Adobe’s new creative cloud upgrades target users working from home and offers more AI

Adobe is releasing software upgrades that target people using their products working from home.

Editing in Photoshop.

Adobe has released a major upgrade to its Creative Cloud suite that takes into account the needs of people working from home.

Adobe’s Scott Belsky says coronavirus has seen Adobe focus on collaboration – the ability of users at different locations to work on the same Adobe project at the same time. Some upgrades are rolled out now, others are due later this year. He says the company has been “very impacted” by the COVID-19 situation “just as everyone in the world has”.

Belsky is an author and investor and nowadays Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and executive vice president, Creative Cloud.

“As an organisation we said let‘s make sure that we are really delivering on the collaboration features because there are more needed than ever before and there were some other things that we said that can wait, in exchange for getting some of these things out sooner.”

The changes will allow graphic artists, photographers and other creatives to work together on the same document simultaneously.

“We have a share for review feature that is coming to InDesign right now that we ourselves have been using over the last few months where, if you‘re making a publication and a magazine or whatever, you no longer have to go to editorial meetings,” he says.

“You send a link to somebody and have them jump in and participate in the document and give feedback.”

He says the sharing feature in Adobe products includes a comment thread, so users can chat about changes they make to assets during a collaboration.

Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Chief Product Officer & executive vice president, Creative Cloud.

“You can also place pins that refer to specific parts of a design, and we’re launching that sort of technology across all of our products this year, because that’s the way people want to work today.”

He says that in Photoshop, Adobe was using its Sensei artificial intelligence capability to make it simpler to select objects within an image.

“The history of selecting and masking in Photoshop used to be painstakingly putting those marching ants (dashed lines) exactly where you wanted them. Then there was smart select which enabled you to pick objects. Then we launched AI driven masking which allows you to do hair and things like that more readily and more accurately, and saving you tons of time.

“Now … our models for machine learning, artificial intelligence can in some cases do selection better than the human hand.

“If our customers spend 50 per cent of their time doing mundane repetitive stuff in our products, then shame on us. We should start to automate that, so you can spend more time on the creative part.”

He says Adobe’s all-in-one video tool Premiere Rush could output a video in different formats that fitted the requirements of individual social networking sites.

“That was a major request. Any video creator today is making video for Snapchat, for Instagram, for YouTube, for Vimeo, and every format is different.”

He says the new auto reframe feature keeps action and subjects in a video in the frame when video dimensions change. It even works when video is automatically reformatted from landscape to portrait and visa versa.

“They (users) often cut out the subject in the video: the surfer or the runner or whatever. Now with artificial intelligence, we can automatically reformat your video to keep the subject always in frame, and we call it ‘auto reframe’ and it‘s an absolute breakthrough for anyone in the video space.”

Editing in Photoshop. Picture: Adobe

He says the auto reframe feature works with video captured from any source. Reframe can be performed in Adobe Rush on mobile devices and regular computers.

He says the new Photoshop Camera app lets people extensively tweak their photos at the time of capture, rather than afterwards in post production.

“What people are doing the Photoshop camera now is they’re taking a picture of somebody, and they‘re applying like a giant shark in the sky, or they’re turning it from day into night, they’re doing things you would ordinarily do in Photoshop. People do it at the point of capture.”

He says Adobe Lightroom now let users share their images, including the changes they make from the original photo to the finished product.

“You can see how they made it beautiful. You can touch an image and go through all of the operations: the saturation, the green, everything that a really great photographer applied to their image.

However this feed is curated. “People have to submit their images for consideration and then only curated images get added to this discovery feed for people to then leverage or learn from.”

He says Adobe is bringing the ability to automatically transcribe audio from videos, to its video products.

He says one of Adobe’s big ongoing moves is making its products work well with the cloud. For example in Illustrator, designers are no longer bound to the desktop with their files. They can share them with other designers, and work on their document on different devices – such as swap from a laptop to an iPad.

He says there was much interest in Adobe Live, where people watch other creatives build their documents, photos and video. It was Adobe’s adaptation of Twitch to the creative platform.

He says Adobe was astounded to find that the average watch time for a customer who stumbled upon Adobe Live is 66 minutes.

“It‘s kind of becoming this new reinterpretation of creative education. You have to ask yourself, do people learn more by going to design school, or do they learn more by watching creatives create.”

More details of Adobe’s updates can be found here.