Our Best and Worst Adobe Creative Cloud Tools

The Envato Tuts+ team share their best and worst tools from the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Which are their most used and biggest time-savers? On the other hand, which are the least used and most annoying? Find out here!

Discover the Best and Worst Adobe Creative Cloud Tools in This Video

Jump to content in this section:

Adobe Photoshop: Brush Tool
Adobe Illustrator: Shape Builder Tool
Adobe InDesign: Primary Text Frame Tool
Adobe Premiere Pro: Remix Tool
Adobe After Effects: Expressions
Adobe InDesign: Pages Panel
Adobe Lightroom: Select Subject Tool
Adobe Illustrator: Pen Tool
Master the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite With These Resources

1. Adobe Photoshop: Brush Tool

Watch video lesson (1 min) ↗

Abbey Esparza

I’m a mixed media artist and freelancer with over ten years of experience in digital art. I love to take fashion-forward modern-day photography and transform it into the unusual and macabre. But while I typically like to play with surreal themes, I'm experienced in various styles and genres.

My Adobe product of choice is Photoshop. Even though there are some solid alternatives, nothing else has quite the same amount of power.

The best tool is the Brush tool in Photoshop. It's endlessly useful, and I use it for everything. But in my personal work, I use it to create texture and details. Nothing I do is possible without the brush tool. And a tablet.

The worst tool is the Frame Tool because I don't know why it exists or why Adobe thought it was important enough to place front and center in the Tools bar a few years ago. It's just a worse way to mask things.

Discover more about the brush tool in Photoshop here:

2. Adobe Illustrator: Shape Builder Tool

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Andrei Marius

I'm a self-taught graphic designer and a vector fanatic. I spend most of my time working on all sorts of designs in Illustrator, Photoshop, XD, Figma, or Sketch. Everything from illustrations to UI designs and interfaces, icons, charts, infographics and diagrams, logos and badges, patterns, a few character designs, and a lot of text effects.

I'm a graphic designer, and as I spend most of time in Illustrator, I'll talk about my best and worst tools.

For the best tool, the first one that comes into my mind is the Shape Builder Tool in Illustrator, mainly because it's a real time-saver when I'm working with a lot of vector shapes.

In the past, the Pathfinder panel was my go-to option when I needed to unite or subtract vector paths, but then the Shape Builder Tool came out, and things got way easier.

Moving to the worst tool, I can't say that it's useless, it's just that I never managed to get along with this tool, and that is the Perspective Grid Tool. I've seen people who can make good use of it, and I suggest you give it a try, but for me for now, I'll pass.

Learn more about the Shape Builder Tool in Illustrator here:

3. Adobe InDesign: Primary Text Frame Tool

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Laura Keung

I'm a design writer, mentor, and entrepreneur currently based in Munich, Germany. With 12 years of experience in the design industry, I lead my own design studio and collaborate with other creatives on branding and editorial design projects.

It's hard to pick only one, but I'll go with the Primary Text Frame. It's great for text-heavy publications and is often overlooked. By simply setting it up in the New Document window, you can copy and paste long text that can be automatically threaded through all the document's pages. After that, it's easy to format the text and add images and other details. This text frame InDesign tool is an awesome time-saver.

The Page Tool in InDesign is good but not intuitive enough, specifically the Page Tool Handles. The Page Tool allows us to change the size of a page from the dropdown menu on the Properties bar. When it comes to the handles, however, it's a different story. If you try to resize a page using the handles, they never seem to stay where you want them. It helps, however, if you hold down the Option key as you drag.

Explore more useful InDesign tutorials:

4. Adobe Premiere Pro: Remix Tool

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Marco Korreli

I'm a multi-skilled content creator with a background in film, music production, marketing, and advertising. I've worked as a Creative Marketing Strategist, Producer, Editor, and Director across corporate projects, TV series, advertising campaigns, and the music industry. I bring my experience to Tuts+ as a Senior Video Producer for the YouTube Channel.

I use Adobe Premiere all the time because it's highly customizable and it can get extremely sophisticated, depending on how you use it. From standard video projects to full-on cinematic productions, Premiere has got you covered. The fact that you can dynamically link your timeline with other programs like After Effects and Audition really makes it a powerful platform.

My favorite is the Remix Tool in Premiere Pro. I use a lot of music for my projects, and I often need to get the length of a track just right. Sometimes it's too long, sometimes it's too short, and instead of doing it like in the old days where you had to cut and paste and nudge and do all kinds of trickery to create loops, I use Remix, which does that for you in seconds.

The feature that I've had most problems with? Nesting clips. It's great that you can grab a bunch of clips and merge them into one, but the problem is that not every plugin or effect will work on a Nested clip. I find this limitation very arbitrary, and it can mess up whatever work you did on your individual clips.

Explore more about the Remix Tool in Premiere Pro, the Essential Sound Panel, and more:

5. Adobe After Effects: Expressions

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Tom Graham

I'm a multi-skilled content creator with a background in commercial film-making. I've worked as a Director, Producer, Editor, and Creative Director across television commercials, feature films, and large-scale corporate video events.

