 Welcome everyone to Should You Upgrade to Adobe Creative Cloud? Thanks for joining us for today's TechSoup webinar. My name is Becky Wiegand and I will be your host for today's webinar. I want to make sure everyone knows how to use ReadyTalk, so we'll just go over this really quickly before we begin. But you're welcome to chat to us in that box on the lower left side of your screen if you have any questions or need additional assistance at any time during the webinar. Most of you should be hearing the sound play through your computer speakers. If you have any issues with that sound or hear an echo, if you're logged in more than once into ReadyTalk, that may be what happens. Or if you have any hiccups with the audio, we'll chat out an alternate number that you're welcome to dial in by phone or Skype to use at your convenience through the webinar. We will keep all lines muted so we get a nice clear recording for today's event. And you can refer back to that and share that with any friends or colleagues who may benefit from it, or rewatch it at your convenience. If you lose your Internet connection, go ahead and reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. You should have gotten a reminder email about 30 minutes ago unless you've just registered. And on the side of both of those emails, the one that you just registered with or that reminder 30 minutes ago, you can find a link to the downloadable PowerPoint presentation that we'll be covering today. There is a section of today's webinar that will be done using live-screen sharing. So you will be able to see some elements of Adobe Creative Cloud in real-time that are not represented in that slide deck. So keep an eye on that if you'd like to follow along with us directly. You'll be able to find this webinar as well as any other past webinars and a listing of our upcoming events on the TechSoup website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You can also find it within the next day or so on our TechSoup video channel on YouTube. You will get an email from us in the next few days that has the full presentation and recordings as well as any links we discuss. And if you'd like to tweet to us today, you can do so at TechSoup or using the hashtag PSWebinars. Again, my name is Becky Wiegand and I am the Webinar Program Manager. Thank you all for joining us today. I am joined by my friend and colleague here at TechSoup, Wes Holing, who is a Senior Web Content Developer at TechSoup Global, where he writes about Adobe for TechSoup and contributes to our design team. He considers himself a hack with experience where he creates graphic design content and how-to's. He's participated in a number of these webinars on the Adobe product line because he uses them day in and day out here at TechSoup. And he's created not only a series on intro to Photoshop for nonprofits and blog posts and webinars on Photoshop tools and filters and InDesign, but he's also created two recent courses, Adobe Photoshop for Absolute Beginners, I think is what we called it, and also one on InDesign. So if you're brand new to those, we'll point to them later on in the program, and they are both free for your use. So if you're brand new to those programs, we recommend checking those curricula out so you can learn how to use some of those tools even better. You may see on the back end Terry McGrath from Adobe and Wesley White from TechSoup. They'll be on hand to help answer your questions. Looking at our objectives for this next 55 minutes of webinar, we hope to identify some of the best uses for many of the apps in the Adobe Creative Cloud because we've found that many folks, myself included, often open up a file and think, I'm going to edit this image and I need to design this flyer or this invitation. And do I use InDesign? Do I use Illustrator? Do I need Photoshop? Am I putting something on my website? So do I need Dreamweaver? So we're going to go over just to make sure that folks are aware of what we consider sort of the best uses for each of the primary applications in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. We'll highlight some key features and compare those with some of the free but limited tools out in the marketplace. We know that there are lots of tools that you can use on your phone or that may be free already installed on your computer. And so we're going to talk about some of the things that you may hit walls with some of those and kind of what those decision points are. Okay, I've tried to do it with this free thing on my phone and it's not working so well, or I can't customize it the way I need to. And those are kind of the points where you may say, this is where I need to really upgrade to something more powerful like the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of applications in order to accomplish what I need for my organization. That's going to help you determine if Adobe Creative Cloud will help you better meet your organization's mission. And so we'll be trying our best to help you find those decision points. We know that it will depend on a lot of factors that are unique to your individual organization. So keep that in mind as we go through this, but we hope that we'll give you some resources to bounce off whether or not it makes sense for you to upgrade now or later or maybe you can manage with some of the free tools you already have on hand. We also want you to understand where the donated and discounted options are and how to access those for Adobe Creative Cloud and some other Adobe applications. So we'll be sharing that as well. Before we get started though, I just want to highlight a little bit about TechSoup. We are everywhere on this map that's blue, and we would love to know from where you're joining us on the map today. So feel free to chat in to let us know from where you are participating in today's webinar. Wes and I are located in TechSoup's headquarters here in San Francisco, sunny, beautiful day outside. So we would love to see where you're coming from. I see people chatting in from Chicago, Portland, Montreal, Canada, Boston, Washington, all kinds of places. So thanks for joining us. If you're joining us from outside the United States, we recommend visiting TechSoup.global where you can choose your country from this dropdown to see what's available to you. We have somebody timing in from Catania in Sicily, Italy. I'd love to be there right now. So again, if you're outside the United States, some of the program details that I discussed today around the donated and discounted products may be different where you're at. And so I'll show those really quickly. And if you're interested in looking at these during the webinar, we're happy to answer questions. In the back end, if you visit TechSoup.org slash Adobe, this is where you can access information about the donated and discounted Adobe products available through TechSoup's US-based program. So for those of you outside, whether you're in Italy or Canada or Zimbabwe, you should check out whether you have access to those same things or whether they're slightly different in your own country. