Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
- Article Categories
- Book Categories
- Collections
- Custom Solutions
- Log In
- Main Menu
Article Categories
- Main Menu
Book Categories
Home
Adobe Creative Cloud All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
Author:
Published:
November 20, 2017
Overview
Adobe Creative Cloud is the most popular suite of tools among creative professionals, and a valuable resource you can use to fulfill all of your design goals. Ready to get started? The only book on the market of its kind, Adobe Creative Cloud All-in-One For Dummies is written by designers for designers. It will provide you with expert instruction that spans seven mini-books, with helpful information that can grant insight regardless of your current level of knowledge. Experience with Adobe Creative Cloud is a marketable skill, and this all-in-one reference guide will help you add InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC, Acrobat Pro, Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Experience Design to your resume.
When you think about manipulating visual media, the design tools in Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) automatically come to mind. The menus in Adobe CC applications offer many options and tools to help you edit and install pictures and active graphics. And you can always use shortcuts to work more quickly. Check out these helpful shortcuts.
About The Author
Jennifer Smith is a web technology expert and author of several books, including Photoshop CS6 Digital Classroom. Christopher Smith is president of the American Graphics Institute and author of more than ten books on Adobe software. Fred Gerantabee is an Emmy award-winning interactive designer, web developer, and author.
Jennifer Smith is a web technology expert and author of several books, including Photoshop CS6 Digital Classroom. Christopher Smith is president of the American Graphics Institute and author of more than ten books on Adobe software. Fred Gerantabee is an Emmy award-winning interactive designer, web developer, and author.
Articles From The Book
3 results
General Adobe Products
Articles
When you think about manipulating visual media, the design tools in Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) automatically come to mind. The menus in Adobe CC applications offer many options and tools to help you edit and install pictures and active graphics. And you can always use shortcuts to work more quickly. Check out these helpful shortcuts.
General Adobe Products
Articles
After you start creating many objects in Adobe XD, you need to consider the position of those objects and how they relate to each other. In order to lessen noise in your design, you want to keep icons and text aligned and distributed in a clean manner. You can check your alignment in several ways, including using a grid or using guides.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Adobe Bridge provides many tools to help you automate tasks. Here, you discover how to use a few helpful features that will save you from repeating redundant tasks.
Batch renaming your files
You might have noticed that in the Book 2-Bridge → Hockey folder, many files contain generic filenames. These images were downloaded from a digital camera, and instead of changing the names immediately, you can opt to change them simultaneously using the batch rename feature in Adobe Bridge.
General Adobe Products
Articles
You can bend objects — make them wavy, gooey, or spiky — by creating simple to complex distortions with the Illustrator Liquify tools and the Envelope Distort features.
The Liquify tools
The Liquify tools can accomplish all sorts of creative or wacky (depending on how you look at it) distortions to your objects.
General Adobe Products
Articles
To begin using Photoshop CC to create images for print, you need to know the existing resolution of your image. To see an open image’s present size and resolution in Photoshop, choose Image → Image Size. The Image Size dialog box appears. The Image Size dialog box.
At the top of the Image Size dialog box, you see the pixel dimensions noted.
General Adobe Products
Articles
There are many times that you want to show items scrolling in your Adobe XD prototype. You can simulate scrolling by changing the size of the artboard while keeping something called the View Point at the original artboard size. If you were following along earlier, you can use any of the artboards you have created, or create a new file with an artboard of any size.
General Adobe Products
Articles
When you have text in your Adobe XD project, you can start changing the text properties. These properties include Font Family, Font Size, Font Weight, Alignment, Character Spacing (kerning and tracking), Line Spacing (leading), Fill, Border (stroke), Shadow (drop shadow), and Background Blur. So let’s review how those properties are applied.
General Adobe Products
Articles
When you’re working in Illustrator, precision is important, but you also want to see how the artwork looks. Whether for the web or print, Illustrator offers several ways in which to view your artwork:
Preview and Outline views: By default, Illustrator shows Preview view, where you see colors, stroke widths, images, and patterns as they should appear when printed or completed for onscreen presentation.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Access the Illustrator Stroke panel by clicking the Stroke hyperlink in the Control panel. In the Stroke panel, you can choose to change the Width height by clicking and selecting a preset width from the Width drop-down menu, or you can type in a value. You can also customize the caps (the end of a line), joins (the endpoints of a path or dash), and the miter limit (the length of a point).
