Pitting Adobe’s imaging & page-layout flagships against one another seems a little wonky (kind of a Celebrity Deathmatch, minus the clay & gore), but by doing so Peachpit’s Mike McHugh shows off some of the power hidden in InDesign. The battle, in six rounds, hits the following:
- Recoloring Grayscale Artwork
- Recoloring RGB Artwork
- Creating Reflections
- Applying Special Effects
- Creating Vignettes
- Generating Contact Sheets
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that ID beats PS on some of these points (cough), but the core imaging juice shared between the two enables ID to perform some neat tricks. And when it comes to generating contact sheets (with a hand-off from Bridge), InDesign just trounces Photoshop–as well it should. [Via]
[Update: Mordy Golding has posted an Illustrator vs. InDesign Smackdown on his blog.]
Well, with RogueSheep’s InDesign plugin, you can do even more cool stuff. Let’s see if the InDesign folks at Adobe will yield to the temptation to integrate Hydra into the next version…
But seriously, I’d rather see InDesign allowing me to directly convert an RGB image to Grayscale/B&W without taking it into Photoshop than being able to apply some fancy filters.
The great thing about Photoshop is, though, that whenever I do stuff like feathering objects or applying layer styles, I can be 99.999% sure they will print correctly, whereas I have had a really bad experience with the layer styles applied from directly within InDesign.
[Hmm–not sure what might be causing that. If you have details of what you’re seeing, I’d be happy to pass them along to the ID team. –J.]
I’m tellin’ ya, John… we are looking straight down the barrel of an Adobe OS (heh) that simply runs a core engine with some UIs and runtime packages added on for specific tasks.
I wonder about defining that core, though… Pixels and vectors, with some shiny task-based tools (layout and text editing, for example). Give Bridge enough extra brain to launch an environment on demand, and use it as Master Control (get it? Master Suite…Master Control? )
… =)
While it’s a slightly semi-odd comparison, it does reinforce my sweet little prejudice that of all the CS3 apps, InDesign is the current jewel in Adobe’s crown. In addition to all its great technologies, ID also has a UI which picks up my Windows XP UI color settings — unlike Photoshop CS3’s abysmal failure in this regard, with its hard-coded, too-light-gray “skin” (which I thought was a bug in the public beta, sure to be uprooted by the RTM code). After months of using PSCS3, my eyes still wince when I open it up — but IDCS3 is almost perfect, a truly glorious piece of code.
!?!?!?!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Oh it’s ON buddy. You do NOT want to get me started…
[ 🙂 –J.]
Hey John
I did concede that Photoshop was the winner in the end, what the hell it was fun anyway.
Would you like to appear on my Podcast as a guest? Maybe youd have a tip for us. Ive has Russell Brown, Jack Davis and Dave Cross so far, and they have all said (PRIVATELY) that you are too much of wuss. I disagree, I think you would be great on the show. I dont think you’d make some lame exuse like “Im too Busy” or somthing like that. 🙂
Thanks for the write up.
As for you Mordy Go on Bring it baby.
How about an Illustrator smack down video for my podcast, the kids on youtube eat up that violent tutorial stuff.