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Wes to take us through Adobe's Creative Cloud and help us figure out what makes the most sense for your organization's needs. Thanks for joining us, Wes. We're glad to have you on the program. Great. And thank you so much for that introduction, Becky. Hello, everybody. This is Wes Holing. As Steve joined us in the past, I've covered a lot of other Adobe products like Photoshop and InDesign. Today I'll be taking a look at the Creative Cloud package as a whole. To answer the question, should you upgrade to Adobe Creative Cloud? This will not be a hard sell despite the title. I know a lot of nonprofits ask the question whether it's time to move to something a little more capable of doing the heavy lifting for your graphic design and creative needs. So hopefully we can answer that question for you today. I'll have some question time at the end too for more specifics, but I'm going to approach this a little more generally. If you're not familiar with Creative Cloud, maybe you have Creative Suite, which is its predecessor, or you've just heard of things like Photoshop, I'm going to give you a quick definition of what Creative Cloud is. First of all, it's a collection of apps. There are dozens of apps that are included in a Creative Cloud subscription from Adobe. With your one account, you then get access to all of them. Instead of previous instances like with Creative Suite where you may have to purchase a particular suite that's for the web or for video, in this case you just get everything all at once, and picking to install only the ones that you want. Contrary to some myths about Creative Cloud, it does not run in the cloud. You get your updates, you get your software downloaded from the web, but it installs and is run on your desktop computer just like any other software that you're familiar with. Along with that comes automatic updates. So instead of having to buy the next version whenever it comes out in a year, two, or three, you get the automatic updates straight from Adobe as they're released. So that means any bug fixes, you get instantly any new features you have in the day that they're available. It also includes cloud storage depending on the plan that you get. If you have the all apps plan which is available through TechSoup or the photography only plan which is also available through TechSoup, you get a certain allotment of cloud storage which you can then use to collaborate with people on your team or with anybody else who has the Creative Cloud apps. There are also mobile apps that integrate well with the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop apps if you need to make small changes to photos or something and you're not next to your laptop or your desktop computer, you can make them on the go with Adobe's mobile apps. I won't be covering any of those apps today, but they are definitely worth a look if you already have Creative Cloud or if it's something that you think you might need while you're out in the field. As Becky mentioned, we've got some objectives here today to help introduce Creative Cloud to you. First, I'm going to cover some of the common types of creative work that nonprofits tend to make. Creative work sounds kind of vague, but this is specifically things like making photos or flyers or social media images or videos or things like that. So we'll be covering a bit more of those. I'm also going to explain how you can best use Creative Cloud to make those types of assets. I'll be covering some of the key features with some of the more popular apps and compare them to the ones that you can find for free online, including desktop software and cloud-based services. And lastly, help determine whether Creative Cloud will help you better meet your organization's mission. The answer I think is fairly clear, but it's not always yes to the question, should you upgrade? So let's first talk about some types of common creative work. These are fairly obvious, but I like to lump everything into one of five categories. You have video, audio, documents which include both print and online like PDFs, web assets which is very vague but includes a lot of things like your website, images that then go on the web like social media assets, anything that needs to be created on a more technical code-based level includes web assets. Also, if you remember Flash, which has been rebranded to Animate CC, then that includes those types of properties too. And of course images, which everyone thinks that would Photoshop and other popular apps. So everything that we're going to cover today falls into one of these categories and sometimes Creative Cloud apps can fall into more than one, which is kind of one of the true strengths of Creative Cloud. For best uses, these are a sample of some of the apps that are included in Creative Cloud. The first two rows, not the two at the bottom. There are even more than what's listed here. This is I think 12 at the top and there's even more beyond that, some of which I'll mention but I won't be getting into any detail on them. You may recognize of course Photoshop, Illustrator InDesign, Dreamweaver. There are some other more useful apps in a collaborative sense, like Lightroom for example, is great for working with Photoshop. Or Bridge tends to be very useful for applying to all the work you can create among any of these apps. Audition connects with Premiere Pro, etc. And I'll go into some more of those details later. The reason that I include the two at the bottom, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, is they can be a good bridge between if you're using a free tool right now or something that you've got that's older. Maybe you've got an older version of Creative Suite product and you want some more updated features but you don't think you need to do much heavy lifting with Photoshop or Premiere. These two products can serve as a good in-between. So I'll mention places where those might help you out too. So in terms of video, the first two here Premiere Pro and After Effects I think are two of the most important apps that you can use to create video. And the difference being that Premiere Pro is very strong at importing your video, cutting up your clips, and assembling your entire project altogether. After Effects then does a lot of the more flashy elements in creating titles for the lower third in your video, adding title sequences, adding motion graphics. If you've seen intros to popular shows like Parks and Recreation or the mini-project, they've got a lot of clips of the show moving in with titles added over it including the actors' names and titles of the series. Things like that can be done with the help of After Effects. Not saying that they were created in that program, but that's the kind of thing you can create with something like this. And of course Bridge which will become a common theme throughout the rest of these best uses slides can help keep all of your assets organized. You can collect your videos and see them organized in folders with metadata and all that sort of added glance and know exactly the things that you want to bring in without having to then open it up in Premiere and see if it's the right one for you. Audio, of course, Audition is the major audio app for both recording and editing your audio. If you're creating podcasts, for example, if you want to add audio to your video, Audition is your one-stop shop basically. Of course Bridge can handle organizing your files for that as well. Creating documents, this is just a quick glance at how documents can be created with Creative Cloud, but InDesign, of course, being the one that assembles and lays out all of your content, your images, your copy, everything, and then you can use Acrobat DC which is also included with Creative Cloud to then package and optimize and track your documents. And of course Bridge, great for managing those documents. Web assets can be created with a lot of different apps in the Creative Cloud family. I include both Photoshop and Illustrator for making mock-ups of your designs if you're creating a web page or a website. I include both of them because it is sort of the big dispute among people who design for the web