Looking for the best Adobe software for your artistic work?—Here is a list of the top 10 most-used Adobe programmes and why you need them.
Adobe’s list of software is pretty long, since the artistic Cloud package covers a wide range of artistic fields.
What Adobe programmes do creative people need the most?
Adobe has almost all of the tools that creative workers use. Whether you are a graphic designer, web designer, photographer, artist, marketing expert, or video editor, you will find an app that fits your needs.
Most Adobe software, on the other hand, needs a subscription.
Subscribers can choose to subscribe to just one programme, the Photography Plan, or the whole Creative Cloud suite (check out the Best Adobe and Creative Cloud membership discounts for 2023).
It’s an important buy, so make sure you know what you’re getting before you make it.
We’ve made a list of all the free Adobe software and the top 10 Adobe apps, and explained why you’d want and need to use them to make good artistic work.
Top 10 Best Adobe Apps for Creatives
- Adobe Photoshop—Best for photo editing
- Adobe Illustrator—Best for vector graphics
- Adobe XD—All-in-one UI/UX design tool
- Adobe Dreamweaver—Best for website design
- Adobe Premiere Rush—Best video editor for beginners
- Adobe After Effects—Best animation software
- Adobe Spark—Best for social media graphics
- Adobe Premiere Pro—Best for video editing
- Adobe InDesign—Best for layout and page design
- Adobe Lightroom—Cloud-based photo editor
What are the benefits of Adobe applications?
Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite is a group of apps and services made for artists by Adobe Inc. and called “creative cloud apps.”
It gives subscribers access to a set of tools for graphic design, video editing, web development, and photography, as well as a set of mobile apps and some optional creative cloud services.
But because each Adobe programme has its own uses, you need to be familiar with all of them to know which ones will work best for your needs.
Photoshop and Illustrator are important tools for graphic designers because they can be used for a wide range of tasks, like editing photos and making vector drawings.
But if you want to edit movies or make animations, you can’t go wrong with either Premiere Pro or After Effects.
Premiere Rush and Adobe Spark are two Adobe apps that are good for newbies and casual creatives.
How to Download Software from Adobe
Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting Adobe apps on your devices:
Step 1: Go to creativecloud.adobe.com/apps and sign in. Then, click put (or Download) next to the app you want to put on the creative cloud.
Looking for the desktop tool for Creative Cloud? It gets put on your phone when you download your first app. If you’d rather, you can just download it.
Step 2: To start the installation, double-click the file you got.
Step 3: Sign in to your Adobe account when the installer box pops up. Your app is instantly downloaded and set up by the Creative Cloud desktop app.
If you are already signed in to Creative Cloud on two other computers, you will be asked to sign out of one of them.
Step 4: To add more apps, click Install in the Creative Cloud PC app for the app you want to add.
1. Adobe Premiere Pro
Premiere Pro is Adobe’s all-in-one video editing programme that lets you edit footage in any file, including 8K and virtual reality.
The best Adobe app for making videos
It is the most famous software for editing videos used by artists.
Premiere Pro is a professional video editing tool with a visual timeline that is widely used in the film and TV industries, by YouTubers, and by marketing and design companies to edit everything from commercials and music videos to TV series and feature-length films.
Auto Reframe, which smartly reframes your footage while keeping the action in the frame for different aspect ratios, and the ability to snap graphic objects to guides, each other, or tracked things are two recent additions to Premiere Pro.
Thanks to native file compatibility, lightweight proxy processes, and faster ProRes HDR, you can work without any trouble on your mobile device.
It works on both Windows and Mac computers.
It also works with Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, Audition, Adobe Stock, and a variety of third-party software to make videos for movies and web shows.
But because it’s hard to learn, Adobe just released Premier Rush, a lighter video editing app for beginners and people who don’t use it often.
2. Adobe Photoshop
Nobody will be shocked by the first name on Adobe’s list of mobile apps.
The best Adobe programme for editing photos
Photoshop is the professional standard for changing images. It is so popular that the word “Photoshop” has become a verb.
