This guide breaks it down tool by tool, shows you how to accomplish core tasks in Express. There are also free alternatives for most Adobe Creative Cloud applications.
Most Adobe Creative Cloud users only use a small percentage of the capabilities of tools like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. The Creative Cloud tools were built for full-time creative professionals producing things like Hollywood films, magazine covers, and agency-level campaigns and typically have high learning curves and high cost.
Adobe Express is a relatively new offering from Adobe that handles the vast majority of creative work that most academic users and content creators actually need to do, with a smaller learning curve, and at a fraction of the cost.
Here’s a tool-by-tool breakdown:
From Photoshop to Adobe Express for Photo Editing
What most people use Photoshop for: Cropping and resizing images, removing backgrounds, touching up blemishes, adjusting brightness and color, adding text to images, and preparing graphics for social media or web.
Express handles all of that and makes it easier. Background removal is a single click. Generative Fill, powered by Adobe Firefly AI, lets you brush over any area and add, replace, or remove objects with a text prompt — no lasso tool or layer masking required. Color and exposure adjustments are straightforward sliders. Text and graphic overlays are drag-and-drop. And you have the entire Adobe Stock library and Adobe Fonts at your fingertips.
When you might actually need Photoshop: Professional print production requiring CMYK color management, complex multi-layer compositing with blend modes and masks, high-end retouching workflows like frequency separation, or editing layered PSD files from other designers.
How to do the core tasks in Express:
- Remove a background: Upload your image → Quick Actions → “Remove Background” → done.
- Clean up an image: Open in the editor → use Generative Fill to brush away distractions and let the AI fill in naturally.
- Fix lighting and color: Editor → Adjustments panel → drag the sliders for brightness, contrast, saturation, and temperature.
- Add text and branding: Drop in text, shapes, and your logo using the editor’s overlay tools.
From Illustrator to Adobe Express for Graphic Design
What most people use Illustrator for: Making social media graphics, designing simple logos, laying out flyers and posters, creating presentations, and marketing materials.
Express was built for this purpose. It offers thousands of professionally designed, customizable templates for every format imaginable (e.g. Instagram posts, YouTube thumbnails, business cards, flyers, presentations, invitations, and more). The Brand Kit feature lets you save your colors, fonts, and logo so every piece of content stays consistent. You pick a template, swap in your content, and export — often in under five minutes.
When you might actually need Illustrator: Creating intricate custom illustrations, technical diagrams with precise vector paths, detailed logo systems with multiple variations, or preparing complex files for commercial printing.
How to do the core tasks in Express:
- Design a logo: Browse logo templates → find one close to your concept → customize the name, colors, icon, and fonts → export as PNG or PDF.
- Create social media content: Pick a platform-sized template → swap in your photos, copy, and brand colors → publish or schedule directly to your accounts.
- Make a flyer or poster: Choose a print template → adjust the text and imagery → export as a high-resolution PDF, print-ready.
- Keep everything on-brand: Set up your Brand Kit once → Express automatically applies your palette, fonts, and logo to every new project.
From Premiere Pro to Adobe Express for Video Editing
What most people use Premiere Pro for: Trimming clips, joining footage together, adding titles and captions, dropping in background music, and exporting videos for websites, course materials, YouTube, or social media.
Express does all of this with almost zero learning curve. Upload your clips, trim them, arrange them in order, add transitions, drop in text overlays, and choose background music from the built-in royalty-free library. The auto-caption feature generates timed subtitles from speech automatically — a task that’s far more cumbersome in Premiere Pro. Express even removes video backgrounds with AI, something that requires plugins or After Effects in the traditional Adobe workflow. And one-click resizing reformats your video for any platform instantly.
Premiere Pro’s multi-track timeline, Lumetri color grading, multi-cam editing, and codec flexibility are genuinely powerful, but they’re built for professional video editors working on documentaries, commercials, and feature films. If you’re making video content for your department, course materials, or college communications, Express gets you to a polished result in a fraction of the time.
When you might actually need Premiere Pro: Long-form video production (films, documentaries, broadcast), projects requiring advanced color grading, multi-camera editing, complex audio mixing within the timeline, or workflows involving professional codecs and high-resolution deliverables.
How to do the core tasks in Express:
- Trim a clip: Upload → drag the trim handles → export.
- Combine multiple clips: Upload your clips → arrange in order → add transitions → done.
- Add captions: Upload your video → hit the auto-caption button → the AI transcribes, times, and styles your subtitles.
- Resize for any platform: Quick Actions → “Resize Video” → choose your format (9:16 for Reels, 1:1 for Instagram feed, 16:9 for YouTube).
- Remove a video background: Quick Actions → “Remove Background” → swap in a new backdrop.
From After Effects to Adobe Express for Animation
What most people actually use After Effects for: Animating titles and lower thirds, creating simple logo reveals, making animated social media posts, and adding basic motion to graphics.
Express covers the most common animation needs with presets. You can apply animated text effects — fade, slide, typewriter, bounce — with a click. Animated templates let you create eye-catching social posts and short videos with built-in motion. For the kind of quick, polished animations that most marketing teams and content creators need, these presets get the job done without learning keyframes, expressions, or the After Effects timeline.
After Effects is an incredibly deep tool — keyframe animation, expressions scripting, particle systems, 3D compositing, motion tracking, rotoscoping — but that depth comes with a steep learning curve and a workflow that can turn a simple title animation into a multi-hour project. If you need text that slides in over a video clip, Express does it in seconds.
When you might actually need After Effects: Complex custom motion graphics, visual effects compositing, character animation, 3D integration, or professional projects that require frame-by-frame creative control.
How to do the core tasks in Express:
- Animate a title: Add text → pick an animation preset (fade, typewriter, slide, bounce) → adjust timing → done.
- Create an animated social post: Choose an animated template → customize the text and images → export as MP4 or GIF.
- Add transitions: In the video editor, apply transition effects between clips from the preset library.