as to which is their preferred tool. We've got our own design team here. Some people are fervently for one while others are for the other. I'm sure you've seen any rivalry with Chevy or Ford fans, anything like that. This is the web design version of that. Both are completely valid. I prefer Illustrator, but that's no slight to anyone who likes Photoshop. Of course Dreamweaver is great for writing any kind of code if you are familiar with HTML, CSS, anything even more technically involved than that, any scripting, coding, back-end, front-end. Great for using Dreamweaver because it will not only let you write and save and share your files, but it will highlight your code for you so it makes it easier to see what you're working on. And you can design with it too, and as well as news, which is nice for general photo editing and things like that, for designing your site and then turning it into code. An animate, of course, if you're familiar with Flash at all, this is the new renamed Flash for a more modern era which is great for creating animation and on-page apps that you can't create with scripting. And lastly, images, of course, everyone familiar with Photoshop for the very detailed photo editing. Illustrator, great for creating illustrations and logos. Of course, that's baked into the name. Lightroom, as I mentioned earlier, can help you with image management and then just general photo editing if you want to change tone, if you want to apply changes in bulk. Lightroom is great for that. And of course Bridge, once again, great for keeping everything all together. So that was a quick look at a lot of the apps that are included. I'd like to kind of burrow a little deeper into some of the key features. First, I'll start with some of the advantages to Creative Cloud in general. First of all, support. If you use anything that's free or old, let's say, you may not get that support. The app may not be supported any longer. Creative Cloud, of course, gives you, as long as your subscription is valid, will give you support for it, which includes asking questions about how to use it better, why something may not be working properly. There's a wide variety of online documentation for any question you may have. I tend to rely on that a lot, questioning just a quick Google search of how can I blah-blah-blah in Illustrator, or how can I do this in Photoshop? And a lot of the times, Adobe's website will show up, helpx.adobe.com will show up with an article exactly what I'm looking for. Of course, you'll get the update software that I mentioned. So as soon as an update is available, you'll get the latest version. It is the industry standard. A lot of these Adobe apps are basic. There's a reason that Photoshop is a household name, because if you know Photoshop, then if you have to use anything else, some quick online tool, or something that somebody else has, the information that you've gained from using Photoshop will translate there very easily, because that's when people create competitors, they're basically looking to Photoshop and these other apps for how it should look and how it should act. Cloud storage, as I mentioned, if you have assets that you're assembling, you've got photos, and you've got documents, you're putting them together, and you want somebody else to copy edit it, you want someone else to review it, make notes, changes, or contribute to it. The cloud in Adobe Creative Cloud is really nice for putting your assets in your cloud storage, and then sharing it with someone else who has that access, they can then contribute, collaborate with you. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention ourselves, TechSoup discounts. Of course, if you get any of these Adobe products through TechSoup, you have a discount or some are donated as well, so that's always nice to save a little money. And workflows, which is kind of an overlooked asset for having the Creative Cloud, and I'll go into that in just a moment. But basically what I mean by workflows is that all of these apps work so well together that you can assemble an entire project within the Creative Cloud, but not have to rely on just one program. If you imagine that you want to create an annual report, that may be three or four applications. If you really want to make it stand out, really want to make it that much better, you may rely on other applications within the Adobe Creative Cloud collection. And I'll go into some examples of that in a moment. This is an example of a video workflow that comes right from Adobe's website. I've added a little link to the bottom of this slide, so if you want to check that out later, you can. There's a 16-minute video where one of the evangelists walks through the entire video creation process, a bridge version in 16 minutes, but showing how you can use each of these apps that come with Creative Cloud to create your video. So starting with Story Plus, which is great for writing and organizing your script for the video, using Prelude to Time Code, your video that you've already shot, using After Effects to add visual effects, title sequences, things like that. Using Audition to record any audio if you need narration, anything like that. You can record and edit it within Audition using SpeedGrade, which is an app for changing color tone to get things to look a little more sharp, professional, cinematic. And then assembling it all within Premiere Pro, which has of course the non-linear editing. You can import your clips and rearrange them, trim them down, including all the effects and everything else that you've added along the way. And then pushing that entire project through the media encoder and then turning it into one final video that's ready to upload to YouTube, ready to put on your website, ready to send out to the world. And that's just one look at a workflow. And of course, some of these apps I didn't mention early on, they are more for assisting. Some of the bigger apps like Premiere Pro, SpeedGrade, Story Plus, Prelude, these are things that you do get with your Creative Cloud subscription but aren't the marquee names, but they are super useful if you know that they're there. You know how to use them. They can be really helpful. Take another look at a different workflow. Of course, I mentioned if you're creating an annual report, this is a great example of that. If you need to lay out a document, you've got copy, you've got images, you may have your logo, you may have graphics to include icons or an info graphics sometimes. If you look at the three apps on the left, you've got Photoshop, Illustrator, and InCopy. Photoshop, fantastic for taking photos that you may have of the people on your board, or even just your office manager, people in the field doing, you know, accomplishing your mission, cleaning those up and getting those to look just right. Using Illustrator to create graphics or like I said for info graphics to show the process of something that you may have accomplished within the last year to create logos or some kind of illustrations to really enhance the copy that you've got. And of course, InCopy, which is great for storing the actual text of your annual report. These three applications working separately, you can then add all of their assets within InDesign. And then if you go back and change them in something like Photoshop, if you brighten up an image, it will be updated automatically in InDesign which is a great feature because otherwise you're reliant on the features of the one app that you're in to do all the work. And sometimes they may not be able to. So if you can funnel all of your work through one, you can go back and change it early on and it