email. Then, you come back here. And then, you can login with your, with your IU guest account. But once you get logged in, you can register for that course and any of our other courses that we offer on our website. Now, if you need a little assistance or need to, need a quick reminder of how to get to our content or how to sign up for a course on Expand, we have a website that will help you with that. And I do believe that April's just put that in the chat as well. And we've got a different path for IU users and non-IU users. So, these instructions give you a video that will walk you through the steps that I just walked through. Finding our courses, registering for our courses. And if you are non-IU folks, you also get a walk through of signing up for a guest account. And then, how to find our courses and how to find the courses that you've signed up for in the past. So, this gives you all the steps that you need to get our, to get to our courses and get registered. So, at this point, does anybody have any questions about Photoshop? Any questions about anything that I've gone over today? Feel free to ask any questions that you might have. I've got the chat open. So, I can see any questions that anybody asks. And April just added the link to the photo that I used as the example today if you want to try working with it on your own in Photoshop. It's also in the Photoshop, the Basics course. Alrighty. If nobody else has any questions, then I'm just going to go ahead and wrap things up. So, thank you everybody for coming on this rainy Thursday afternoon. And I hope everybody has a good day. And have fun learning all you want to learn about the Adobe apps. >> Hey, Beth, you did get a question. >> Oh, yes. Oh, I see that. It's from Lisa. Do you need permissions to download to your computer? Depending on. So, for. So, for computers that are managed by IU, depending on how your computer is setup, you might need some assistance installing Creative Cloud. For example, if you have admin rights on your computer, you should be okay. But otherwise, you might need to reach out to your IT pro to get it installed on your IU computer. If it's on a non-IU computer, you should be fine to just install it. You can install the Adobe Creative Cloud apps on up to two computers. So, so, I hope that answers your question. Alrighty. If there are no other questions, then again, I hope everybody has a good rest of your day.