How To Use Adobe Stock With Adobe InDesign CC

Okay, what is Adobe Stock? All that it is, is stock imagery that you get to use for your projects. So they're professional photographs that you get to use commercially. They cost about $20/month, it's their subscription service. You can sign up at bringyourownlaptop.com/stock, and that will give you 10 free images to get started. Now there are competitors. iStock, and Shutterstock are the main ones but to be honest, they're all very similar. You find images that are on iStock, are also on Adobe Stock and Shutterstock. There are some exclusivity deals but most of them are all the same.

Now the main perk for Adobe Stock is, I'll show you here. So, when I'm in here, I'm going to search for 'furniture'. I need them for my project. And I'm going to pick an image. There's one that I want, and that is this one over here. Now when I hover about this kind of download cloud thing I have the option of just downloading it to my computer, and that's fine, but if you use the Libraries, it adds a special kind of feature and functionality. So down here, I'm going to add it to my Maynooth Furniture that I've made. You might add a Library there. And what you'll notice, if I jump back into InDesign you can see, I've got my CC Libraries open, I'm switched to Maynooth Furniture, and there's my image. So I'm going to drag this in, and drag it out.

Now to start with, it is watermarked. So I haven't paid for it yet because I haven't got the client to say, "Yes I like it yet," or I haven't decided if I like it yet. So you get to start with a reasonably High Res image to start your design work, except it's got the big ugly watermark in it. So say you get it how you want, we're going to do just a tiny bit of work to show you the magic of it. So, I'll make it here. We give it 'No' Fill, and I'm going to give it-- actually going to give the Fill 'Black', and 'No' Stroke. I'm going to lower the opacity a bit. And I grab both of these. Select both of these, and I'm going to push them all the way to the back. So I work through this, and I've liked it, and the client signed it up, you can see some other images here.

What's really nice about Adobe Stock is, if I click on the image, you can see, in the corner of the icon here can you see, like a licensed image from Adobe Stock? This is where the magic happens. You can do it from over here as well. You can right click it, and say, 'License Image'. And because I'm paying my money, and I get 10 free a month I know that I've got-- if I jump back into Adobe Stock, you can see at the top here, I've got seven left for this month. You can pay more to get more, but what I can do is click on this little icon here, hold tight… it's going to use one of my seven licenses, I'm going to click 'OK'.

And what's really nice is, watch, watch, watch. You can see, it's syncing over here. And you can see, the watermark's gone, and now it's a High Res version. So it's just super handy if you are working with images. It's really even better when you're using, say Photoshop. You can use these images, do a lot of kind of manipulation to them. Adjust them, bend them, do lots of cool stuff, and license them, and then you don't have to try and redo it later on. Cool! So now I have the image. I get to use that on any of my projects now because I am legally allowed to use it commercially.

And that my friends, is Adobe Stock, tying it into CC Libraries.