will change in the future. And then so once you've got your annual report or whatever document all packaged and ready, export that as a PDF and you can send that off. Acrobat DC is also great for making anything interactive. If you want to create a PDF that somebody can then fill in or take action with, then clicking links or things like that, Acrobat can do that as well. So these are just two workflows but there are a host of many others depending on the work that you envision creating and then how you can assemble it with Creative Cloud. Quick look at some free alternatives to some of the more popular apps. Of course Photoshop may be the most popular Creative Cloud application. GIMP, the unfortunately named GIMP is a free photo editing piece of software as well as Paint.net and Pixlr which is an online one from Autodesk. They are feature rich. They are missing some of the advantages that are available in Photoshop like CMYK mode which if you don't know what that is, RGB mode is the one for screens if it's anything on a mobile device, if it's on your monitor, if it's on a TV even, that's going to be RGB. If it's CMYK that's print. So anything that you need to create that's intended for print may not look exactly like it does on your screen if it's not in the right mode and these services don't include that mode. Photoshop is a little bit better at it's called non-destructive editing so basically retaining the original work all the way through so that if you even make a change from something you did early on you can and it won't ruin the final product. It's a lot better with its history and other features like that. It also includes some simpler tools for common tasks and what I mean by that is Photoshop can take, if you need to make quick changes that you don't want to spend a lot of time brushing out something, adding a bunch of layers, it can do them all in a quick, in one quick, excuse me, I'm getting caught up in my own time, one quick click where as opposed to doing it in several steps with some of the free options. And of course it supports raw file format which is really nice if you have a person who's taking high quality photos, they have a nice camera, they give you the raw files then Photoshop can handle those which not a lot of other free options can. Inkscape is an alternative for Illustrator which is nice for drawing vector images, creating logos, creating graphics, infographics, things like that. A lot of great features in that one also free in the desktop app. Missing some of the similar things that Photoshop includes and Illustrator also includes like CMYK mode which I mentioned, some of those tools for common tasks, something that you can get done quickly without having to reinvent the wheel each time. So a quick look at, actually let me pause for a moment. Becky, do we have questions that I should address now before I get to the big question? Sure. Yeah, we had a couple of questions and one that I wanted to highlight just because I think it's a great benefit that a lot of people aren't aware of. Jocelyn asked, is it possible to install the apps on more than one computer if I have to work at home and at the office? Can I? And the answer is yes, you can. In previous versions of Adobe's Creative Suite you could have it up to two, you could have it on a work and home computer. You can install Creative Cloud apps on multiple machines. You can't use them on multiple machines at the same time because they are tied to your account. So if I was holding a Creative Cloud account which I do, I can run it on my laptop, no problem. I can't run it at the same time on someone else's laptop installing my account on their machine. So that's the way to kind of keep it honest but also keep it flexible for use of user which is even better than it was before not to be a big Adobe fanboy but I'm pretty happy with that. Wes's new title, Adobe Fanboy. We do have a couple of other questions. We've answered some of these on the back end but I think that they are useful to include for everyone to hear. Amy asked, if apps are downloaded on my computer what happens at the end of the one year subscription? Will I still be able to utilize the apps that I've downloaded and access my files? That's a really good question. So if you get the year-long subscription you create work and you save it for example in the cloud storage space and then you let your subscription expire then you won't be able to use the apps after that. You'll still have access to some of your cloud storage. There's a time limit on getting your files out of there. I don't remember the limit off hand if anyone does feel free to chime in but there's a limit to the amount of free space that you get with Creative Cloud versus what you get when you have a paid subscription. You will lose anything beyond the amount of free space. So say for example I'm going to guess 5 gigs of free space and then there's 100 gigs of paid space let's say. And if you have 10 or 15 stored in there you're going to lose everything beyond that first five. Those are hypothetical numbers. I'm not speaking to that exactly but that's essentially how that works. So if you want to let your subscription run out be sure to grab your stuff out of the cloud storage before you do. That's my advice. Good hearty advice. And we should mention that you can also renew with the discounts that are available through the Adobe program with TechSoup. It is an additional 20% I believe. So it's a 40% of the retail cost for the first year and then it goes up to 60% for subsequent years if you want to renew. Is that right? You can see the way around. You're right. I said it opposite. I meant that you are paying 40% of retail the first year. You're paying 60% of retail for subsequent years. I just said it wrong. It was right in my brain. It just didn't come out of my mouth correctly. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. So if you do it for the one year you can renew later. One other quick question before we move into the determination section and we will have more time for Q&A later as well. But Richard asked, are there free alternatives to Dreamweaver? So for folks who are using web design and really designing websites and building websites what would be the equivalent that you could have in mind for Dreamweaver? There we go. Now I'm off mute. That's a really good question. I do a lot of markup and scripting myself. And I know this is going to sound like a paid plug. I promise it's not. Adobe also has a free app that I'm currently a big fan of. This is my current favorite for writing code called Brackets. It's extensible which means you can add on a lot of little add-ons to enhance the way that it works if you have certain work in certain scripting languages. For example, if you work in jQuery or you do more things with ESP.net or something that's one more high level in terms of coding you can add add-ons to add even more features. It's also super lightweight. It loads quickly. That's my personal favorite. There are a lot of other free options for writing code. Notepad++ I think is really nice for Windows. Text Wrangler I believe is one for Mac. Those are free code apps. Of course the drawback with those is that they are very good at just editing the one file you're on. One of the nice things about Dreamweaver is you can edit your entire site for example through Dreamweaver. When you linked other pages within your site or whatever you've got, whatever other assets, images, flash animations, whatever you've got you can add them within the page and see them there and then link to them within your site. As I mentioned there is also a design mode view which allows