Last year, we covered the Adobe Max Creativity Conference and gave you a few updates about what was new with Adobe CC that would directly affect IndieFolio users. This year, we’re at it again but this time, you get even more updates and more peeks into the sneak previews of the projects Adobe has in store for us. First, the updates, then the new software and finally, the amazing projects they’ve been working on.
The Updates
Lightroom: Lightroom is now going to be called ‘Lightroom Classic CC’ meant for desktops. There’s a new program called ‘Lightroom’ which works across desktop, mobile and web. Editing your pictures should be a lot easier with the Colour and Luminance Masking Adobe is including in Lightroom Classic CC.
Illustrator CC: Kyle T. Webster is an international award-winning illustrator and makes a lot of really great brushes. All of the brushes he has made will now be available at no extra cost to Creative Cloud members. You can also crop images now. Illustrator now gives you the ability to tweak fonts with Variable Fonts.
The properties panel has been updated to adjust to only show you properties related to what you’re working on.
Puppet Warp is a new tool that allows morphing of your images by adding specific pins to the graphic and adjusting the pins.
InDesign CC: Annotations and endnotes can now be added to documents.
Object style enhancements is a new change allows for faster and easier formatting of images and frames. You can update it once and have it updated across your entire document.
Paragraphs can now have borders.
Choosing the kind of font you want to go with a selected typeface is now easier.
And you can even search for similar fonts with one button.
Premiere Pro: You can now edit between multiple projects simultaneously. You can copy media and sequences from one project to another. There’s a new collaboration feature that allows editors to work on the same project while enabling read-only access to other users.
You can also edit VR videos inside a VR headset while using keyboard tools. Responsive design controls give motion graphics the ability to automatically adapt to changes in duration, ratio or position. You can now manipulate multiple graphics layers at the same time. There’s a new font menu too. You can also access Adobe Stock for opening and closing credits and more.
After Effects: Data can now be visualised easier. A simple drag and drop can link data points in your video when animating.
Editing for virtual reality content comes with a number of different ways to visualise the 360 video. You can view it as a cube, a sphere or even a classic rectilinear screen that you can pan through. You can even add VR environments to create a 360 project without any pre-existing 360 video footage.
You can also begin working in After Effects either from existing footage or start fresh. Your keyboard shortcuts can be customised to suit what you need while creating and editing.
Photoshop CC: Photoshop now gets the curvature pen tool which allows you to makes shapes far more easily.
Photoshop has also included brush smoothing for creating lines that flow a lot better. Their painting symmetry tool allows you to draw on one side and have Photoshop mimic it perfectly on the other side.
New software from Adobe
Adobe XD: This is a complete solution for UI/UX designers and the professionals. Regular updates will be rolled out to improve design, prototyping and sharing.
Micro-interactions and gestures are implemented but support for higher fidelity gestures will be rolled out. It’s one that looks most promising because it will keep getting updated to make it better and better. One of the updates that we can look forward to is getting documentation, measurement, workflows, colours and styles from within a browser.
Adobe Dimension CC: The solution to making realistic mock-ups is here. Those who love to design in 2D can see what their work looks like on a product in 3D. It’s perfect for everyone in package design.
Adobe Character Animator CC: If you ever felt like making 2D animation was hard, this makes it easy. By giving people a set of great motion tracking and rigging tools, it’s easy to animate almost anything. Even live animation, speaking of which, The Simpsons already did it.
The Sneaks
Project Cloak: A researcher at Adobe took us through a common pet peeve that happens to people when they are shooting videos. You may have a great frame of a good subject but there might be an element in front of it that ruins the effect you’re trying to make. Now, after using the Cloak feature in After Effects, the object is masked out and the video looks like it never had the element in the first place. This can be applied to almost anything, even people walking into the frame can be removed with this new feature.
Project Deep Fill: This works in a manner similar to Project Cloak but it applies to images rather than video. What Adobe found was that their Content Aware Fill only sees what’s next to the image but doesn’t understand the image as a whole. Deep Fill is better than this. After you select an area in your image and apply Deep Fill to it, it creates what the area should be filled with. It can even manipulate images based on simple sketching.
Project Lincoln: Could infographics and data visualisation be simpler to make? With Project Lincoln, it is. Once you have spreadsheet data, it allows you to visualise it in Adobe XD. The tool has a button called ‘Repeat Grid’ which clones the existing bar according to the number of entries in your spreadsheet. When editing the length of one, you can edit the length of them all. The length of them will change proportionately to the values in your data. If you had more data, you could visualise it radially too.
Playful Palette: Adobe’s playful palette allows you to choose colours and blend them together as you would do on a real palette. Unlike a real palette, you can unblend the colours. As you keep using different shades of the colours you used, the Playful Palette records and keeps them on the outskirts of your palette. If you wanted to see how your work would look with a different colour in your palette, all you need to do is change it and as soon as you select a new colour, the hues of your image will change along with it instantly.
Project Quick 3D: What if your rudimentary sketches could translate to 3D models? With project Quick 3D, that’s what happens. You can do an extremely rough sketch and search for a model. The tool will search through Adobe Stock for 3D models that match what you drew and even display it at the same angle you drew.
Project Scribbler: Portrait artists should have the most fun with this. It is capable of colouring a black and white portrait in the colour tones that we would expect to see. Colours and textures can also be added to black and white sketches of objects. Simply keeping a couple of coloured textures can enable the tool to apply it to multiple sections on your sketch. It can be used on characters and caricatures.
Project Puppetron: What if Van Gogh painted you? Or what if you could look a comic character? With Project Puppetron, it’s dedicated to converting the image you add into a style of art you keep next to it. You can also change the strength of the style if it over-stylises the image you want to edit. Once the face fits the style you want, you could go into character animator and it will capture a face on a webcam and animate the movements of the face in real time.
Physics Pak: For those who love abstract shapes coming together to create another shape in the negative space, this one is for you. By selecting an outline shape, a few vectors of varying shapes and letting it run, Physics Pak starts rearranging the items you gave it until it fills up the space you designated for it.
Scene Stitch: While most people can now use Adobe’s Content Aware selection tool to remove sections of pictures they don’t want, one of the limitations is that it will only use existing image content from the rest of the image to fill in the gap you made. Now, Adobe will use images from Adobe Stock to give you options about what should be in the space you want to edit out.
Sonic Scape: Sonic Scape is meant for those who work with 360 video. It allows for the editing of 360 audio to match the video. It plays the audio as visual cues on the screen. If the audio that you want to be isn’t at the same source audibly as it is visually, Sonic Scape can create a sphere allowing you to rotate the audio source and align it to the visual on the screen. You could also add audio and choose where in the scene it’s heard from and adjust whether it should sound close by or far away.
Project Sidewinder: While 360 video is pretty great, Sidewinder looks to enhance that by depth mapping objects and stitching the surroundings to objects that are closer. This enables a sort of 3D view of the video you are looking at.
There are a few others like AdobeLive on Behance for live streaming learning from the community and Adobe Typekit now along with all of their other software uses Adobe’s AI called Adobe Sensei. And that’s it, that’s our roundup of all that’s exciting and new from Adobe. Thank you for coming this far, you must be a true Adobe fan. If you want to check out all the updates right from the source, here it is.