6effortlessAdobe just launched major updates to its flagship Creative Cloud tools and services to boost the creation process and productive efficiency. Spanning across virtually all of the Creative Cloud portfolio, updates in this new release target many of the pain points that designers, photographers and filmmakers face every day. New features are seen in Adobe’s flagship applications, performance enhancements across Creative Cloud (CC), and exciting updates to Adobe Stock -- including deeper integration within CC and the addition of an all-new Premium collection of high quality stock content.

According to Paul Robson, President, Adobe Asia Pacific, the industry is going through unprecedented changes - driven by mobile explosion - and content velocity is becoming more critical in tying content and customer experience to business impact and success. The new Adobe Creative Cloud innovations now deliver the magic and improved workflow that unleashes creativity and helps organizations ultimately provide superb customer experience across channels.
“We have two key goals with this release: saving our customers time and helping them jumpstart their creative engines,” said Bryan Lamkin, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Every creative project starts with a blank page and ends with a vision coming to life. Today’s release of Creative Cloud will help make that journey as fast and productive as possible. From deeper integration of Adobe Stock into the CC experience, to amazing new features like Content-Aware Crop in Adobe Photoshop, this release will expedite the creative process for millions of our customers.”

New CC desktop app capabilities and performance enhancements

Highly anticipated CC features, offering critical time savings and new creative opportunities for Creative Cloud subscribers, include:

  • Content-Aware Crop in Photoshop, which automatically fills in the gaps when you rotate or expand a canvas beyond the original image size.
  • Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop, an easy way to create artistic effects with facial features using the Liquify Tool while keeping the face in proportion.
  • Match font in Photoshop, an innovative font recognition technology that has the ability to recognize and identify licensed fonts and automatically suggest fonts available on your computer system or available to license through Adobe Typekit.
  • Character Animator Preview in After Effects CC, which matches an animated character to a real-life actor’s speech and movements, such as seen first on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ in the host’s recurring “Cartoon Donald Trump” (1:30) interviews.
  • New Virtual Reality (VR) features in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, including “field of view” mode for previewing content.
  • Fast export of assets and artboards in Adobe Illustrator CC, allowing users to export assets to multiple formats and resolutions with a single click.
  • Photoshop productivity enhancements, including a four times performance improvement when working with fonts and Content-Aware Fill features.


Adobe Stock service offers built right into Creative Cloud

Patrick Ng, Creative Group Head of Hakuhodo Singapore, is excited about the friendly interface of Adobe Creative Cloud, saying: “Our designers work with a high volume of images every day, and having ready access to Creative Cloud services, as well as Adobe Stock that’s integrated directly into Creative Cloud, expedite sharing of assets amongst the team. All-in-all, great for the team’s efficiency.”

Indeed, research from Pfeiffer Consulting confirms that integrating Adobe Stock with CC desktop applications delivers up to 10 times greater efficiency than other stock services.  The expanded Adobe Stock service includes over 55 million royalty-free, high-quality photos, videos, illustrations and graphics as well as the following new capabilities:

  • One-Click Workflow. Deeper Adobe Stock integration with CC applications enables a new, one-click workflow‘ that lets users select an image or video on the Adobe Stock website and place it on their creative canvas with a single click.  Also an expanded In-app purchase feature delivers an industry-first, one-click license capability, directly from Photoshop.
  • Premium Collection. Adobe’s first premium content offering sourced for Adobe Stock includes nearly 100,000 curated images that meet the standards of top advertising agencies, leading brands and digital and print publications.
  • Monetization made easier is in the making and will come soon. Here, Adobe will expand on its vision to build out the world’s largest creative marketplace by offering opportunities for creative professionals to contribute and monetize their work. They can contribute directly from desktop and mobile applications, including Adobe Lightroom CC, Adobe Bridge CC, Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix, providing an easy on-ramp to showcasing and selling their work via Adobe Stock.  Also coming soon is Adobe’s new Stock Contributor Portal, which will feature intelligent auto-tagging capabilities saving hours of key wording.


Greater discoverability, productivity and integrated mobile to desktop workflows

The company’s signature CreativeSync technology ensures a user’s files, fonts, design assets and settings instantly appear in their mobile to desktop workflow, wherever they need them.  Recently made available collaboration capabilities include read-only Creative Cloud Libraries that provide controlled permission levels while collaborating with teams. The Creative Cloud library serves as a virtual digital style guide for teams to ensure campaigns are consistent and always on brand.  Creatives can also delegate permission levels to help manage libraries and files. Also new is an updated Creative Cloud Libraries panel with search filters that allow customers to easily search and select video, photo, vector and illustration assets.

Furthermore, Creative Cloud for enterprise (CCE) enables customers to create, collaborate and deliver content at high velocity - all behind the security of a corporate firewall, including simplified workflows for creative teams collaborating and exchanging assets, as well as read-only libraries and folders, archiving support for folders and files and versioning capabilities. With today’s CC release, Adobe Stock for enterprise now includes the Premium collection as well as advanced search, flexible payment plans and the ability to track stock images and videos through one unified enterprise dashboard.

By MediaBUZZ