you to see and edit things in the same way you would like edit a Word doc within Dreamweaver which is really nice. So those are of course the advantages to Dreamweaver over the free ones. Free ones are great if you just need to make quick changes or you don't need to see your work kind of in the moment. Although one other quick thing about Brackets which is nice, it does have a live preview mode that allows you to see your changes in Chrome if you've got Chrome on your computer. You can make changes to your page and see them instantly change on the page which is really handy too. So those are my picks for free Dreamweaver alternatives. Terrific. Some great options to look into. I think maybe this is another question real quickly before I move into determination. So Michelle asked, I already use Adobe products and I'm using CS6, so the Creative Suite that's the installed version that was perpetually licensed so you didn't have to pay attention to subscription or anything like that. Is it worth it to move from something like Creative Suite 6 or whatever version you may have to Adobe's Creative Cloud? I know you covered some advantages of using the Cloud before, but really what are the big key points that you think would make somebody want to move from the installed version they may already have? That's a really good question. And I know a lot of nonprofits like the Creative Suite 6 or really versions that they've already got for the same reason that Becky mentioned is perpetually licensed. You've got it from here to eternity and instead of Creative Cloud which is a subscription model. I would say that the biggest difference is the two things. One, you get access to everything that Adobe has to offer when it comes to the apps. So if there's some, I'm not sure which version of Creative Suite 6 you've got. Of course if it was the Master Collection you've got a lot of applications but if it were some of the other ones you may have fewer. But if you decide that you need a certain application from Adobe it becomes very difficult to sort of replicate what it can do with an older version. And as time goes on more features, more applications will be added to the Creative Cloud version instead of the Creative Suite which is unfortunately kind of frozen in time when it comes to features, when it comes to apps that are included. So that's one thing if you decide, if you start running into, and I'll go into this a little bit more in the Determination section, but when you start running into limitations I think it will become evident that maybe it's time to upgrade. And the number two thing I would say is if you, I'll get into this a little bit more too, if you need more than one of the current versions of the apps in Creative Cloud then it's financially beneficial to basically upgrade at that point. And I'll get into a little bit more about that in a moment. But having those up-to-date apps and features that come with it and then sort of the cost-benefit analysis, like literally cost and benefits in terms of money, it can become more advantageous to subscribe. So that's a great segue though. I'm glad you asked that. So let me go into the actual determinations to whether you should upgrade or not. So as I mentioned, the first question is, are you running into limitations with your current free or paid tool, or paid for tools? If you have Creative Suite 6, if you have Gimper, you're using Pixlr, or you're using some of the, oh shoot, I'm blanking on the name, the one that a lot of folks use, a camera. If you're using something like that to assemble images or videos or audio or anything like that and you keep running into limitations, I wish I could just open up more than one file at a time or I wish I could just run one quick filter and change all this. Then maybe it's time to start considering that. Now, this is another good opportunity to mention that if you are running, if you are using a free tool, and you don't quite think you need the whole kitchen sink of stuff that comes with Photoshop, maybe Photoshop Elements is worth considering, or the same thing with Premiere Elements. If you want to make quick, simple videos, you want to make some tone changes to your photos, but not like get in there and really do some heavy lifting, those might be good in-between options, and of course, Of course, TechSoup offers those through our donation program as well. You get both when you request the bundle, so that we have a Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements bundle that's available through our donation program and those are licensed software. They're not subscription based like Creative Cloud. But that's the first thing I would say, are you running into any limitations with what you currently got? The second one is if you need multiple applications to accomplish your work. Like as I mentioned with some of those workflows, you can see how beneficial it can be to use more than one application to produce your product at the end, your annual report, your video, your podcast, whatever it is. You can see how assembling them separately and then putting them all together in one application and then changing them later and all that really has an added benefit in terms of saving time and producing a more professional product in the end. Third, if you need to share your work with other team members, of course there's options like Box and Dropbox and Google Drive and things like that. What's nice about using the Creative Cloud Shared Space is that it's so integrated with the applications that you can share something immediately with someone without having to like save your file, upload it to the shared space, send them an email or send them a notification through the service and let them know it's instantly shared with them so that when they get the notification immediately they can open it up and they can make changes and you're collaborating through the app and through the cloud space rather than using yet another third-party tool. So that's I think if you're not a one man or one woman operation if you're having other people contribute to the copy, the images, if there's a review process for anything that needs to go out before it gets published on the web or wherever, that's a great way to do it. If you need more than one Adobe product, and of course this sounds obvious but what I mean by that is if you subscribe to let's say one, if you have a single app subscription through Adobe, that's more cost effective for you than subscribing to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud Collection. If you need a second one, even just a second one, if you need an illustrator and Photoshop it then becomes more financially beneficial to just get all of them. I know this is going to sound like a sales pitch but that really is the big selling point financially for Creative Cloud. You get everything that Adobe has to offer that includes Acrobat, that includes Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. So at the point that you begin to see a need for having both let's say Photoshop and InDesign or Audition and Premiere Pro then you may as well just get the entire app's collection. And if you consider the old method of having to purchase the entire Creative Suite, let's say Creative Suite 6, the amount that you would spend on that let's say every two years that a new version came out, you're actually spending less year over year with a Creative Cloud subscription. If you're doing it monthly or annually however you choose, it's cheaper in the long run than upgrading each time. And the last thing, if you want to try other Adobe products you don't have to pay extra if you have the