General Adobe Products
Articles
You don’t have to make PDFs in Adobe Acrobat CC. You can also convert Photoshop files, Illustrator files, or InDesign documents to the PDF format. Here, you find out how.
Converting Photoshop and Illustrator files to PDF
Both Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Illustrator CC can save documents directly into the Adobe PDF file format.
General Adobe Products
Articles
You can use InDesign to create and modify QR code graphics. QR codes are a form of barcode that can store information such as words, numbers, URLs, or other forms of data. The user scans the QR code using her camera and software on a device, such as a smartphone, and the software makes use of the encoded data; for example, it opens a browser with the encoded URL, identifies a product, tracks a package, and so on.
General Adobe Products
Articles
A border, also known as a stroke, can be applied to any of your Adobe XD document’s shapes and paths. When you create a border, you select both the width and color.
If you still have your button selected, make sure the checkbox is on to the left of the Border in the Properties panel; then click the box to the right of the checkbox to open the color picker and select a color that you would like to use for your border.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Here, you are directed through the steps to create a simple button with a solid fill and some text in Adobe XD. Follow along with these simple steps.
Select the Rectangle tool and click and drag to create a rectangle of any size on an artboard.In this example, the standard iPhone 6 template is selected.
With the rectangle still active, type 200 into the Width textbox and 70 into the Height textbox.
General Adobe Products
Articles
After you have added metadata to an image in Adobe Bridge CC, you can easily apply it to more images by creating a metadata template. In this exercise, you apply the metadata template from the IMG_4088.JPG image to other images in the same folder:
Make sure that IMG_4088.JPG is selected in Adobe Bridge.
Choose Tools → Create Metadata Template.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Your documents likely contain all sorts of text, and some of that text may need to be edited. InDesign has a built-in story editor for editing text. This feature can be useful when it’s inconvenient or impossible to open another text editor to make changes.
InDesign also integrates with another Adobe product: InCopy.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Although editing text and graphics is helpful, you may need to take text or images from a PDF document and use them in another file. Fortunately, Acrobat also includes tools to make this a breeze. Of course, you should always make certain that you have the permission of the owner of a document before reusing content that isn’t your original work.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Seasoned Illustrator users love the Hide command. Use it when the object you want to select is stuck behind something else or when you need to select one object and another repeatedly activates instead.A good opportunity to use the Hide command is when you’re creating text inside a shape. Follow these steps to hide a shape:
Create a shape.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Your InDesign documents may sometimes need a little support from other documents. Find out how to import PDFs and other InDesign documents below.
Importing PDFs
You can import PDF files to place them as images in InDesign layouts. When importing, you can preview and crop the pages by using the Place PDF dialog box.
General Adobe Products
Articles
You can use corner effects on basic InDesign shapes to customize the shape’s look. Corner effects are useful for adding an interesting look to borders. You can be quite creative with some of the shapes you apply effects to or by applying more than one effect to a single shape. Here’s how to create a corner effect on a rectangle:
Select the Rectangle tool and create a new rectangle anywhere on the page.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Saving your colors in Illustrator not only keeps you consistent, but also makes future edits easier. Any time you build a color, drag it from the Color panel (or the Tools panel) to the Swatches panel to save it as a color swatch for future use. You can also select an object that uses the color and click the New Swatch button at the bottom of the Swatches panel.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Using rulers to help accurately place objects in an illustration is not difficult, but not knowing how to effectively use the rulers in Illustrator can drive you straight over the edge.To view rulers in Illustrator, choose View→ Rulers→ Show Rulers or press Ctrl+R (Windows) or ⌘ +R (Mac). When the rulers appear, their default measurement setting is the point (or whichever measurement increment was last set up in the preferences).
General Adobe Products
Articles
Using keywords in Adobe Bridge — logical words to help you locate images more quickly — can reduce the amount of time it takes to find an image on a computer. Here’s how:
Click the Keywords tab, which appears behind the Metadata panel.A list of commonly used keywords appears.
