Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX and more. Explore your creativity with software like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. Voted #1 in graphic design software.
Pros:
- Industry-standard and highly recommended by creative experts.
- Complete package with more than 20+ creative apps.
- Free trial available. No credit card needed.
Cons:
- Only available for a monthly or annual subscription.
- Less suitable for beginner or amateur use due to the relatively high cost.
More About Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud Reviews
Find out what each expert had to say about Adobe Creative Cloud.
Ray Allen
Joshua Galinato
As a photographer & graphic designer I have been using the Adobe Suite for over 10 years now. When it comes to editing photos it’s really down to the two main photo editing software:
✓ Adobe Lightroom
Great for organising albums and grading photos.
✓ Adobe Photoshop
Great for manipulating photos even further.
Having said that, this year I wanted to try my hands on open source software. The equivalent would be:
✓ Darktable
Lightroom equivalent.
✓ GIMP
Photoshop equivalent.
Although the free alternatives are similar, I can’t deny that the Adobe products are far better and more intuitive to use.
If I was an amateur with a small budget, GIMP & Darktable would do just fine. If I’m in a professional environment, I would need to use Photoshop & Lightroom.
Theo Fels
✓ Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. This service allows you to use any of Adobe software for a monthly fee. The software is easy to install and is automatically updated so you are never using out of date software. Adobe also has free tutorials for all its applications and free downloads of all adobe fonts.
Also, all adobe products integrate with each other so importing files is easy because you can use the adobe native format (.psd .ai, etc). You don’t have to export into typical formats such as .jpg, png or .mpg.
Adobe Creative Cloud has a ton of stuff, here’s a rundown of the must haves:
InDesign – Print design
Photoshop – imaging and graphic software
Illustrator – vector (resizable graphic) software
After Effects – Motion graphics”
✓ Webflow
It’s also a subscription service. You don’t have to know anything about coding to use Webflow. The genius of Webflow are their tutorials, they are smart, informative, and entertaining. Our studio uses Webflow to make comprehensive prototypes that are fully interactive and responsive. We can show our clients exactly how the website will work and act before we hand it off to our developers. You can also use as a development tool but ONLY if you have the development capabilities in-house.
Adil Advani
✓ Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is the most recommended software for photo editing. Because it has a lot of features for editing and it’s a comprehensive and powerful software, and despite its reputation for being complicated it can actually be used with relative ease by photographers of all ability levels and graphic designers.
Brian Gargone
✓ Adobe Creative Cloud
At Squeeze Marketing, all of our designers use the Adobe Suite. It is the software we are all most familiar with and it gives us greater design opportunities. We use Illustrator for hand-drawn designs, whereas we use Photoshop or InDesign for laying out projects. Additionally, we most recently started using XD to wireframe our websites to show clients their navigation before taking it into development.
Michelle Kraft
✓ Adobe Creative Suite
If you want software that is going to get the job done right, you need to go with the non-surprising industry standard—Adobe Suite. For the last 15 years, I’ve consistently used Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign to create everything I need for both online and print. Recently, Adobe has come out with templates, presets, and tutorials to compete with Canva and allow a user to dive in and get started right away. You can create your own brushes, patterns, and effects to make sure your designs stay unique to you and your brand. There are zero limitations with what you can create in your Adobe designs. I’ve arm-wrestled with trying to create a simple drop shadow in Canva, and I always go back to Adobe software to create what I need to import into Canva.
Louis Porter
In the graphics design team at CoinCorner, we use a number of Adobe’s design software to create everything from marketing materials to Bitcoin sock designs.
✓ Adobe Creative Cloud
Illustrator is my top recommendation as it doesn’t limit the types of designs you can produce.. I use it daily to create the likes of web and mobile landing pages, industry-standard vector graphics, infographics and web banners, and more. It has very useful features such as being able to blend typography and graphics together, and adding multiple artboards to one document so that all work can be kept together.
Secondly, I’d recommend Photoshop as the best software for editing, manipulating and transforming images. It makes the entire process of image editing very easy, allowing users to combine photos and graphics to create new pieces of artwork, as well as make GIFs for use on social media and marketing emails.
Finally, as a graphics designer rather than coder, I liaise closely with our in-house tech team to optimise designs for our web and mobile platforms. To make this process easier, I use the XD software to produce functioning mock ups without the need for any coding. Designs made in XD can be shared with others across the business, giving them the chance to play around with the web or app design elements before it’s coded into our applications too.
Madhsudhan Khemchandani
For over two years, I have been using Photoshop and Canva for eye-catching images.
✓ Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop allows me creating new images, editing screenshots and exporting as a web which compress the images without losing the quality. The reduced size is essential in the web world. The only downside of Photoshop is that it’s not free, and you also need a good computer to perform some tasks.
✓ Canva
I use Canva to create amazing thumbnails for my YouTube videos. The tool allows creating images which users want to click on. Canva is a free tool, but it offers a paid version which comes with many great backgrounds, elements, and images to work without finding the images on Google.
✓ Snapseed
In terms of mobile, I use Snapseed as it offers some of the great tools such as auto-enhance, dual exposure, curves etc. If an image is taken on my mobile, I edit and compress the image in Snapseed and upload to my website straight away.
Nicole Garcia
I’m a graphic artist and I also handle a creative team that makes the bulk of the graphic designs you see on our site. In Most Craft, we utilize 2 software for our images, and I truly recommend all of them. These are Photoshop and the Canva photo editor.
✓ Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a mammoth image editing software that everyone is familiar with. In our company, we use this to retouch, make complex edits, and make new images out of the old ones. Depending on your skill level, anything is possible with this software. However, it can be challenging if you’re working with dozens of images on a tight schedule. That’s why utilizing the other tool is a great big thing.
✓ Canva
We use the Canva photo editor for efficiency. The broad template collection you can easily access is a lifesaver. It saves you time and effort because the design template and stock images are easily available for you to tweak. Whether it be for a social media post or banner for your site, creating one in Canva is a breeze.
Syed Usman Hashmi
✓ Adobe Illustrator
Illustrator is best for the detailed crafting of creatives for your landing pages with a variety of tools with vector-based designing however it needs much more expertise than other tools e.g. photoshop or canvas.
The helpful user interface, it’s in-pane editing, no resolution issues and minimum utilization of resources makes this software unique and much preferred than other tools.