all apps subscription. I have installed on my computer I would say probably 18 of them and I use regularly maybe 6 but the fact that I can just click install they're on there and then I can just play with it and see oh maybe this will do this thing a little bit better or I'm going to try and use it with this other one. As I mentioned the video workflow using Story Plus and Prelude and After Effects, SpeedGrade, all these other things, you may not need that every time. If you're making a quick video just to get something out of an event you had you're not going to need to necessarily have a script or admiration over an audition. But if you want to create something that really encompasses the spirit and the mission of your organization you may want to spend more time on it. You may want to get it to look very professional and you don't have to pay anything extra to get those extra apps which is really nice. I want to also throw out a few resources that may be useful to you. Of course I mentioned Adobe Support which comes with Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe also provides a lot of free support as well. It's a great way to just take a look and see if it's got what you're looking for. You may not, as I have, not even realize that there's an app that can do a certain thing or have a certain feature that would make your work that much easier. Checking out the support from Adobe is a great way to do it sort of shopping. We've also got a few resources here that I've helped contribute to. Of course our intro to Photoshop for nonprofits which is a blog series for creating a poster in Photoshop. And of course as I just explained InDesign is your preferred app for creating print resources. And yes, I know I'm contradicting myself. But Photoshop, this is a great way to get to know a lot of the features within Photoshop and have a finished product to go with it. So adding text to an image, cropping an image, resizing it, changing many things, color or layout, things like that, you can all do that within that intro series. I also made an app a while ago called How to Choose the Right Adobe App and you'll recognize some of the icons from earlier. In fact, let me click on that and I'll show you while I wait for this to load. Please bear with me. But the intent here was to guide users through series of prompts to just determine which app will be best used to create the finger you want to create. So let's see if I'm creating, if I'm working on an image. It's not a logo chart or illustration. Yes, I am manipulating photos, but I want to do some very in-depth, like pixel by pixel kind of work rather than just broad strokes. So I won't be making quick edits. Photoshop, aha, that's my preferred app. Let's try it again with video. Will it have animation or special effects? Of course, you have to have special effects. Is it completely animated? No, it's not. Try After Effects because then you can use that to create motion graphics and add title slides and things like that. And of course, explosions if you really need them for your nonprofit video. So I encourage you to check that out just to get a sense of which app can then deliver the right features for you. I'll switch back over to this. And of course, TechSoup Courses which is our recently launched, oh no, I'm getting an error clicking on that. Let's see if it goes through. This is of course our recently launched learning management system for nonprofits. We've got a lot of courses in here, some of which are free to help with anything that nonprofits run into. Successful Tech Planning courses is one of our biggest ones, but we also have a lot of great design courses here and I'll scroll down, Web Design Best Practices. We've got an Adobe Absolute Beginners course creating a fundraiser invitation using InnoZine which harkens back to a previous webinar that I had hosted as well. And I'll scroll down here to the bottom. Another one on Photoshop 101 as well as design for non-designers 101. If you know that you need to start working in creative tools and making graphic design assets and you don't know where to begin, this is a great place to begin. And of course it's free. So please check that out. The price is just right. And of course there's a lot of other great resources from TechSoup in order to get the products that we've covered today including the All Apps Plan which includes everything Creative Cloud as well as the Photography Plan which I mentioned at the beginning but just to be clear it includes only Photoshop and Lightroom. So you still get some Creative Cloud storage with it. You still get the support and it's a lower price if that's all that you need. That might be the way to go. We also offer the subscription to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC which just like Creative Cloud gives you the latest versions as well as storage space for your documents. And there's also some great tracking features in there too. So if you need someone to sign something electronically and then know if it's been delivered and know if it's been signed, those are some built-in features to that that you won't find in previous versions of Acrobat. And of course honorable mention for our friends Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. We have the latest version of both of those in one bundle for a super low admin fee. So if you don't think you're quite ready to take the plunge into the big products like Photoshop and Premiere, maybe give those a shot or if you've already got them and you know that you're kind of running into some limitations, you want to try some more experimental stuff, that's a great place to start. So all of that said, if there are any more questions, I'd be happy to field them through you Becky or feel free to tell them anything else that's useful. Sure. Well I am going to go ahead and stop sharing really quickly because I want to show where folks can get it and then we'll jump into more questions. We do have a lot in the back end so let me go really quickly back to where we left off on the slides way back here at the end. Just for folks who are looking to access it, we want to make sure that you know where to do that and what the options are that are available to you. So again this is about how to choose the right Adobe app. The link is at the bottom of the page and I did chat that out. We love that little tool. Super helpful for people like me who get confused on whether I need Illustrator or InDesign. I love it. But if you go to TechSoup.org you can browse by clicking on this Get Products and Services tab here on the left. You can browse by Donor Partner and click on Adobe. You can also just go directly to the Adobe page at TechSoup.org slash Adobe where you can find these and many other options. Wes just mentioned the Premiere Elements 14 and Photoshop Elements. I think we are actually on 15 right now. Sorry about that. My screenshot is old here. But you can access that. That is an installed perpetual license if you only need the consumer level products and you don't need the more advanced features that are available through full-fledged Photoshop and through the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps Suite. But you can find the links to all of these different products that we've mentioned, Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps Plan, One Year Individual Membership. Again that does allow you to extend it to use it on a second computer so whether that's your home machine but you can only be logged into one at a time. And that is a $19.99 monthly fee paid to Adobe for the year. You pay a $5 admin fee to TechSoup to access that. And that is 40% of the