Tag Archives: creative cloud

adobe

Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 update brings Stock images, Android apps, video magic

Adobe’s Creative Cloud has been updated with a 2015 “Milestone” release. Creative Cloud is an apps by subscription service in which the apps can be updated at any time, but the company still pushes out update waves which are near equivalents to the old product launches.

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The big news this time is the introduction of a new product/service. Called Adobe Stock, it is based on the company’s acquisition of the Fotolia stock image company in January 2015. You can search and license images from a library of 40 million, paying £5.99 for a single image or buying a subscription.

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The puzzle here is that the image library is essentially the same as that of Fotolia, and the prices still available via the Fotolia site are different and can be cheaper, though direct comparisons are difficult since Fotolia has a more complex pricing system based on credits (one credit is from £0.43 to £0.82 and buys a single small image license) and license types, whereas Adobe Stock seems to be “one size fits all”. I asked Adobe exactly what rights you get when you purchase an Adobe Stock image license but have not got the answer yet.

Still, the costs are pretty low for most businesses and Adobe’s advantage is integration with its design tools like InDesign, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. It could be useful for images for this site, for example, though my search for “Windows 10” images did not quite hit the mark:

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What else is new? A huge amount: this is a suite of large applications and each application has updates ranging from minor to highly significant. Based on a quick preview, here are some of the highlights:

Premiere Pro, the video editing application, has an amazing feature called Time Tuner which changes the length of a video. For example, you have a 30 minute video but need to cut it by 3 minutes to make room for an ad break. Time Tuner will automatically remove frames “at scene changes, during quiet audio passages, and in sections with still images or low visual activity.” Results will vary according to the content, but could save hours of meticulous editing.

A related feature is Morph Cut which helps you to edit interviews. If you cut out things like ums, ahs and hesitations in an audio recording, no problem, but with video you will get jumpy results thanks to head movements. Morph Cut smooths these out automatically.

Another magical video features shows up in After Effects. Face Tracker lets you apply effects to a face and have it applied automatically – this may not sound like much, but if you imagine the task of say blurring faces in a video in order to prevent recognition, you can see that this can save a lot of work. More mischievous examples would include adding spectacles, hats, hair or other embellishments.

The quick summary here is that “photoshopping” is easier than ever now for videos as well as photographs. You cannot trust what you see on the screen.

Dreamweaver, the web design tool, has built-in Bootstrap integration, Bootstrap being an open source JavaScript library developed by Twitter for responsive, mobile-friendly web designs. It is also used by Microsoft for the ASP.NET MVC templates in Visual Studio.

The Mercury engine, which accelerates image processing by using GPU cores for parallel processing (among other techniques) has been improved and applied to more products. Adobe claims that Illustrator is now 10 times faster and more precise than previous versions for zoom, pan and scroll (though some comparisons are with CS6, the last version before Creative Cloud). InDesign now uses Mercury for zooming and scrolling, which is twice as fast.

InDesign is also getting a new online publishing feature, though this is in preview. You can publish documents to Adobe’s hosted service. A way of publishing content without the hassle of hosting is always welcome, but raises old issues like the quality of the markup after conversion from InDesign (which is primarily for print), how you monetize the content with things like online ads, and exactly what role Adobe sees for the service versus other ways of getting content online. I will be looking for more information on this.

Update: I gave the online publishing feature a try and you can see the results here. I noticed that the HTML source is mostly SVG (a web language for vector graphics), and that the images are blurry though there is no doubt a fix for this.

Lightroom and Photoshop now have a Dehaze feature, for removing fog and haze in photos, or alternatively adding it. This looked amazing in the preview we saw. Here is a before and after:

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Android is getting some Adobe love, with the release of Brush CC, Shape CC, Color CC and Photoshop Mix, previously only available on iOS. There is still a clear preference for iOS though (presumably reflecting the preferences of the customer base), and a new Adobe Hue CC app for capturing colour schemes for Premiere Pro or After Effects is iPhone only.

There is plenty more of course; Adobe has a ton of information here.

adobe, cloud computing

Adobe opens up Creative Cloud to app developers

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At the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles, Adobe has announced enhancements and additions to its Creative Cloud service, which includes core applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver, mobile apps for Apple’s iPad, and the online portfolio site Behance. Creative Cloud is also the mechanism by which Adobe has switched its customers from perpetual software licences to subscription, even for desktop applications.

