Adobe Drives Creative Innovation Forward at MAX 2015.
LOS ANGELES, Calif., Oct 05, 2015 (BUSINESS WIRE) — At Adobe MAX 2015, the world’s leading creativity conference, Adobe ADBE, +0.29% today outlines its vision for Creative Cloud — a “connected creative canvas” where people create and share their work from anywhere. At Apple’s 2015 iPhone launch event, the audience was wowed not only by new hardware announcements, but by one software feat in the presentaton: Adobe showed off its free Photoshop Fix iPad app, which convincingly turned a photo subject’s frown upside down. With millions of members around the world, Creative Cloud brings together essential desktop and mobile apps; a growing marketplace for content, assets and talent; and a vibrant community where creatives can showcase their work and find inspiration. With today’s major update to its suite of Creative Cloud apps and services, the company is also updating Adobe Stock with support for video content. If you ask them why they don’t pay for it, their answer probably amounted to something like this: Photoshop costs well over $1,000, and I use 10 percent of its features.
Traditionally, this is where the company announces its latest updates and gives us a glimpse of the new features it’s working on for products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Premiere Pro. Exactly one year after a sneak peek at Adobe’s annual MAX Creativity conference — the crowd will assemble to witness the launch of the shipping version. For so long, Photoshop simply hasn’t been for those people — it’s been for the professionals who need many of its deeper, more specialized, and more arcane tools. In addition to being a retouching tool, Fix is something of an aggregator in that uses the company’s recently unveiled CreativeSync technology to gather photos from a variety of online sources, such as Creative Cloud, Lightroom, Facebook and Dropbox as well as local photos residing or captured on your device.
Adobe’s Photoshop Fix is an app built for beginners, which you might remember from a demo at Apple’s September event (yeah, the kinda sexist one.) And for the past few days, I’ve given the app a test run. But Adobe has been making the app far more accessible lately: on the desktop, it’s started offering Photoshop and Lightroom in a bundle for $9.99 per month, and on mobile, it’s started to break Photoshop apart into easily digestible chunks offered for free. You don’t need a Creative Cloud subscription to use Fix, but you do need an Adobe account, which is available with a free signup involving little more than providing your name and email address. Adobe is also making updates to its Adobe Stock stock content service and it’s launching new portfolio sites for the creative professionals on its service (based on its existing Behance service).
This year’s MAX will feature film director Baz Luhrmann; “Humans of New York” founder and photographer Brandon Stanton; illustrator and writer Maira Kalman; and artist, designer and author Elle Luna. Of course, this is Photoshop, so fixing can mean anything from removing unwanted objects that made it into the frame to removing temporary blemishes or changing a person’s facial features, some of which is cool, some of which is useful, and some of which you should probably leave alone. To view the keynote via a live stream, visit: http://www.adobe.com/go/maxkeynote. “Creative Cloud has become the de facto platform for all creatives, providing the tools and services to fulfill every creative need. The app includes most of the key Photoshop tools used for altering pictures: one tool lets you make adjustments to exposure, contrast, and saturation, another tool lets you warp objects and faces, another lets you edit out objects and blemishes, and another lets you lighten or darken specific areas.
Soon, however, it will also offer its Creative Cloud subscribers (including those on the lower-priced Photography plan), a new, easier to use portfolio service based on Behance. After logging in, the app popped up a message saying automatic backup was enabled, meaning anything edits to photos that I made in Fix would be saved to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. With this latest release, we’re giving our creative customers the freedom they need to work and be inspired from anywhere,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Being connected to your assets, team and projects, at all times, is critical to today’s designers. I wanted to try the Apple event’s frown-to-smile effect right away, and was even more impressed by a demo Adobe showed me, because the app actually selects facial features automatically with the tap of a face icon. The simple, intuitive touch interface makes legendary Photoshop desktop features, like the Healing Brush and Liquify, available for real retouching work on iPad and iPhone.
All the tools for editing line the bottom of the screen, like so: After selecting a tool, options for changing things like size, opacity or color pop up on the left. As usual, there are too many small new features and updates across the Creative Cloud app to go into detail about every one of them, but Adobe is clearly putting the emphasis on a couple of areas. This app combines the capabilities of Adobe Brush, Adobe Shape, Adobe Color and Adobe Hue into a single, powerful, simple-to-use app and the captured design asset can be used as a brush, shape or color theme for professional work. In addition, Adobe shipped updates to other essential connected Creative Cloud mobile apps, including Photoshop Mix, Photoshop Sketch, Illustrator Draw, Comp CC and Premiere Clip.