retail price or approximately 40% of the retail price. You are getting a 60% discount on that for the first year. Subsequent years that goes to a 60% of the retail fee. So you are saving 40% on it for renewing. You can also access that Creative Cloud Photography Plan only which Wes alluded to and mentioned that it includes only Photoshop and Lightroom. So if you only need the photo editing package you can access that for $7.99 monthly to Adobe. And again you can get that with a $5 admin fee to TechSoup. So you can find out about those. And as well as other programs somebody mentioned Acrobat and Acrobat 11 and Acrobat DC. So they are all in there on this Adobe page. You can find access to all of those. Wes did you want to chime in on something real quickly? Yeah, I wanted to mention too linking from the Creative Cloud All Apps Plan product page. We also have an FAQ all about Creative Cloud to answer any questions I may not have gotten to today. We've also got links up from that page to comparisons between the features that are in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and Premiere and Premiere Elements. So in case you've got questions about the differences those might help you out. Absolutely. We have a lot of resources on our site. We also have this page that's Adobe Software for Nonprofits that has all of them kind of highlighted in depth where you can link to the different products. And we'll chat that out to you in just a moment too. And you can learn about the program specifically as well as specific apps. We've got cute little videos from folks on our team introducing what's included and how the programs work. And then I also just wanted to point people to those courses that Wes showed. You can get to our course catalog including those design courses, the Absolute Beginners on Photoshop and InDesign plus just Design 101. Those are free. We also do have some paid courses specifically if you're looking for higher level technology planning. But the great majority are available to you for free. This is not logged into with your regular TechSoup login. What you would use to get into the TechSoup site to request donations. You do have to set up a separate account. But once you're in, there's no cost to joining. It's just like having a library card and then you can go in and take courses 24-7 at your convenience to improve your own capacity and experience on designing or tech planning or training your staff on technology or design for non-designers or web design. We have a lot of courses and we're adding to that all the time. So please do check those out. Now back to questions. We do have a handful in the queue that we haven't gotten to yet. We have a couple of questions actually that are related. Both Donna and Ali were asking kind of what's the free equivalent of InDesign or if there are benefits of using InDesign over Publisher for example. So free version or free alternatives to InDesign. That one I'm not familiar with to be honest. I haven't had to use anything except InDesign for, I haven't needed a free version so that's what I'll say to that. So I'm sorry I don't have a good suggestion for a free alternative for that. Compared to Publisher though, I've definitely used both of those. Publisher is nice for creating quick flyers and just having things like just kind of line up and snap in and ready to go, clip art and all that. The problem I run into with using Publisher for creating things is that my stuff tends to look like everybody else's. Because of how easy it is you get less control over how it looks in the end. Like I said, it's a great option for making something that basically just works. I can just get in there and I can make it and I've got it and it's ready to go. It's a flyer, it's a handout, it's a brochure, whatever. But InDesign has a lot more features when it comes to how your type looks. If you want granular control over the spacing, the letting, the anti-aliasing, all these things, if you really want to get it to look just right, InDesign has that cover. If you want to put something into a grid so that you can see exactly how things line up and leave just enough light space and all that, it's super beneficial for that. So if you don't find the need to take real control over everything, the net control freak like me basically, maybe you stick with Publisher, but once you start, like I said, the very first question on should you upgrade, if you start winning the limitations, if you start seeing like, I just wish I could make it, resize it to this or I wish I could make it have a full spread instead of just one page at a time or whatever, maybe it's worth considering it then. And as I mentioned, Adobe does offer individual app subscription plans. They don't offer that through TechSoup, but if you are interested in trying one product, you can either do a free trial for a month or you can consider the single subscription. If you decide you need more than one, maybe the all apps plans are way to go, you can come back to us and get both for a lower rate. Great, that's helpful. And we realize Publisher is not a free product, but many organizations do have Microsoft Office already installed, and it may already include Publisher. So if you're looking to start someplace and you don't have access to InDesign, you can certainly start and try using Publisher. I used it a lot when I had to make little flyers at a small nonprofit I worked with. And I did run up to issues where I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted. So InDesign was certainly much more savvy and full of more bells and whistles, but if you already have it on hand, there's no harm in trying it. Yeah, I think it gives you a more professional product in the end. I think that's the takeaway for me. I would absolutely agree. So we have some other questions here. We have Patrice asked, does Creative Cloud version use as much of your computer's resources and memory RAM, that kind of stuff, as the current installed suite, especially like an illustrator, does it use all of your memory in the way that the Creative Suite would kind of lock things up for smaller or older computers? In my experience, they're pretty comparable in terms of system resources. I believe Creative Cloud because they have a few more features than the older versions, I believe take up a little bit more hard drive space. But in terms of performance, I believe, and please check the system requirements from our website to be sure if it matches your system because I don't want to just tell you everyone can run it. But in my experience, I haven't run into any performance issues going from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. Now I went immediately from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud once it became an option. So I can't speak if your system can run Creative Cloud. But no, I haven't seen any large differences between the two in terms of system requirements. Great. And Teri from Adobe on the back end also responded to this question with some specifics. So just to add this to your thoughts on this, she said when you install Creative Cloud you can choose which apps to save to your desktop so you don't actually have to install all of them like you would with Creative Suite. You can install just the ones you know you'll need upfront. And she mentioned that Illustrator Creative Cloud requires 1 to 2 gigabytes of RAM and 2 gigabytes of available hard disk base for installation. So I think that's more detail than maybe many of you needed but that gives you an idea of kind of what you're looking at in computer usage. We had questions about if each user is sharing work. So for example, if