Photoshop is also a full-fledged graphics maker, which many creative people are looking for in an app these days.
Photoshop is a programme for editing photos, while Adobe Illustrator (below) is a programme for making vector drawings.
Photoshop is a great tool to have on your computer if you want to edit images and put together several layers of image files, graphics, and text; edit and render graphic images or vector graphics; or make 3D graphics or video.
There are many versions of Photoshop, such as Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Express, and Photoshop CC. This app works on Mac, Windows, and the iPad.
Photoshop is used not only by photographers and photo editors, but also by digital artists, graphic designers, art directors, and even 3D artists, because it can do so much.
3. Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe’s Dreamweaver is a programme for making websites for people who don’t know how to code. It was first released in 1997.
The best Adobe web design software
It was new at the time, but now there are many other options, such as Adobe’s own Muse CC, that do the same things.
Dreamweaver is thought to be the best programme for making websites. Professional site designers use it a lot because they already know how to do it.
But it’s not just for professionals. If you’re just starting out as a web designer, you can check out the 10 Best Web Design Courses Online to improve your skills and knowledge in the field.
Dreamweaver has features like flexible code, ready-to-use themes, and free photos from Stock that let you make a great web page quickly.
Also, the software has extra features like smooth live view editing, support for multiple monitors on Windows, a new, modern user interface, and git support, just to name a few.
4. Adobe InDesign
InDesign is page layout software that is mostly used for print but can also be used for desktop versions and digital media.
The best Adobe tools for designing and laying out pages
It is the standard tool used by graphic designers and production artists to make images for posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books, and eBooks.
With InDesign, it’s easy to keep track of design features and create immersive experiences in any format.
Professional artists can make music, video, slideshows, and animations that draw people into digital magazines, eBooks, and online documents that people can interact with.
Adobe InDesign is the app that millions of digital designers use to lay out and create pages.
You can also make beautiful visual designs using fonts from the best foundries in the world and pictures from Adobe Stock.
Text wrapping that takes into account the subject, easy colour location, auto-activation of Adobe Fonts, HSB support, and other features are some of the best things about InDesign.
5. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a UI/UX design tool that can be used for many different things. It lets you make animations, build interactive mockups, and talk to other people.
All-in-one UI/UX design tool application
This app has more features, such as 3D transforms, reusable design elements, a style that takes into account the content, auto animation, and more.
Adobe XD is a vector-based UX tool for creating web and mobile apps. It was released a few years ago as Adobe’s alternative to Sketch.
In other words, you don’t build the whole software in Adobe XD. Instead, you use it to see how the user experience will look and how the different parts will work together.
This makes it easy to make sure everything works right from the start to the end of the editing process.
The basic plan of Adobe XD is also free, and you don’t need a Creative Cloud account to use it.
You can share projects with your coworkers, get comments on the same file, and solve problems all in one place.
Adobe XD can be used to make apps and websites, and it can be used on both Mac and Windows devices.
6. Adobe Premiere Rush
The Premiere Rush is an all-in-one video editing app for beginners that works on multiple platforms and processes and uploads video clips right away. This makes it great for people who make content for social media.
The best tools for first-time video editors
The application has tools for cropping, resizing, moving, and changing colours, as well as a number of tools for changing sounds and sequences.
The Premiere Rush is another great programme for editing videos for social media.
All of your artistic works will be saved in the cloud. This makes it easy to change them on different devices, and you can even set them to automatically sync.
With its full integration with Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush is meant to make it very easy to edit and post material directly to social media sites.
You can change the speed of your videos, add audio and motion graphics, and share high-quality movies on social media with your phone.
With this free programme, it’s easy to add transitions, change titles, and fix colours to make your movies better.
7. Adobe Illustrator
As the name suggests, artists, illustrators, and graphic designers use Illustrator to make everything from simple images like logos, icons, and infographics to complex drawings and everything in between.
The best Adobe app for making vector art
It’s a drawing programme that uses vector graphics, which means it has less complexity than raster graphics and can be scaled up or down indefinitely.
