What Are the Main Uses of Each Major Adobe Program?

Adobe started out in 1987 with Illustrator. Since then, they now have over 20+ programs to choose from. For beginners, it can be confusing to figure out which program is best suited for whatever you’re trying to accomplish. Today, I will quickly explain and summarize the main use for each major program. The main programs I’d say are Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and InDesign. Let’s dive into it!

Illustrator is best used for designing vector graphics, which differs from regular images as they don’t contain pixels. Instead, it uses lines and mathematical formulas to create the graphic. Vector graphics are scalable, so they don’t become blurry if you were to enlarge the image. Therefor, Illustrator is best used in creating logos or other vector graphics.

Photoshop is a very well-rounded program and it’s great at doing pretty much everything, but it’s best used for creating and modifying images. Unlike Illustrator, Photoshop works with individual pixels, so there’s more room for creating very specific images with greater details. Photoshop is great at color correction.

After Effects is a video editing software which is best used for creating animations or any other type of visual effects. It differs from Premiere Pro in that its primary purpose isn’t to edit the final project into one video, but rather to edit individual clips to add the visual effects that Premiere cannot.

Premiere Pro is another video editing program, except it’s not about creating effects. Instead, it’s more about compiling all the footage and clips you have into one comprehensive video. This is where you trim footage and organize them all together in the way you want. I like to think of the relationship between Premiere Pro and After Effects like a book and its pages – Premiere Pro is the book itself and it keeps everything together, while the clips edited in After Effects are the pages.

InDesign is a document design and layout program. It’s best used for creating print media such as brochures, handouts, posters, or even books. You can even create interactive eBooks as well. InDesign’s greatest strength is its text editing capabilities, where Photoshop and Illustrator doesn’t have a whole lot of options for text editing.

As you can see, each program has different uses, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully by reading this summarization, you now understand the main differences between them all, and you'll know which program to utilize in accomplishing whatever task it is that you're doing.