These include innovations for design, web, user experience (UX) design, video and photography customers, across nearly every Creative Cloud application. Highlights included: For Design, Adobe introduces new and updated Touch workspaces to InDesign CC and Illustrator CC, powering mobile creativity for layout artists and graphic designers.
Each of those has a set of controls that allow you to enhance facial features such as slenderize the nose, jawline and cheeks — or fatten them up if you want. InDesign CC delivers new online publishing capabilities and Adobe Fuse CC (Preview) 3D character software is added to existing Creative Cloud membership plans. When you’re don with edits on your mobile device, just save to Photoshop and it will instantly launch the app on your desk top complete with layers representing your edits.
But in Fix, after applying one edited layer you’ve got to hit a small check mark/circle in the bottom right corner before the app will save your work. It’s very easy to get awful results with this tool and make a person look freakish, but it’s also very easy to manipulate someone’s body in subtle ways.
Fix’s smile choice overlays a curved dotted line that you can move up or down, but without the eyes and cheeks smiling, too, it wasn’t a truly joyous result. For Web and UX Design, free-form responsive design comes to Muse CC, to easily create websites that dynamically scale to any size screen, browser or device, without having to code or use restrictive templates. It’s a really impressive tool, but using it feels extremely creepy — unless you’re using it on your own face, in which case it just feels kind of sad. Adobe caught some well-deserved flak for how it presented this feature during an Apple event last month, using it to make a woman smile, and I expect that people will feel similarly uneasy when they see just how straightforward this tool makes it to dramatically change various facial features, too. In Photoshop CC new Artboards capabilities precisely place elements and layers for easier visualization and the first version of Design Space, a streamlined design-centric experience,is made available to all customers.
UX designers can also look forward to Project Comet, the only end-to-end UX design solution that includes a new CC desktop app with a companion mobile app. Tapping outside the face and then directly on the center of the face again will get you back to where almost all the face’s features can be tweaked.
It worked best on the high-res image, probably because features were easier for Fix to identify. “Healing” is another big win for Fix, and true to its medicinal underpinning, this feature basically “heals” whatever just messed up your perfect shot. And the app crashed at one point during editing, but only that once over a full day of use, so by today’s iOS app standards, its pretty sturdy even in this first release. New Touch capabilities are introduced, with Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC and Character Animator optimized for Surface Pro, Windows tablets or Apple track pad devices.
I decided to try fixing this image from my friend’s wedding, where I had taken—what I felt was—an amazing photo of the two newlyweds walking out of the church to the wedding-mobile. Launched in June 2015, Adobe Stock will soon support the download and purchase of video content, adding to its high-impact collection of photos, images and graphics. It also lets you paint over your image (using a color chosen from the image itself with a dropper if you so desire), and adds effects like defocus and vignette. Adobe Stock also adds the ability to search for and browse assets directly from Creative Cloud Libraries, including new support for accessing stock within Muse CC, Dreamweaver CC and Flash Professional CC. Most of them are improvements to its desktop apps — including additional 4K, 8K, and HDR support in Premiere Pro — but there are also some other interesting changes on mobile.
Most notably, Adobe is launching a new iOS and Android app called Capture CC that combines four other apps that it had previously broken out on their own. Lighting and color adjustments can be brushed onto specific parts of a photo, rather than applied to the whole image at once, as most simple photo editors do. Adobe Stock is also being made available for enterprise use, with additional support for license management, reporting tools, and unlimited usage of stock content in large print runs.
Available soon, Portfolio comes free with any Adobe Creative Cloud plan, delivering elegant layouts ideal for any creative field, from photography to fashion. For hardcore Photoshoppers out there, you can also export your projects from Fix in layers to Photoshop CC for further editing, so it’s a nice little tool to have in your mobile editing arsenal. For Adobe Stock pricing, including a special promotion available until October 30, visit: https://stock.adobe.com/plans. © 2015 Adobe Systems Incorporated.