Click the New Keyword button at the bottom of the Keywords panel.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Panels are small windows in a Creative Cloud program that contain controls, such as sliders, menus, buttons, and text fields, that you can use to change the settings or attributes of a selection or an entire document. Panels may also include information about a section or about the document itself. You can use this information or change the settings in a panel to modify the selected object or the document you’re working on.
General Adobe Products
Articles
If you find that you are reusing objects in your Adobe XD UI, you should consider converting them to symbols. Symbols are linked objects that can be reused across all artboards in a document. Because they are dynamically linked, changes to one reflect across all instances.In this next set of steps, you use the icon artwork from this DummiesCCfiles folder.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Whether you’re saving a GIF, JPG, or PNG file in Photoshop CC, you probably spent some time experimenting with settings to find what works best for your needs. Save selected options to reload later by saving the settings. Do so by clicking the arrow to the right of the Preset drop-down list. Select Save Settings from the list that appears and name your settings.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Repeat Grid is one of the top timesaving features in Adobe XD. The Repeat Grid feature allows you to create a set of repeated elements with a simple click and drag. When repeated, you can tweak one set of repeated elements and have those changes reflected instantly throughout the rest of the elements. The steps you find here help you experience this great feature.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Hold down the Pen tool icon in Illustrator’s Tools panel to access additional tools: the Add Anchor Point, Delete Anchor Point, and Convert Anchor Point tools. You can create a corner point by using the shortcut method, by pressing the Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) key to access the Convert Anchor Point tool. You may feel more comfortable switching to that tool when you need to convert a point, but switching tools can be more time-consuming.
General Adobe Products
Articles
With InDesign, it’s a good idea to know how to organize text frames in your publication and achieve the results you need. Controlling text frames so that they do what you need them to do is a matter of knowing how they work after you put text in them.InDesign gives you a lot of control over the text in your publications.
General Adobe Products
Articles
InDesign offers many tools that help you work with text and graphics together in a layout. From the tools in the Tools panel, to commands, to panel options, InDesign offers you an immense amount of control over the manipulation of graphics and text in a spread.
Page orientation and size
When you create a new document, you can set its page orientation and size.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Navigating in Photoshop CC isn’t much different than getting around in other Adobe applications. Most Creative Cloud applications make extensive use of panels. Here, you have an opportunity to experience the Photoshop workspace and configure those panels.As a default, you are in the Essentials workspace. If you are happy with the panels that appear while in that workspace there is no reason to change your workspace at this time.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Illustrator CC gives the tools you need to make basic shapes. But, there are ways to improve upon those. The following simple tips can improve your skills at creating basic shapes in Illustrator:
Press and hold the Shift key while dragging with the Rectangle or Ellipse tool to create a perfect square or circle.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Clipping paths allow you to create a path that crops a part of an image based on the path, such as removing the background area of an image. This shape can be one you create using InDesign, or you can import an image that already has a clipping path. InDesign can also use an existing alpha or mask layer, such as one created using Photoshop, and treat it like a clipping path.
General Adobe Products
Articles
In InDesign CC, you can change the settings for an entire text frame or a single paragraph in a text frame in several ways. You can use the Paragraph panel to make adjustments to a single paragraph or to an entire text frame’s indentation, justification, and alignment. Open the Paragraph panel by choosing Window→ Type & Tables→ Paragraph.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Using the Layers panel that appears when you click on the Adobe XD Layers icon, you can rearrange the stacking order, rename, duplicate, delete, and select artboards.
Rearranging artboards
Click and drag up or down an artboard in the Artboard in the Layers panel in order to move it up or down in the stacking order.
General Adobe Products
Articles
Just like in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop artboards provide the capability to build separate pages or screens within one document. This can be especially helpful if you are building screens for a mobile application or small brochure.You can think of an artboard as a special type of layer group created using the Layers panel.
General Adobe Products
Articles
After you have imported your images into Adobe XD, you don’t have a great deal of editing control, but you can resize and rotate images just like you would any other shape.You can also easily round the corners of an imported image using the corner widgets. Click and drag a corner widget in order to round the edges of an image.
General Adobe Products
Articles
The page is the central part of any InDesign publication — it’s where the visible part of your publication is created. Navigating and controlling pages are important parts of working in InDesign. The Pages panel allows you to select, adjust, move, and navigate pages in a publication. When you use default settings, pages are created as facing pages, which means that they’re laid out as two-page pairs, or spreads.