We pick out four excellent titles from the Creative Cloud suite that you’ve probably never heard of
Have you ever wondered what the lesser lights of the Adobe Creative Cloud package actually do? Barry Collins discovers some hidden gems for subscribers
Most subscribers to Adobe’s Creative Cloud package are paying the thick end of £50 per month for access to a handful of industry-standard apps: Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, perhaps Dreamweaver in the web-development studios.
However, CC subscribers can’t fail to have noticed a barrage of other apps that are available to be installed as part of the package. Apps that you’ve probably never heard of, let alone got around to installing.
In this feature, we explore what’s on offer in some of Creative Cloud’s lesser-known titles. We’ve picked four apps from the dozen or more available to subscribers to see what they might be missing out on. We’ll uncover powerful software that can be used to easily create 3D characters, a package that can churn out stunning portfolio websites, an audio editor that will clean up anything from your band’s latest demo to the background noise in a podcast, and finally the oft-forgotten Acrobat, which might even ease your hatred of the dreaded PDF.
We’ll also explore some of the mobile apps on offer to Creative Cloud subscribers, and explore how these companion apps further enhance the desktop software. Six years ago, my PC Pro colleagues and I went to Adobe HQ for a morning to learn how to use Audition 4, venturing as we were at the time into making our own podcasts (listen along at
mixlr.com/pcpro). It was a traditional classroom setup: each of us had our own workstation, and the Adobe chap at the front showed us precisely what to do on the big screen at the front. Even with this level of hand-holding, and a thick wodge of tutorial handouts in front of me, I was lost within the hour. I’d dragged the wrong clip onto the timeline, couldn’t work out how to remove the background noise, and quickly became the Picasso of audio, with weird wibbles and gurgles all over the soundtrack. This, I concluded at the time, was not for me.
Today, the Audition interface looks no less intimidating to an audio amateur than it did six years ago, but Adobe has done a stand-up job of better explaining what all those icons and psychedelic-looking waveforms do. For starters, there’s now a built-in walkthrough tutorial system (Audition Learn, available from the Help menu, which opens when you first fire up Audition post-installation). This guides you through common scenarios, such as how to remove background studio noise or how to cobble together a podcast. Usefully, the tutorials open the relevant dropdown menus for you, with screenshots showing how to achieve
the desired effects. Within just an hour of using Audition Learn and the video tutorials on Adobe’s website, I had managed to record and edit a short podcast, with music intro and outro, and with all the background mouse-clicks and standard low office hum removed.
Also much improved since I last dabbled with Audition are the preset effects, which make cleaning up chunks of audio far less of a manual chore. The Essential Sound panel on the right-hand side provides a selection of corrections for different types of audio: dialogue, music, SFX or ambience. Choose a speech track recorded for a podcast, for example, and you can select from a variety of presets that make the speaker sound like they were stood right next to the mic, far away, speaking over the telephone, or the more appropriate “podcast voice”, which does a decent job of mimicking studio conditions. Speech can be enhanced for male or female voices, volume levels can be easily adjusted and normalised, and all of this is performed using a series of basic dropdowns and sliders that are similar to adjusting the parameters of a photo in Lightroom.
Adobe appears to be edging towards a consistent, familiar interface, whether you’re editing audio, video or photography, which can only be a good thing in the modern era, when content creators are almost forced to be masters of multiple disciplines.