Glossary of graphic design software, A.

Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is really a collection of software tools that have a variety of uses. It started off as a digital proofing tool, which enabled graphic designers to repurpose any file format into a document that could be read by any user, regardless of whether they had the original software that created the file, or which computer platform the user had.

Whilst this is still its primary use, it has now evolved into a sophisticated editorial digital proofing and pre-press tool.

See also: Distiller

Adobe

Adobe are the publishers of most of the major professional design and graphics applications in use by designers today. Their portfolio ranges from image editors, such as Photoshop; to video tools, such as Premier; to vector drawing programs such as Illustrator. There must rarely, if ever, be a design company or freelancer who doesn't use some their products every day.

See also: Adobe's graphics software applications

Audition

Adobe Audition is a recording, sound mixing, music editing and mastering software tools for producing professional audio.

After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a motion graphics and visual effects production software application. Part of the Adobe CS4 set of production tools, After Effects is used for creating video and movie special effects and can integrate with other Adobe tools, including Photoshop.

Alpha channels

Alpha channels are the digital equivalent of the masks that used to be used by photo compositors to make adjustments to photographic images on printing films. Channels are used in image editing programs like Adobe Photoshop and also some video editing tools. Utilising either opaque or transparent areas, they can be used to select (via a clipping path for example) an area of an image to edit or adjust.

See also: Clipping paths, Photoshop

Anchor points

Anchor points in vector drawing programs, such as Illustrator or Freehand, are located at the ends of vector paths. Anchor points can be smooth and create vector curves when they are adjusted, or they can have sharp corners, such as at the corner of a box shape.

Auto trace

Autotrace is a feature in some vector drawing programs such as Freehand, CorelDraw, or Illustrator, that allows a bitmap image to be converted to a vector line art graphic.

In practice, this technique has limited success for photo-realistic rendering, but it can be useful for editing and posterized-like special effects.