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Adobe Announces A New, Massive Update to Creative Cloud

Mobile apps integrate with on-the-go features, including masking and compositing

By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)

We’ve been hearing about a bold new world that Adobe was going to announce for several weeks now, and yesterday we got a preview of tighter integration with a host of new mobile apps, that promise to bring compositing and masking to the mobile platform.  But there’s a whole lot more going up in Adobe Creative Cloud, including a new Photoshop package with Lightroom for under $10 a month. Wow.

Our shift to Creative Cloud has given us a broad canvas on which to innovate like never before. We've taken bold steps with this milestone release, fast-tracking new features to industry-defining tools like Photoshop and InDesign, while introducing mobile apps that turn tablets into indispensable creative tools. -David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media, Adobe

The first new feature that Adobe announced in this update comes in the form of a trio of new iPad apps – Adobe Sketch, Adobe Line, and Adobe Photoshop Mix. Designed to integrate with not only Adobe Creative Cloud, these apps also work with Adobe’s new hardware tools such as Adobe Ink, a digital pen, and Adobe Slide, a digital ruler. These tools will enable users to add even greater functions to those apps for digital sketching.

In addition, Photoshop Mix brings a few features out of the realm of After Effects, and include on-the-go masking and compositing of mobile digital footage. That’s a very cool development. I’ve always felt that a mobile version of After Effects would be very popular, and the iPad and other tablet computers are now powerful enough to perform this kind of workflow. It’ll be fun to see what mobile filmmakers will do with it.

The next announcement brought a host new features to Adobe Creative Cloud’s suite of 14 digital software products. These new features break down as follows:

• New capabilities in Photoshop CC include Blur Gallery motion effects for creating a sense of motion; Focus Mask that makes portrait shots with shallow depth of field stand out; new Content-Aware capabilities; and the recently introduced Perspective Warp for fluidly adjusting the perspective of a specific part of an image without affecting the surrounding area.Photoshop users can also harness the power of an enhanced Mercury Graphics Engine to provide improved Layer Comps which give users the ability to change  visibility, position, or appearance of one layer and sync the change reflected in all other Layers. Photoshop CC also has ability to pinch and zoom images, create smoother strokes, and deliver a more responsive experience on Windows 8 Touch devices, such as Microsoft Surface Pro 3.
• New features in the video apps include, Live Text Templates and Masking and Tracking. These new integrations make it easier to bridge changes with Adobe After Effects CC inside Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Premiere Pro also gets enhanced graphics performance, new keying effects that are more precise in After Effects; a more flexible Direct Link color pipeline in Adobe SpeedGrade CC; and enhanced multi-track tools for audio work in Adobe Audition CC. Integration between apps has also been further improved to save time when working between Premiere Pro and After Effects or SpeedGrade.

Lastly, Adobe has announced a new pricing scheme for those seeking to just do basic image processing workflow through Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. The new Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan monthly subscription will provide Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 for a monthly subscription of just $9.99 a month. That’s a great deal, and also includes the free Adobe Mobile Apps which will bring that mobile content into your workflow.

This is the real promise of the Adobe subscription model. Non stop updates which bring greater performance and more features that users can employ immediately. I understand that some are hesitant to get into the subscription model. But this is what, the third major update since Creative Cloud was announced last year? And while there’s been a few hiccups that have left members waiting and worried, I still think this beats waiting until the new version hits the store shelves, IMHO.

For additional details, visit www.adobe.com.

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