your workflow has you design a draft and send it to your supervisor for their feedback or input or somebody else is going to be inputting images or infographics, do each of those people need to have their own membership or subscription to this or can they view it and add or provide input without having a membership or subscription? So that's basically up to you. And that sounds kind of a cop-out but I'll explain. If you need somebody to make changes, if you need them to edit the copy or replace images or provide something that you may not already have, the logos or the graphics or something like that, then I would recommend that you both have a subscription because then they can open the source material and make changes and you can collaborate on it. If it's just a review process, if it's you're creating the annual report and you can export that into a PDF and then send that to somebody else, your manager or whoever, they can open it up in even just the Acrobat Reader to make comments and then provide it back to you. No subscription needed for that. So I would say it all depends on the level of work that you're both going to be doing rather than the product that you're creating. Very helpful. And I'm sure many people could just use the Reader back and forth in that way without having to have multiple memberships. We had a question from Michelle asking, I learned how to use Photoshop so I use it for things that illustrators actually intended for. How can I become better at using Illustrator because I found it not super user friendly from her experience? Oh man, if there were ever a question I thought may have been paid to ask me, it would be that. I had the same journey. I started with Photoshop and then discovered Illustrator along the way and it became my favorite. I still love Photoshop. I do webinars on Photoshop but it's my favorite. But this question is not about me. So to answer your question, I would say the best way and this applies to anything within Creative Cloud, I think it applies to anything in life. The best way to learn it is to just do it. Illustrator, I assume what you mean by the work you're doing is better done in Illustrator. I assume that means it's vector drawings using the pen tool, Bezier curves and all that. And yes, Photoshop can do it. Illustrator can do it really well. And the only way that I've gotten any better at it is by just finding excuses to use it. I create our By the Cup newsletter images and so I use that as an opportunity to draw illustrations for each of the sections. And it's just an excuse for me to get better at Illustrator. I would say try that out. I mean, if you know someone who sketches and you want to turn those into illustrations for them, you can promise them, you know, to begin your work, but it will be able to get you that much better. But the only way to really get better at it is to try it. As I mentioned, if you really want to go professional, you know, Adobe does include a lot of support options as well. You can read articles. You can learn a lot of tips from there in terms of like the technical aspects, but in terms of the best practices and just getting comfortable with it. I say dive right in and create a lot of really bad stuff until you create a lot of really good stuff. Create a lot of bad stuff before you create the good stuff. I think that's true with learning just about anything in life. So I love that advice. Just keep on trying. We're almost at time to wrap up. We had a couple of questions that I'm going to just try and answer myself quickly. One was from Zett asking if there's a trial period that you can use it for free. And yes, you can access the free trial directly through Adobe for 14 days to try out whatever you'd like. But if you do want to access the discount available through TechSoup's program, you should not renew through Adobe. You don't want to actually upgrade from there because you won't get access to that discount. So you'd want to make sure you come back to TechSoup to get that so that you're not missing out on the 60% discount for that first year. The other question that I wanted to quickly address, Karina is joining us from a library. So she asked if there were any specific advantages or uses that you could see for libraries. And just off the top of my head, many of the things that Wes mentioned that you could be designing or creating are similar for libraries. I mean I can imagine designing your summer reading program, a little checklist for kids. You could be designing flyers for your events. You could be updating your website and creating infographics on the services you provide to your community members, to your patrons. Those are just a couple of examples. I don't know, Wes, if you have other things you'd want to add. I don't know that there are specific, or very library specific advantages, but sharing between branches if you have another branch that has similar access that you could be sharing resources in the Creative Cloud with one another, or getting feedback on branch-wide services for your patrons. So I imagine there's a lot of different uses that you could come up with. With that I want to go ahead and wrap us up because we are at the top of the hour. So I'd love it if you, our participants, would chat in one thing that you learned during today's webinar that you will take back and either try. Maybe you'll go and try and create a bunch of bad stuff before you create the good. Or you're going to try out one of the apps. Or go ahead and subscribe if that seems like it makes the most sense for you to upgrade at this point. If you've been hitting up against those walls that Wes mentioned, and maybe it is time for you to look at upgrading, go ahead and let us know what you're planning to do. And we would like you to also share this information with your friends and colleagues who may benefit from learning about Adobe Creative Cloud and whether they should upgrade. And we'd also ask that you complete our post-event survey, which will pop up once you exit out of our program today. Lastly, I'd like to promote our upcoming webinars and events with you. So for those of you who have joined us for the first time today, you should know that TechSoup offers a steady stream of webinars and events for your participation, and they are free. So feel free to join us if you want to learn how to build a stronger brand for your organization on March 7th. If you are using QuickBooks for your accounting, this is the desktop installed version of QuickBooks, not QuickBooks Online. If you're a new nonprofit user, join us on the 8th. If you're an existing QuickBooks user, feel free to join us on the 22nd. These will be 90-minute webinars, but we'll be actually sharing live on-screen what QuickBooks looks like and how to set it up and use it. And then we'll also have a webinar specifically for libraries on how to protect their patron's privacy. You can find all of these and our full archives on our website at our TechSoup events and flash webinars section, which is linked here on the slides even though you can't click on it. We would invite you to join us for more of those. And lastly, I'd like to thank Wes and the other Wes on the back end and Terry on the back end for helping to answer questions throughout the webinar. Thank you to our participants, and thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of today's platform for us to present these webinars if you want a regular basis. Please take a moment and complete that post-event survey that pops up once you close out, and let us know so that we can continue improving our webinar programming. Thanks so much everyone, and have a great day. Bye-bye.