June’s Creative Cloud suite update arrives today and brings new features to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom, and more that focus on three themes: learning/inspiration, collaboration, and empowering through innovation.
On the learning front, Adobe adds live streaming to its Fresco iPad drawing app, so artists can show the world their painting techniques. Adobe Live tutorials are now part of the mobile Creative Cloud app, while programming is being increased from 5 to 12 hours per day. Meanwhile, photographers can now share their editing process with other Lightroom users via the program’s Discover menu, and Behance—Adobe’s stock source—is adding more powerful search options, like filtering by camera settings and specific models.
(Image: Adobe)
Collaboration Is Key
Collaboration tools are key to our new work-from-home reality. When it launched Photoshop for iPad, Adobe also introduced Cloud Documents, which enables syncing of PSD files between devices via the cloud. With today’s announcement, Illustrator users can now also save their work to the cloud.
(Image: Adobe)
InDesign gets a “Share for Review” feature, which offers one-click sharing of designs to designated colleagues and lets them offer feedback inside the app.
Adobe Spark, which lets non-design professionals create web graphics, animations, and videos, can now access Creative Cloud libraries of assets like fonts, logos, and color sets.
New Creative Features
Photoshop selection tools have been improving with each passing year. The automatic and impressive “Select Subject” tool arrived two years ago; with this update Adobe builds on that with the new “Select Subject Portrait” tool.
Like its progenitor, Select Subject Portrait taps Adobe’s Sensei imaging AI technology to make selecting hair far more accurate. Adobe found that people were the most selected subject, and that selecting their hair perfectly was the most troublesome aspect of the process. Previously, Adobe added the Refine Brush tool to help, but even that tool is imperfect and laborious, so Adobe trained its AI on the problem.
(Image: Adobe)
Photoshop also gets a completely redesigned Adobe Camera Raw interface, mirroring the look of Lightroom. The filmstrip thumbnails now have an overflow menu, allowing you to share individual images and more. The Curves tool now has color gradients to help show what you’re doing to specific color channels. You can now rotate pattern fills to taste, to match your image, and Font Match has been improved, with more font support, vertical text, and multiple line detection. On the iPad, Photoshop can now access Lightroom photos—a plus, since Photoshop for iPad has no raw camera file support.
Speaking of Lightroom, the top new editing feature for that program is Local Hue Adjustment. This makes a cinch of changing the color of one object or set of objects to another color. Doing so has long been possible, but the new tools makes it simpler. And it’s not just for creative use: You can also use it to adjust a hue that looks off in one part of your photo, such as a face.
A couple of smaller new Lightroom tricks include the ability to set the raw develop setting and to use settings presets based on a photo’s ISO level. Availability of the new Lightroom and Photoshop tools starts today with an update available from the Creative Cloud app.
Adobe’s powerful mobile video shooting and editing app, Premiere Rush, which lets social creators quickly publish polished projects to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and more, will be getting the whizbang Auto Reframe feature that arrived in Premiere Pro last November. The tool uses AI to automatically crop video, maintaining the important subject matter so the resulting aspect ratio is suited to varying social platforms. The tool will enter beta this month and roll out to all Rush users later in the year.
These are just some highlights among the updates announced today. Other product news involves AR and 3D editing in the Aero application, stacks and design tokens in the XD interface design app, scene edit detection in Premiere Pro, and a new Roto Brush version in After Effects.
