Adobe in their efforts to provide the best tools have upped their game at their annual MAX conference. For the truly uninitiated, Adobe are the company that gave us Photoshop and Acrobat reader. Acrobat was probably your first PDF reader if you started with a Windows PC.
If you have used a computer in the last 5 years, you have seen this logo
Photoshop has been given a cool new update with a search bar within Photoshop that allows you to find tools within Photoshop along with images from Adobe Stock (their stock images platform) and tutorials on using that tool. So all those complex icons in the toolbox like lassoes and pen tool for example which were confusing for newcomers will now feel like Adobe is willing to teach rising and experienced creative how to unleash all their creative talent. Think of Adobe as an art teacher but without a history of rejection and a worrisome personal life. Now Photoshop wants to be friendly to everyone and wants you to open your mind and vision to them. Already you must have heard a designer or two say ‘Photoshop can do anything.’ Now apparently, it can teach you how to work with Photoshop too. We think that’s wonderful.
Great as this is, Photoshop isn’t the only thing that has been given a major update. Adobe have recognised that a lot of people who use their tools post their completed work online. With this firmly in mind, Premiere Pro will have options to select the type of platform you are creating for and add the metadata for the video within the program so that the video is truly ready to upload to social media sites. This is going to save a lot of people a lot of time and if you think about it, isn’t that why we have technology; to make our lives easier. It’s also integrated support for creating high quality virtual reality content with Premiere Pro but more on that at the end.
Exclusive to Mac for now is the new Adobe Experience Design (XD) which aims to be the first complete tool for designing and testing experiences for mobile and desktop platforms. What sets this apart from the others is the ability to collaborate for web design in real-time. What also sounds exciting is Project Felix which is meant for combining 2D and 3D assets seamlessly for creative purposes while encouraging using resources from Adobe Stock. After Effects also promises to speed up rendering of 3D content which we think we will come as a huge benefit for the development of more 3D content.
For those who create for companies that mostly rely on Shutterstock and similar stock images to drive their communication forward, they will find the most value in the new offerings from Adobe Stock which is partnering with Reuters, arguably the world’s leading news coverage with 2600 journalists in over 200 locations across the globe. This gives Adobe Stock users access to a variety of high quality images and video which is updated constantly.
Adobe has a lot of other great new offerings built into their new software. It is a game changer and to find out more, Adobe has a twitter account dedicated to their conference: https://twitter.com/adobemax
Image from Twitter.
It’s mind boggling how much they have been working on and they had some great keynote speakers like fashion designer Zac Posen (see his interview here) and iconic filmmaker, Quentin “Say what again!” Tarantino.
Image from FosterGem
He shared his story about how he started, how the accessibility of film-making has shifted and what the future holds for him. Though he has confirmed his impending retirement, we can’t wait to see what the future holds and we’re guessing that he will be using a lot of Adobe products to make his films as stylistically cool as he always has. Check out his interview here.
Adobe is viewing A.I. to drive the future. Adobe Sensei detects what’s the sky in a photo and asks you if you want to replace it. There’s a tool for editing audio currently dubbed Project VoCo and this has been nicknamed ‘Photoshop’ for audio files. The software needs about 20 minutes of recorded speech to ‘listen to’ before it allows you to use that person’s voice to say things that weren’t in the original audio files.
In this world where we don’t trust images anymore because of image editing, concerns over how much we can trust audio recordings now have arisen but we have been assured by Adobe that security measures will be put in place to avoid misuse.
Another really impressive piece of technology they have shown us is called StylIt and it’s a breathtaking piece of software.
In the video the Adobe presenter draws on paper and uses a camera to see what kind of style he has drawn in and StylIt applies that to a 3D model. It can also be applied to animation. At the end of the video, he mentions that anyone can download the demo of this at http://stylit.org
Last we come to Clover VR, the Virtual Reality editing tool working within Premiere Pro that allows you to put on a headset and edit videos in virtual reality. See the video here for a proper idea about how the editing actually takes place.
And that’s all that’s been talked about from Adobe. Which new software would you want to work with? What impressed you the most? Let us know in the comments or on our social media and always, keep up the creativity.