Adobe today unveiled major updates to its Creative Cloud (CC) applications –including significant updates to 13 CC desktop tools and a new family of integrated mobile apps. The Adobe CC apps are now available at no cost to Creative Cloud members.
Central to the release is a new “Creative Profile” that you can access from any of your devices or Adobe CC apps. Once logged in, you can access your work, your creative tools, and your “communities” of choice.
Although the new or updated mobile apps are just for iOS users right now, Adobe did share some love for users of Windows 8 tablets and notebooks. Namely, the company has added touch support in the new CC versions of Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC.
Adobe made the announcements at its annual Adobe MAX user conference, which this year was held in Los Angeles. The company also announced a new Behance job board service for Adobe users. (See more further below.)
Adobe CC apps go mobile
The new release connects your CC desktop tools in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Lightroom with new and updated Adobe CC apps for iPhone and iPad users. The lineup includes:
Photoshop Sketch lets you draw with new built-in expressive brushes, and enables an integrated workflow with Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC.
Photoshop Mix has been updated with extended mobile compositing capabilities, and now includes enhanced integration with Photoshop CC, as well as a new iPhone version.
Lightroom Mobile is a new app that 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. The app also syncs GPS information from iPhone photos with Lightroom desktop.
Illustrator Draw — formerly Adobe Ideas — give you access to your favorite vector drawing tools. The updated app features high-resolution integration with Illustrator CC, and improved support for Adobe Ink and Slide.
Illustrator Line is a a precision drawing app that allows you to distribute shapes as you draw, as well as send sketches to Illustrator CC, where you have full access to your original vector paths for editing.
Adobe Premiere Clip lets you transform a video shot on 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 Brush CC allows you to create custom brushes on iPad or iPhone to use in Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC or Adobe Illustrator Sketch. Adobe says that any photograph can be made into a brush, so you can design brushes that can range from photorealistic, to organic, painterly or graphic.
Adobe Shape CC lets you capture and create shapes on your iPhone or iPad. 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.
Adobe Color CC — formerly Adobe Kuler — lets you capture colors and save them as themes that are immediately available in other Adobe applications, including Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC.
Adobe CC apps work with all Creative Cloud plans.
Adobe also launched the public beta of a Creative software developer kit (SDK) for mobile developers who want to connect their mobile apps to Creative Cloud. The Adobe Creative SDK is available at creativesdk.adobe.com.
CC Desktop improvements
The Creative Cloud release also includes some useful new features for Adobe’s desktop software. 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.
New services available today include:
Creative Cloud Market — a collection of curated content that is freely accessible to Creative Cloud members. It includes thousands of files including user interfaces, patterns, icons, brushes and vector shapes.
Creative Cloud Libraries — an asset management service that lets creatives 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.
Creative Cloud Extract — a cloud-based service that reinvents the Photoshop CC comp-to-code workflow for Web designers and developers, letting them share and unlock design information from a PSD file (such as colors, fonts and CSS) to use when coding mobile and desktop designs.
Pricing
Adobe CC apps are available at no cost to Creative Cloud members. The new and updated mobile apps are free to everyone. To join Creative Cloud, Adobe is offering a special promotional rate if you own Adobe Creative Suite 3 or later. Adobe offers different membership plans for individuals, students, photographers, teams, educational institutions, government agencies and enterprises. For pricing, see here.
New creative job board
In related news, Adobe has also launched a new job board service called Talent Search. For creative job seekers, Talent Search now includes creative-oriented public job postings on Adobe’s Behance website for sharing your creative portfolios.
For hiring managers, Talent Search offers targeted talent search tools – for example, finding experts in Photoshop, who live in a specific city, and have worked in automotive design. Custom algorithms recommend candidates for roles and get smarter the more a recruiter uses the system, according to Adobe. You can check out what’s there now at behance.net/talentsearch.