One of today’s announcements is a public preview version of the Creative SDK for iOS, with an Android version also available on request. Nothing for Windows Phone, though Adobe does seem interested in supporting high-end Windows tablets such as Surface Pro 3, thanks to their high quality screens and pen input support.

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The Creative SDK lets developers integrate apps with Adobe’s cloud, including access to cloud storage, import and export of PSD (Photoshop) layers, and image processing using cloud services. It also gives developers the ability to support Adobe hardware such as Ink and Slide, which offers accurate drawing even on iOS tablets designed exclusively for touch control.

Adobe’s brand guidelines forbid the use of Adobe product names like Photoshop or Illustrator in your app name, but do allow words such as “Photoshop enabled” and “Creative Cloud connected.”

Other Adobe announcements today include:

Mobile app changes

Adobe’s range of mobile apps has been revised:

  • Adobe Sketch is now Photoshop Sketch and lets you send drawings to Photoshop.
  • Adobe Line is now Illustrator Line and lets you send sketches to Illustrator.
  • Adobe Ideas is now Illustrator Draw, again with Illustrator integration.
  • Adobe Kuler is now Adobe Colour CC and lets you capture colours and save them as themes for use elsewhere.
  • Adobe Brush CC and Adobe Shape CC are new apps for creating new brushes and shapes respectively. For example, you could convert a photo into a vector art that you can use for drawing in Illustrator.
  • Adobe Premiere Clip is a simple video editor for iOS that allows export to Premiere Pro CC.
  • Lightroom Mobile has been updated to enable comments on photos shared online, and synchronisation with Lightroom desktop.

There are now a confusingly large number of ways you can draw or paint on the iPad using an Adobe app, but the common theme is better integration with the desktop Creative cloud applications.

Desktop app enhancements

On the desktop app side, Adobe announcements include Windows 8 touch support in Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects; 3D print features in Photoshop CC; a new curvature tool in Illustrator; and HiDPI (high resolution display support) in After Effects.

New cloud services

New Adobe cloud services include Creative Cloud Libraries,a design asset management service that connects with both mobile and desktop Adobe apps, and Creative Cloud Extract which converts Photoshop PSD imagines into files that web designers and developers can use, such as colours, fonts and CSS files.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud is gradually growing its capabilities, even though Adobe’s core products remain desktop applications, and its move to subscription licensing has been executed smoothly and effectively despite annoying some users. The new SDK is mainly an effort to hook more third-party apps into the Adobe design workflow, though the existence of hosted services for image processing is an intriguing development.

It is a shame though that the new SDK is so platform-specific, causing delays to the Android version and lack of support for other platforms such as Windows Phone.

Adobe actually has its own cross-platform mobile toolkit, called PhoneGap, though I imagine Adobe’s developers feel that native code rather than JavaScript is the best fit for design-oriented apps.

adobe, mobile

Adobe focuses on iPad (not Android) with new mobile Creative Cloud apps

Adobe has announced a new wave of its Creative Cloud subscription offering, including new mobile apps for Apple’s iPad.

The apps are Adobe Sketch, Adobe Line, Adobe Photoshop Mix, Lightroom Mobile and Adobe Voice.

Photoshop Mix includes a popular feature of the desktop package, content-aware fill, which you can use to remove unwanted objects from an image.

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There is also hardware for the iPad: Adobe Ink which is a digital pen, and Adobe Slide, a digital ruler. They only work with Adobe apps but apparently are cleverly designed using a wireless connection to overcome the lack of built-in pen support on the iPad. (I was amused by the codename for Slide – “Project Napoleon”, little ruler, geddit?)

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Why the focus on the iPad, when Android is also a popular tablet platform? Adobe says that it its particular design-oriented market, almost all the demand is for iPad support. That said, it is interested in Microsoft’s Surface 3 as a tablet platform for designers.

There are also new features in the Creative Cloud desktop applications, which have all been updated. These include Smart Guides, font search, and new masking tools in Photoshop; and support for fixed layout EPUB documents from InDesign. Adobe has also improved its Linked Smart Object support in Photoshop, which lets you embed documents such as Illustrator files while keeping them linked to the original. You can now convert embedded Smart Objects to Linked Smart Objects, and package linked files so you can share them with others while maintaining the links.

Adobe Muse (a web design tool) has been rewritten as a 64-bit native application (it was originally a Flash/Adobe AIR app).

The Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which was first announced as a limited offer, is now available indefinitely at £8.78 per month (perhaps it is a round number in dollars?)

adobe, apple

Creative Pros prefer iOS says Adobe, explaining lack of Android support in new apps

Adobe has shown a new touch app for Kuler, its web application for creating and choosing colour themes, which will be available in June.

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I asked Scott Morris, Senior Marketing Director of Creative Cloud, about Android and whether apps like this will also be supported there.

“That is coming out to begin with at least only as an iOS app,” he told me. “For PhotoShop Touch and Adobe Ideas we do have those avaialble both for iOS and Android. What we do know is that there’s very few creative pros using Android tablets. There’s many more who are using Android phones, but more still using iPhones.”

Morris says that no decision has yet been made on porting the Kuler app to iPad or Android, but adds, “we are going to start with iOS as we are with most of our apps now because that is the most popular platform for creative professionals.”

Perhaps not surprising given the popularity of Macs among designers, but disappointing for Android users.

A secondary question is whether Adobe is using its own cross-platform app tools, either Flash or PhoneGap, for Kuler and future apps. The web version of Kuler is being converted from Flash to HTML, making PhoneGap a possibility. If it is, then you would have thought extending support to other platforms would be a no-brainer.

adobe, cloud computing, design, development

Adobe announces next Creative Suite, now called Creative Cloud

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Adobe has announced the next version of its all-conquering Creative Suite, now renamed (or subsumed into) Creative Cloud.

Availability is set for June 2013. There will not be any perpetual licenses for the updated applications:

Can I purchase a perpetual license for the new Creative Cloud (CC) desktop applications that were announced in May 2013?

No. The new CC versions of the desktop applications are available only through Creative Cloud offerings for individuals, teams, and enterprise. We do not have any current plans to release future CC tools outside Creative Cloud.

Let’s start with the important stuff. I like the new “totems” which are intricate and abstract; but I think it works. Here is Creative Cloud:

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and here is InDesign, wow:

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Here is Premiere, can you see the lettering?

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So what about the technical stuff? Here is quick tour of what’s new.

Adobe always seems to demo Creative Suite on the Mac these days, but says there is feature-parity between Mac and Windows. GPU acceleration of algorithms (such as in the Mercury engine) no longer uses NVidia Cuda but rather Open CL for best cross-platform compatibility.

Typekit Fonts can now be installed on your desktop, and once installed work like any other font – you can use them in Microsoft Office, for example.

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We quizzed Adobe about what happens to the fonts if you stop subscribing to Creative Cloud. The answer seems to be that you must no longer use them, but whether this is technically enforced is unclear.

Settings synchronisation is a theme across a number of apps including Dreamweaver and After Effects. This touches on a curious aspect of Creative Cloud: despite the name, the applications are desktop applications. Sync settings means you can log in on any machine with the suite installed and get your settings back, including for example web sites in Dreamweaver. The consequence is to bring the make your desktop experience more cloud-like in respect of working from anywhere.

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Photoshop gets an amazing camera shake reduction feature. Camera shake is a big problem for me, as I rarely have a tripod. The new feature detects how the camera moved during the shot and compensates accordingly. The demo worked great on Adobe’s sample shot, but then it would, so it is not until we get to try this with some of our own images that we will know whether Adobe’s claim of “making unusable images usable” is justified. Still, Adobe has a good track record and I am optimistic.

Other interesting features are a filter for Camera Raw, and a “straighten” effect for perspective distorting in images such as those of tall buildings which look as if they are leaning (though I am sure I have seen ways of handling this in earlier versions too). There is also an rounded rectangle editor, a new artefact removal feature, and the ability to upsample an image so that your low-resolution bitmap magically becomes more suitable for print.

There will no longer be an Extended Photoshop. If you have it, you have it all.

The Kuler colour theme chooser has been rebuilt in HTML.

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Illustrator gets a CSS properties panel.

Flash has a Publish feature which converts Flash to HTML (We can see where Adobe is going with this). This uses the CreateJS framework; it does not convert ActionScript.

Premiere Pro now includes the engine from Audition for advanced audio editing within the application.

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Edge Animate is able to animate a sprite across a Motion Path curve for some cool effects.

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Fireworks is still in the suite, but is not being updated. Bad news for Fireworks lovers.

Dreamweaver has a new CSS designer, and a Fluid Grid Layout for designing adaptive web sites:

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After Effects now embeds the Cineware 4D engine, which is big news if you use both AE and Cineware (as many do).

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InDesign is now 64-bit with an updated user interface.

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InDesign also has a “favourite fonts” feature making it easier to manage a multiplicity of fonts on your system.

What have I missed? A lot, no doubt; but I am impressed with how well Adobe has managed its transition from mainly perpetual licences to mainly subscription, how it is rapidly adding features to Creative Cloud, and how it has also managed the transition from Flash to HTML.

adobe, google, open source, professional, software development, Web, web authoring

How Adobe turned on a pin to embrace the web (and Google)

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Adobe’s Create the Web world tour – which came to London yesterday – is in the public unveiling of of Adobe’s new wave of tools, the first since it turned away from Flash and towards open web standard, hardly a year ago.

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Michael Chaize is a developer evangelist at Adobe. I asked him when it became clear to him personally that Adobe was no longer a Flash platform company.

“The main shift happened November last year [2011]” he told me. “It happened when we, for the Flash part, decided to just focus on video games and premium video, and invest in HTML tooling and specifications with a team of engineers. It was synced with the decision to stop developing Flash in mobile just to focus on apps with Adobe AIR.

“Now we are almost a year later, and Create the Web is an opportunity to showcase the work that has been done. All the product that have been launched, the Edge tools and service, just started in November of last year.”

The timing was confirmed by Adam Lehman, product manager for Edge Code, a tool built on Bracket, which is an open source project created by Adobe to provide a lightweight, code-centric editor for HTML 5 technologies. I asked him when work on Brackets started. Research started in mid-2011, he said, but “we got the team together in December 2011 and started coding.”

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Adam Lehman

The Edge tools are intended as focused, lightweight product each targeting a specific small part of web design, in contrast to typical Creative Suite products such as Dreamweaver which encompass a large area of functionality; a valid approach but one which inevitably leads to huge tools that take an age to load and a lifetime to learn. Edge is also being used as a not-to-subtle way to promote Adobe’s subscription-based Creative Cloud, since the tools are only available by that route. As a further sweetener, you can get some of the tools as part of the free subscription tier.

It is remarkable that Adobe has navigated the difficult transition from Flash to HTML, and the difficult transition from shrink-wrap to subscription, with so little pain.

That said, perhaps the transition from Flash to HTML is not as profound as it first appears. The Flash runtime was always free, while Adobe made its money from design tools, and as the web become more capable, designing for the Web looks increasingly similar to designing for Flash.

Even the community is the same. “When it deals with expressive web, motion design, we feel that the Flash community can reuse their skills,” said Chaize.  “Being a Flash developer is not just about the language, it’s a knowledge, it’s a culture. Agencies tell me, ‘When I need to hire a motion designer for HTML, I hire a Flash guy.’

That said, HTML 5 is still inferior to Flash in some respects. I watched a slightly jerky animation showing off HTML 5 capabilities and could not help thinking that it would run more smoothly in Flash (of course it was all preview software). It will get there though. This is why Adobe is working to bring specifications like CSS shaders and CSS regions to the official standards.

There is another thing I noticed at Create the Web, which is the extent to which Adobe’s new tools are built on Google’s platform. Many of the Edge tools are made with the Chrome Embedded Framework; the browser used for demonstrations is Chrome Canary, a preview build implementing the newest standards, and if you look at the code you see abundant use of the WebKit prefix which designates features currently specific to the WebKit browser engine used by Apple, Google and others. There is also extensive use of WebGL, popular with designer but contentious because some browser vendors consider it a security risk and it is not an official web standard.

Lehman insists that there is no intention to go down a Google-specific route. “It was more of a technology stack we went with,” he says, explaining that the intent for Brackets is that it will one day run in the browser, in which case it will have to support Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft browsers as well.

The reason for adopting so much Google stuff is partly the excellent fit with what Adobe needed, and partly the low friction. “We didn’t have to go to a meeting, it was just published” said Lehman, referring to the Chromium Embedded Framework which let you run HTML5 applications on the desktop.

Brackets looks great, has real community adoption already, and Adobe has interesting plan for its future. Along with browser hosting, Lehman talks about proper debugging support with breakpoint, JavaScript macros, an embedded node.js engine, and more.

When Apple rejected Flash in iOS it put Adobe in a difficult spot – another reason for the company’s warmth towards Google and Android – but since then the transition has been remarkable.