Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud (Adobe CC) is an expensive, exclusive hub for all things Adobe. These Adobe CC applications are used for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, and more. Adobe CC is a subscription based service that provides access to all of Adobe’s creative tools and services, including the most popular applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.

For access, Adobe CC costs $54.99 per month. But for Blake students and faculty in Photography, Advanced Printmaking, or Journalism courses, Adobe CC is essentially free. Additionally, it is free for students and faculty on FLASH magazine and the yearbook, Reflections.

Student publications FLASH, Reflections and The Spectrum all use Adobe InDesign for the formatting of their pages. Anika Rodriguez ‘23, a leader of FLASH, says, “It’s pretty difficult for people new to InDesign to be able to figure it out, so in terms of working with it for FLASH, it slows down the design process a bit. As helpful as some online video tutorials are, just getting the basics for the program down is quite complicated, so there’s limited opportunity to try more ambitious designs. As reliable as the program is, it sure has its challenges.”

All Photography classes interact with Adobe Photoshop as well. Brian Sago, arts teacher and Photoshop expert, says, “Maybe six years ago, Adobe ended their education discounts, so [Blake] pays full-price for each user that is granted access. [The way that access is granted is] I tell [Justin] Karels which students need to use it and he manually subscribes them to Adobe CC. At the end of the semester, those students get taken off.”

If a student or teacher needs access to Photoshop, for example, but they are not in any of the aforementioned courses or organizations, they can use alternate editing websites such as GIMP software (which is free) and Affinity Pro and Affinity Camera.