Digital Arts

Adobe Creative Cloud Gets Major Makeover

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/04/19

Adobe's suite of creation programs has been given a major ladling of updates in time for the company's annual user conference. Today, at Adobe MAX, Adobe showed new functionality for Creative Cloud, including:

• A search engine that can search across all assets and files in the application;

• New ways to get to services such as Fonts, Stock and Behance (Adobe's social media platform for sharing creative work); and

• A new screen management approach for Creative Cloud Libraries, the tool for maintaining and organizing elements that users want to access repeatedly. Libraries are now integrated with Adobe XD, to give users direct access to what is created in other programs, such as Illustrator. Libraries can also be accessed by "non-creative colleagues" for use in Word or PowerPoint, to give them access to the latest assets. And Library "packs" -- pre-populated with elements -- have been made available to serve as a jumping-off point to Libraries for new users.

Other updates permeated the Creative Cloud product roster and are available to all current Cloud subscribers (including those with academic subscriptions):

• Adobe XD, the company's user experience design platform for web and mobile apps, now sports a beta feature. Live coediting allows multiple users to work on a document at the same time. Document history provides a list of saved versions of the documents to let people see what's been changed.

• Video editing software Premiere Pro includes Auto Reframe, which uses Sensei, a machine learning technology, to view footage and do automatic panning and cropping to keep the action in the frame.

• After Effects, motion graphics and visual effects software, includes performance enhancements for smoother, more fluid playback of cached previews, faster Multichannel EXR files and a speedier Content-Aware Fill that uses less memory.

• Lightroom, for photo editing, now includes in-app tutorials and features "panorama fill edges," which "magically" fills in the edges of a photo with "content-aware fill technology."

• InDesign, Adobe's layout and page design program, can now do imports of SVG files from digital and print design workflows and allows for the use of customizable Variable Fonts in the app. A new feature allows for direct linking between Adobe Experience Manager and InDesign to speed up print content creation.

On top of those product changes, Adobe also announced that it was bringing Photoshop to the iPad; releasing Fresco, a drawing and painting app, to Windows; and updating Illustrator in 2020 to work on the iPad.

Finally, Adobe also introduced two new products. Photoshop Camera is a mobile app currently in preview mode that lets users create, automatically enhance and share images and video on social media using various lenses. The company said that the app would come with a library of lenses and effects from leading artists and influencers, including American musician Billie Eilish. And Adobe Aero is a newly released mobile tool that runs on iOS devices for developing augmented reality content using assets created in Photoshop, Illustrator and other Adobe programs.