At the Adobe MAX Creativity Conference today, Adobe unleashed a slew of updates to its Creative Cloud portfolio including four brand new applications. Adobe XD CC comes out of a two-year beta, while Project Felix officially becomes Adobe Dimension CC for 2D to 3D compositing. Also, Character Animator CC for 2D animation gets official billing, as well as Lightroom CC—the all-new cloud-based photography service. Adobe also rolled out updates to its flagship applications Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Premiere Pro CC and its Adobe Stock service.
Adobe Sensei, the artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, continues to be the underlying enabler in Adobe’s suite of services and tools. Sensei-powered features in applications enables the execution of concept to completion much faster, and enables creatives to focus on what matters: doing creative things.
Key new product announcements:
Adobe XD CC: The all-in-one cross platform solution for designing and prototyping user experience across mobile and web goes official.
Adobe Dimension CC: The ground-breaking 3D tool for graphic designers gets an official name, after being known as Project Felix for the past year. The app allows for designers to create photorealistic 3D images with the ease of working with 2D, with integration with Photoshop, Sensei and Adobe Stock.
Adobe Character Animation CC: The digital 2D animation tool comes out of beta. New features include pose-to-pose blending, new physics behaviour and visual puppet controls. Sensei helps improve lip-sync capability—matching mouth shapes with spoken sounds.
Lightroom CC reimagined as a service
Lightroom CC is an all-new cloud-based photo service for editing, organising, storing and sharing photos on any device, anywhere. The beauty of Lightroom CC is the ability for raw files to be synchronised across mobile, desktop and web. Photos can also be added without the worry of tagging, as this is now done automatically, thanks to Sensei.
The Photoshop Lightroom CC desktop app is now known as Lightroom Classic, and Adobe has assured that it will continue to develop and enhance this photographer’s tool of choice, and for those who prefer the traditional desktop experience.
The popular Photography Plan now includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop CC, Adobe Portfolio, and Adobe Spark.
Other features and performance enhancements
Adobe Photoshop CC boasts significantly expanded photography support, major improvements in learning and overall performance.
Illustrator CC includes multiple workflow, user experience and performance improvements
InDesign CC gives designers more control over workflow with an improved UX with faster and easier access to tools and assets they use the most.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC adds deep collaboration features, immersive 360/VR workflows and responsive motion graphics controls and templates.
Adobe After Effects CC streamlines artists ability to create data-driven graphics and deliver high-quality VR and 3D results. Performance is now faster thanks to GPU optimisations.
Adobe Spark, the visual story-telling tool for mobile and web receives premium features.
Assets and more
Adobe Stock continues to expand, now including hundreds of professionally-designed motion graphics templates for Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC users. The creative marketplace now has over 100 million assets including photos, illustrations, videos and vector graphics.
Adobe Typekit now leverages on Sensei to power visual search for fonts. You can now submit your own photos of type and find similar fonts available on Typekit. The visual search feature marks the first Sensei-powered service to be available to third party developers.
AdobeLIVE on Behance: A live-streaming channel that enables the 10 million-strong Behance community to learn and inspire each other. It currently features 24 hours of weekly programming, and will expand to 24/7 in 2018.
Stay updated @ Adobe MAX
Adobe MAX 2017 conference happens at The Venetian, Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada from 18-20 October 2017.
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Disclaimer: I’m an invited guest at Adobe MAX. Conference tickets, travel and accommodation are sponsored by Adobe. My opinions are my own.
