Well, I decided to install Creative Cloud version of Adobe applications at home sooner than I anticipated. The price was right. As professional staff at the University of Iowa I am eligible for an educational discount. The cost was just shy of being free. I didn’t install everything possible and retained my CS4 versions that are not subscription based. The apps I picked were Dreamweaver CC, Photoshop CC, Flash CC, Audition CC, Muse CC and After Effects CC.
The deciding factor was the price. Second was a perceived need to stay current in the industry. Everything installed just fine.
I explored Muse CC first. It is easy to create webpages with the program. It is setup to publish to Adobe’s hosting service. I saw that I could create paypal payments with the program. That is a first. It has a few easy to add interactive menus. I think it is a work in progress so it will be interesting to see what happens to it in the future. Next, I am going to determine if it is really possible to create a shopping cart website with the program.
It is fairly expensive to run a shopping cart web site that takes credit cards, prices start at $20/month at Dreamhost. At that price point you get a service that allows you to build a site online that takes credit card information and tracks your inventory on a simple level. $20 per month compared to just a few years ago is quite inexpensive. There are more expenses for security, and credit card transactions. But it is in the ball park of allowing just about anyone to setup a business online. As an artist I would like someone else to do the fulfillment portion of the deal so I could just focus on making Art. But that is unlikely.
Well, back to CC. The next program I looked at was Photoshop CC. I went to look at the filters and I found one for adjusting focus. I think they call it tilt-focus. It is very nice.
Then I looked at Audition CC. It is very similar to Soundbooth that I currently have on tap. It is alittle easier to edit sound files with it. And I see a boat load of filters in it. Very nice.
I looked at After Effects CC for a few minutes. I’ll have to read up on it. I installed it to learn more about it.
Then Dreamweaver CC, not much change.
So there are a few additions to the apps in CC. I really could not afford to not install it. At work they are thinking about upgrading us to CC though we are reluctant because we use non-Adobe tools like Camtasia. I would really like Audition CC at work. That is one area we are lacking, a good audio editor. We have CS6 currently. We like Adobe Premiere Elements 11 as it does the work we need to do without being overly complex. It does chroma key with plenty of controls. The output options are written in English rather than Premiere’s lists of broadcast quality presets. Most of the time we want output that is a file, an mp4 ready for Camtasia and captioning.