Photoshop has a lot of features that are always being added to, but Adobe Illustrator is much more focused on a single task.
PC Magazine said that Adobe Illustrator was the best app for editing vector images in 2018.
Illustrator’s software list includes just a few of its best features, such as the ability to edit with other people, take better screenshots, and store files in the cloud.
With Adobe Sensei AI-powered features in Illustrator, you can make things quickly. For example, you can change the colour of artwork with just one click, make your own effects, and a lot more.
Most of Adobe Illustrator also works on Windows, the iPad, and MAC.
8. Adobe Lightroom
Creative people like you can use Lightroom to make amazing shots from anywhere.
A picture editor that runs in the cloud
It’s the first full photo service made just for professional shooters and people who like taking pictures.
Even though Lightroom doesn’t have all of Photoshop’s image-editing features, it’s easier to use for everyday jobs because it has a simple interface.
Also, keep in mind that Lightroom’s changes are never harmful.
This means that the original picture and any changes you made to it with Adobe software are saved separately. This makes it easy to undo changes if things don’t go as planned.
Lightroom also has easy-to-use tools that let you improve photos, boost colours, and hide things that take away from your vision.
You can make photos that stand out by using presets for vintage, travel, and other themes, as well as portrait settings for every skin tone.
With cloud storage, you can work on any device and keep all of your other mobile and PC devices in sync.
The Lightroom community is a great place to meet other creative workers and get ideas.
9. Adobe After Effects
With After Effects, you can make amazing motion images and visual effects.
The best software for artists to make animations
As a tool for post-production, After Effects is used to make special effects like explosions and lightning hits, as well as for keying, tracking, and compositing.
After Effects is a must-have on any list of Adobe programmes for visual effects and motion graphics.
You wouldn’t use it to make a whole movie, but a creative company might use it to make short animations like those you might see on a website, in an explainer film, or in a credit sequence.
As well as working well with other Adobe apps, After Effects also works well with Cinema 4D, a 3D app from Maxon.
Compositions can be made in After Effects, and Adobe Premiere Pro’s intermediate processing can be skipped by using dynamic linking.
After Effects automatically changes how it uses resources so that your compositions can be rendered as quickly as possible on your computer.
After Effects lets you get the most out of your computer’s CPU by speeding up previews, marking layers that affect processing time, and even rendering your works when you’re not using the programme.
10. Adobe Spark
Apps like Adobe Spark make it easy and quick to make short videos, web pages, and pictures for social media.
The best images app for social media
This software is good for both professionals and beginners in the marketing and social media fields, as well as people who don’t have time to learn more complicated programmes like Photoshop and Illustrator.
Adobe Spark is a design app that you can use online or on your phone. It makes it easy to make beautiful social images, short videos, and web pages that will make you stand out on social media.
You can make your work look better by using pre-made pictures that are easy to change by adding your own photos, graphics, and text.
With Adobe Spark, it’s easy to get rid of backgrounds, change text, and add branding elements because the tools are easy to use and walk you through the steps.
You can easily change the size of material for social media and add effects, filters, and textures that would be at home in Photoshop.
Adobe Spark lets you choose the pictures you want to use. You can upload your own from your device or a cloud storage service, or you can choose from a list of thousands of free images that are already online.
From practical tips on how to stand out on social media to inspiring stories, the Adobe Spark app has an amazing collection of advice from experts and real people who learned by doing.
Conclusions
This is the end of my list of the 10 best Adobe programmes for artists and designers.
To sum up, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom are the best when it comes to changing photos.
Adobe Premiere Pro is the best software for editing videos if you are an expert video editor.
But newbies and casual artists are more than welcome to use Adobe’s programmes. Adobe offers Adobe Premiere Rush and Adobe Spark, which you can use to make simple creative work that looks professional.
Adobe also made apps that are great for web and page designers. The best software packages for your web and page designs are Adobe InDesign and Adobe Dreamweaver.
I only named the 10 most popular Adobe programmes, but you should know that Adobe has a lot more software for artists like you.
Find the right programme for your needs, and you can make the most creative designs.
