After 3 months I wasn't overwhelmed

 I’ve had an trial of the creative cloud suite for an extended 3 month period. It really does have a comprehensive set of programs. In comparison I have a number of different programs, from several different software companies, that I use standalone but use whichever is appropriate and have to swap files between each application. I was expecting that by now adobe would be well integrated. I was disappointed there is only some interchangeability but it is pretty much the same step, saving &/or exporting then opening working on the file, save again and back on the roundtrip merry go round, like plugins have pretty much always worked. Ok it all works but I don’t need to be in the creative cloud environment to do it like this.

  I was once quiet a fan of lightroom up to revision 5 when it got so slow. So I was keen to see how light room classic had progressed and it had. The facial recognition was nice (but not essential for me) the HDR and Panorama were also fine and the synch to lightroom mobile seemed to work nicely. I was initially impressed. However I still had the strong impression that behind it all was the one person one catalogue, one spot to file your originals was underlying this all (the shared images just being smart previews). So I was a little underwhelmed here compared with tools I already had.

  I had decided to spend a fair bit if time learning Photoshop in detail, and it started well, I was particularly interested in layers and blending. I must admit it does do these tasks well, However things kind of fell apart after that there are so many menu, tabs, icons,  sliders and even different terminology for much the same process that I found trying to consume the actually well put together training material to be brain numbing. I did step down to Photoshop Express and that was useable straight away (I do have an old version of Adobe Photoshop express on my main machine, it came with my Wacom tablet, but I actually haven’t used it in 3 years. The new express is certainly update but again a bit disappointing.

  Illustrator wasn’t as hard to pick up and I made a couple of fun things with it, however when I tried doing a couple of cartoons I was a little shocked at how few graphic tools I commonly use I could actually find.

My final foray into the creative cloud world was video. I’m not very experience with video but interested and have been making a few experimental shorts. So I then dove deep into premiere pro,  The training material is good but stopped short of what I wanted. The wealth for a menus, tabs, sliders and icon and number of track types was a bit confusing. I reckon Davinci Resolve is easier to pickup. (that’s not a compliment by the way)  So after some time back down to Premiere Express (its ok easy and much quicker to get things done), then finally Rush.  

 Now Rush does about 90% of what I was after and sort of quickly and had a nice set of options including schedule upload to YouTube. Its very heavily aimed at social media influencer wanna-bees. So I actually used that for a few weeks to recorded a set of quick tips for watercolourist. This might be the one program I would miss when the trial ends. I’ve since discovered a few stutters in the videos on YouTube that are not the same as renderings on my computer (but I’m not totally off-put, it may have been easy to avoid.)

The ongoing rental (aka subscription) and its price, have always been a stumbling block for me. I can’t find any strong reasons for me taking up an subscription (and no discount was offered). I did however registered for Adobe Max, which is free for those with Adobe ID just before my trial version ran out. Maybe the blue sky of features yet to come might keep the adobe flame burning, but its nearly gone out for me.