Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and more are getting major upgrades. We reveal what's new for users of the Creative Cloud.
New touch capabilities are coming to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more
This week we're at Adobe Max, the company's annual event and where it tends to make its biggest announcements. And this year is certainly no different.
At this year's Max, the software company is about to unveil a whole host of new features and enhancements to its Creative Cloud desktop apps, including new touch capabilities for Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC.
Here's a quick roundup of what will be announced later today...
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01. Photoshop CC
New and updated touch interfaces and enhanced features.
New Artboards capabilities include guides for advanced placement of elements and easier visualisation of layers.
3D character tool Adobe Fuse CC has now been added to the Creative Cloud, and your 3D models can be synced across Creative Cloud Libraries for use in Photoshop CC. (Fuse CC recently joined the product family after Adobe bought out Mixamo.)
02. Illustrator CC
New Shaper tool, which lets you draw with natural gestures and transform them into perfect shapes. "The tool gives you functionality that you previously had to use 12 different tools and panels to achieve – all baked into a single tool," explains Adobe's Mala Sharma, Adobe's vice-president, Creative Cloud business strategy. "It's a must faster, more intuitive way to create perfect geometric shapes by loosely drawing basic shapes like circles, squares and polygons. These are live shapes, so they are non destructive."
New and updated Touch workspaces.
Other new features include Live Shapes, SVG export option and enhanced Smart Guides.
Summary of the new features coming to CC apps for graphic and web designers
03. InDesign CC
New and updated Touch workspaces to create layouts. The experience is said to be similar to what you can do with the Comp CC apps on iOS.
New online publishing capabilities mean you can now embed a document directly in a website.
New capabilities will make working with glyphs easier in InDesign
04. New mobile apps and updates
Adobe is today releasing two new mobile apps, Photoshop Fix and Capture CC.
Photoshop Fix offers a retouching and restoration-focused image editing experience on iPhones and iPads. The simple, intuitive touch interface makes Photoshop desktop features, like the Healing Brush and Liquify, available for retouching work on the move. For more details read this post: Free Photoshop mobile app available for iPad
Capture CC combines the capabilities of Adobe Brush, Adobe Shape, Adobe Color and Adobe Hue into a single app and the captured design asset can be used as a brush, shape or colour theme for your design work.
The new connectivity between Creative Cloud mobile apps
Adobe has also updated other Creative Cloud mobile apps, including Illustrator Draw, Photoshop Mix, Photoshop Sketch, Comp CC and Premiere Clip. Illustrator Draw now has grids and guides and will be available for Android.
05. Web design
Adobe will also today announce Project Comet, an "end-to-end UX design solution" currently under development that will include a new CC desktop app and a companion mobile app. Read more about that here: Adobe unveils radical new UX tool.
We'll get more details later, so check back to Creative Bloq to get the lowdown, or watch Adobe's keynote live here.
What Adobe's calling "free-form responsive design" is coming to Muse CC, so designers who don't code can more easily create websites that dynamically scale to any size screen, browser or device, without having to code or use restrictive templates.
Dreamweaver CC is also adding responsive design capabilities powered by the Bootstrap framework, plus there's a new 64-bit version of the software.
Flash Professional adds the ability to publish animations to multiple platforms, including HTML5, Canvas, WebGL and even custom platforms. There's also support for 4K video.
06. 3D and film-making
New tool Adobe Fuse CC (see Photoshop section above).
After Effects to get comprehensive native format support for editing 4K-to-8k footage.
Summary of the new features coming to CC apps for video pros
Colour advances include support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) workflows in Premiere Pro CC and improved colour fidelity and adjustments in After Effects CC.
A new audio feature called Remix added to Audition CC.
New Touch capabilities added to Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC and Character Animator – optimized for Surface Pro, Windows tablets or Apple track pad devices.
Other announcements
Adobe is making two other big announcements today: read about them here:
The updates to Creative Cloud desktop software will all ship to Creative Cloud members "before the end of the year," Adobe has told us. You'll find pricing details here.
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Meanwhile, we're here at Adobe Max all week so we'll bring you more big Adobe announcements as soon as we get them. You can also watch the keynotes live at from 9.30 am Pacific Time (5.30pm UK time) & Tuesday, October 6 at 10.00 am Pacific Time (6pm UK time) here.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
