Adobe Flexes Creative Cloud Muscle with New Features, Updates

If you subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, you’re about to get a whole slew of new goodies–some are new features to programs like Photoshop and Lightroom, others are entirely new apps and services.

If there’s a single theme that unites the updates, it’s connectivity. Adobe is pushing deeper integration between i’s apps–not just improved desktop-to-mobile integration, but also improved mobile-to-mobile workflows.

Let’s start with what’s new.

Photoshop Fix

Adobe will release Photoshop Fix, a mobile app for making non-destructive retouches to images. Fix will offer a liquify tool to reshape images, a healing brush to remove blemishes and a Smooth tool to smooth or sharpen portions of an image. Fix is a free download and will be integrated with Photoshop and Lightroom so that edits made in Fix can be imported and continued in Adobe’s other products.

The second new app is Adobe Capture CC. This app combines the features of Adobe Brush, Shape, Color and Hue into a single app to photograph objects in the world and use them as a brush, shape or color theme in the company’s other apps, like Photoshop or Premiere.

Adobe Portfolio

The company also announced Adobe Portfolio, a new way to create portfolio websites that will be offered free to CC subscribers. Details were sparse and Adobe said Portfolio would be available “soon.”

A Portfolio designed site would be optimized for all displays using responsive web design. They will support personalized URLs, password protection and Typekit fonts. Portfolio is built on Behance and users can sync Adobe Portfolio to their Behance Projects pages.

Portfolio is expected to launch before the end of the year.

Lightroom CC will now offer speedier imports.

Lightroom CC

Lightroom CC desktop will get several new features as well, including the ability to increase or decrees atmospheric haze in portions of your image using the graduated filter, radial filter and adjustment brush. The import tool has been redesigned to operate faster.

The largest number of improvements will roll out to Lightroom mobile for iOS, which enters a 2.0 release. Among the new features:

* new Adobe in-app camera on your iPad or iPhone.
* a Dehaze filter.
* a new Target Adjustment Tool in the Color / B&W adjustment tool for adjusting the hue, saturation, and brightness of colors throughout your image
* send photos to Adobe Premiere Clip 2.0 to make videos from images
* integration with Photoshop Fix so that images can be edited in Fix and saved in a Lightroom category without having to leave the Fix app.
* use of Lightroom on a mobile device without a paid membership.

The Android version of Lightroom mobile is updated to 1.3 and includes a new color/B&W adjustment tool, new tone curve adjustment tool, adjustable vignettes, improved cropping and support for TIFF files.

The full release notes are here.

Adobe Photoshop CC

Photoshop CC

Adobe had fewer specifics about what was coming for Photoshop but did indicate a “completely streamlined and tuned” Design Space mode was coming along with new Artboard capabilities and the ability to work with 3D filters using the new Adobe Fuse CC service.

The new features will roll out “in the coming weeks” Adobe said.

The mobile app Photoshop Mix will also be updated to version 2.0. It will be add more layers, nine blend modes, two times as many image adjustments, support for layer masks and integration with Lightroom and Photoshop Fix. Mix 2.0 will roll out to iOS first and Android soon.

Premiere CC

Premiere uses will enjoy support for native editing of high-resolution footage “from 4K-to-8K” according to Adobe. Support for high dynamic range video and improved color adjustments in After Effects CC will also be rolled out.

Adobe’s stock service will also be updated to support video downloads.

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