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This week at Adobe MAX: The Creativity Conference, Adobe announced a new family of mobile apps and enhanced Creative Cloud (CC) desktop tools that enable creative professional to access, use and create apps from anywhere.
At Adobe MAX 2014, Adobe announced a milestone release of Creative Cloud that transforms how creatives work across desktops and devices. This release includes significant feature updates to 13 essential CC desktop tools that link to a new family of integrated mobile apps. In addition, the latest versions of Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC include breakthroughs in Touch support for Microsoft Windows 8 and Surface Pro 3.
Moreover, central to this release is an all-new Creative Profile that drives deep connections between CC desktop tools and nine new mobile apps that extend the power of the Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Premiere franchises onto mobile devices.
Adobe also launched a public beta of a Creative SDK that enables the delivery of mobile apps that connect to Creative Cloud, launching a new era of third-party app innovation for creative developers. The company also introduced Creative Talent Search, connecting creatives around the world with job opportunities from top brands and companies.
“The pace of innovation continues to accelerate with Creative Cloud and today we are introducing a new family of mobile apps that are deeply integrated with flagship CC desktop tools, like Photoshop and Illustrator, and taking mobile devices into the creative mainstream,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president of Digital Media at Adobe, in a statement. “Also, new capabilities, such as Creative Talent Search, show that Creative Cloud is evolving into an increasingly powerful resource for our millions of members.”
This Creative Cloud release includes a new Creative Profile that connects creatives to their work, to the assets they use to create, and the communities that matter to them–no matter where they are. Files, photos, colors, brushes, shapes, fonts, textstyles, graphics, and any other assets are always at their fingertips. This new Creative Profile moves with creatives from app-to-app, and device-to-device, so assets automatically appear when they need them, in the right context.
Moreover, mobile apps provide new Creative Cloud connections. This release includes radical new connections between essential CC desktop tools and a new family of mobile apps that extend the power of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Lightroom onto mobile devices.
For instance, in the Photoshop family, Photoshop Sketch enables users to draw with new built-in expressive brushes and enables an integrated workflow with Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC. Updates to Photoshop Mix extend precise mobile compositing capabilities and now includes enhanced integration with Photoshop CC, as well as a new iPhone version. A new Lightroom Mobile app builds on integrated desktop and mobile workflows and includes features to allow clients, friends or family to select favorites and leave comments for photos shared online; and GPS information from iPhone photos now syncs with Lightroom desktop.
In the Illustrator family, Illustrator Draw (formerly Adobe Ideas) gives users access to their favorite vector drawing tools and features in a modern, streamlined interface, high-fidelity integration with Illustrator CC and enhanced support for Adobe Ink and Slide. And Illustrator Line, a precision drawing app, gives creatives new features for perfectly distributing shapes as they draw, plus the ability to send sketches to Illustrator CC, where they have full access to their original vector paths for editing.
And in the Premiere family, the new Adobe Premiere Clip app transforms video shot on the iPhone or iPad into edited videos that are simple to share. Aspiring videographers can then send their compositions to Adobe Premiere Pro CC for advanced editing and finishing.
Adobe also introduced a new category of “capture” apps to create designs and bring them into creative workflows. Adobe Brush CC enables designers to craft unique brushes, on iPad or iPhone, to use in Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC or Adobe Illustrator Sketch. Any photograph can be made into a brush, so creatives can quickly design high-quality brushes that can range from photorealistic, to organic, painterly or graphic.
Adobe Goes Deeply Mobile With Creative Cloud at MAX 2014
In addition, Adobe Shape CC provides a simple way to capture and create shapes on iPhone or iPad, wherever inspiration strikes. A high-contrast photo of anything–a chair, a pet or a hand-drawn font–is converted into vector art that can be used immediately in Illustrator CC and Adobe Illustrator Line via Creative Cloud Libraries. And Adobe Color CC (formerly Adobe Kuler) allows creatives to capture colors and save them as themes that are immediately available in other Adobe applications, including Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC.
These mobile apps work with all Creative Cloud plans, giving everyone–from freelancers to creatives in large organizations–access to all the benefits of a deeply integrated mobile and desktop workflow, connected via their Creative Profile. Adobe also launched the public beta of a Creative SDK that powers the delivery of new third-party mobile apps that connect to Creative Cloud. Adobe Creative SDK is available at creativesdk.adobe.com.
“It is fascinating how Adobe is transforming desktop and mobile software into cloud software,” said Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC. “Cloud technologies have a well understood value proposition for server software but ‘client-side’ technology that runs on a desktop and mobile devices, it is sometimes hard to imagine how a cloud can provide enhancement or added value. The early stages of Creative Cloud provided flexible license management and software distribution and file storage. But recently, and with some of what Adobe is doing today, the cloud comes into full force in supporting desktop and mobile workflows.”
Adobe noted that this Creative Cloud release includes powerful new features for Adobe’s flagship creative desktop tools. Highlights include Touch support on Windows 8 devices for key design applications; new 3D print features and enhanced Mercury Graphics Engine performance for Photoshop CC; a new Curvature tool in Illustrator CC; interactive EPUB support in InDesign CC; SVG and Synchronized Text support in Muse CC; GPU-optimized playback for viewing high resolution 4K and UltraHD footage in Premiere Pro CC; and HiDPI and new 3D support in After Effects CC.
Through a member’s Creative Profile Adobe is driving frictionless creative workflows, with CC desktop tools able to access new mobile apps and services. Building on the success of Creative Cloud capabilities such as file sharing, Behance and TypeKit, new services now available, include: Creative Cloud Market, a collection of curated content freely accessible to Creative Cloud members, including thousands of professionally crafted files, including user interfaces, patterns, icons, brushes and vector shapes, to speed through desktop and mobile projects.
Also available are Creative Cloud Libraries, an asset management service that lets creatives easily access and create with colors, brushes, text styles, and vector images through Creative Cloud desktop, mobile apps and services. Creative Cloud Libraries connects desktop tools like Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC to each other–and to companion mobile apps.
And the Creative Cloud Extract is a cloud-based service that reinvents the Photoshop CC comp-to-code workflow for Web designers and developers, letting them share and unlock vital design information from a Photoshop Document (PSD) file (such as colors, fonts and CSS) to use when coding mobile and desktop designs.
“Capabilities like running some of the complex lighting algorithms in the cloud to harness processing power, storing of detailed settings and personalizations so that users can float in and out of different devices while retaining the context of their work, have been areas of continued investment,” Hilwa said. “Today we are seeing Adobe announce a bunch of mobile tools that use the cloud to cleverly integrate and manage design work seamlessly across mobile and desktop. To me these are unexpected and delightful innovations that move the bar in how cloud features can help client-side desktop and mobile software.”
Meanwhile, Adobe’s creative Talent Search connects creatives across the globe with job opportunities from top brands and companies. Hiring managers using Talent Search are able to use advanced discovery tools to find the right talent for their job–for example, finding experts in Photoshop, who live in a specific city, and have worked in automotive design is easier than ever. Custom algorithms recommend candidates for roles and get smarter the more a recruiter uses the system. Also, public postings will advertise job opportunities to the millions of creatives on Behance.