My current most-used Creative Cloud tool is After Effects. I enjoy it the most because no matter how long I spend in it, I'm constantly learning new things. And I know I'll never master it—even though I'm pretty proficient after ten years of use, I'm not even close to understanding its full capabilities.

My favorite tool that I'm using recently is understanding the power of After Effects Expressions and how to use them in a way that is smarter, faster, and more creative than doing things manually in the program... plus it makes me feel like a hacker.

The specific built-in tool I enjoy most is the newly updated Properties panel, and if we're talking about plugins, I use Motion 4 all the time but only use about 10% of its capability.

The worst thing about After Effects is the steep learning curve, the barrier to entry, and the many quirks about the program that you discover along the way. You come to live with them, and then you have to teach someone else the program and you don't know how to explain these weird idiosyncrasies, and then you tell them just to accept it because it's been like that for ten years and we don't talk about it, nothing to see here, move on....

Here are more great resources for you, like how to use the After Effects wiggle expression:

6. Adobe InDesign: Pages Panel

Watch video lesson (1 min) ↗

Ashlee Harrell

I'm a graphic designer with over ten years of experience, currently working for a full-service data, digital, and print firm located in Florida. I'm passionate about all things design and know my way around the Creative Cloud suite.

Adobe InDesign is my software of choice because it’s the perfect software program for print materials from magazines to business cards. Using InDesign streamlines my design process.

My best tool is the Pages panel (Parent Pages to be exact). I mainly use it for adding footers and repeating design elements to all of my pages/spreads. Using the Pages panel has made creating multi-page documents so much easier for me. I don't have to manually add page numbers to each page because everything is taken care of through Parent pages. This has saved me a lot of time.

My worst tool is InDesign's Effects panel. The Effects panel is rudimentary compared to Photoshop’s Effects panel (aka Layer styles). It’s not as robust, and I find myself spending hours just to get a decent effect compared to just minutes in Photoshop.

Here are some great resources:

7. Adobe Lightroom: Select Subject Tool

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Jamie Kronick

I'm a drummer and photographer from Ontario, living in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

These days, my absolute favorite tool in Adobe Lightroom is the Select Subject Tool. Call me old-fashioned, but I've become a little bit weary of all of these new AI tools that are starting to roll out—but this Select Subject Tool is an absolute lifesaver!

In almost every photo edit, I'm creating some kind of custom mask. In a portrait edit, I'm definitely going to be masking out my subject so that I can increase the contrast and sharpness, giving them an extra little bit of attention. In the 'older days' we had to use a paint brush and manually paint in where our subject was in order to mask it out, but now at the click of a button, the Select Subject Tool can automatically detect the subject in your image and create a mask for you, so that you can edit only the subject as you see fit.

The worst tool in Adobe Lightroom Classic is the Dehaze slider. It's not that it doesn't do its job well, but for Dehaze to get the prime real estate all the way up in the Presence grouping of the Basics menu, it really isn't very useful!

The Dehaze Tool is only specifically to increase or reduce the amount of haze in an image, but I don't find myself shooting in hazy conditions more than, maybe, once a year. Don't take it personally, Dehaze Tool: you just don't belong up there with the everyday-use juggernauts like Exposure, Highlights, and Saturation!

Learn more about Lightroom with these resources:

8. Adobe Illustrator: Pen Tool

Watch video lesson (1 min) ↗

Jonathan Lam

Hi everyone! My name is Jonathan Lam, and I'm a digital artist on a mission to empower, educate, and inspire creative students just like you to gain the creative skills you desire! My skills range from graphic design to illustration, animation, 3D modelling/sculpting, concept art, and video editing.

Adobe Illustrator is one of my favorite apps from the Creative Cloud. It's easy to use, and it's my go-to piece of software for creating vector illustrations, logos, and icons.

My best tool to use with Adobe Illustrator is the Pen Tool. It's an extremely versatile tool, with different modes like the bezier curve control or the add anchor points tool. I use it for almost all of my projects, whether it's for creating precise paths and shapes or for making adjustments to complex illustrations and editing existing artwork.

The tool that I find the worst in Adobe Illustrator is the shortcut Control-H (or Command-H on Mac). Sometimes I hit this shortcut by accident and it hides all the edges and anchor points in Illustrator, which can be annoying when you're in the middle of working... especially if you're like me and you forgot what the shortcut key is.

Discover more here:

Many of the graphics used by our instructors in this video are from Envato Elements, so be sure to check it out! With one subscription, you'll have unlimited access to assets such as graphics, add-ons, and fonts. That's millions of creative digital assets, with simple commercial licensing, and you can cancel at any time.

Master the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite With These Resources

Our instructors covered their best and worst Creative Cloud tools, but if you want to go deeper and learn more, the Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel is here to help. You'll find courses that cover the basics of the Creative Cloud suite, so keep exploring to learn more advanced techniques:

Or if you prefer written tutorials, we have a huge library of practical resources. Here are a few to get you started: