As regular readers– and photographers – will be aware, Adobe’s image editor exemplar Photoshop is now only available as part of its Creative Cloud package – and on subscription at that. We’re beyond the days of buying cereal boxes containing CDs and hard copy manuals.

With this in mind ‘new’ versions tend to arrive in the shape of a nip here and a tuck there, rather than a complete under-the-bonnet overhaul. Indeed at the London preview we attended, the ‘new’ version of its desktop and mobile apps for the latter half of 2016 had yet to be given a confirmed name – shown only on the demo slides as ‘CC 2015.5’.

The last time we wrote about Adobe’s Creative Cloud, the parallel introduction of the Adobe Stock service was the big news, and, unsurprisingly, the newest version offers an even deeper integration with Creative Cloud, according to the software giant’s Business Development Manager Neils Stevens – with the introduction of a Premium Collection (a curated library of over 100,000 images that Adobe says will meeting the standards of advertising agencies and print publications), alongside a number of refinements. There have also been performance enhancements, such as Photoshop being three times faster at start up and when opening files.

Principal Solutions Consultant for Digital Imaging Richard Curtis also focused on the new desktop and mobile apps in Adobe Photoshop CC – highlighting the Content-Aware Crop feature which he said is “really going to delight photographers”, in that the software will look for the edges of the frame and expand that out, saving the need for photographers to ‘build’ that extra space themselves. There is also now the ‘Match Font’ ability to highlight text in an image – for example a sign on a wall – and the program will look for the closest match in terms of a font – with results being similar, if not exact.

Liquify to Rectify

Meanwhile the use of Face Aware Liquify tool now allows photographers to tweak the edges of a subject’s mouth to force a subtle smile on them; naturally you’ll want to apply this feature subtly to avoid any subject resembling the Joker from Batman. Added to this is a brand new toolset ‘Select & Mask’ including a new tool called ‘Refine Edge’, which Adobe is pitching as providing a lot of precision. This tool set also allows photographers to manage and modify colours as well.

As mentioned earlier, Stock is something that Adobe is majoring on with its new release. So there is now the ability to license and image for use direct from a layer in Photoshop, streamlining the whole creative process for graphic designers and artists. There is also an Enhanced Search facility in the Library Panels of the program, so users can select stock images without having to leave what they’re doing. “Coming in a future release is a Contributor Panel with automatic tagging of images,” says Adobe’s Curtis.

Adobe’s Senior Solutions Consultant, Digital Media, Tony Harmer then presented on Creative Cloud’s Design, Illustration and Animation features, outlining the fact that the latest updates were all about “trying to decrease the time it takes you to do the job.” When using InDesign CC it was now suggested that interface “panels look crisper” whilst in Illustrator CC users can specify compression levels of JPEG – for example select ‘jpg100’ from a menu bar. Animate CC has now made canvas projects responsive – said to be “as easy as checking a box”, whilst an impressive Character Animator function is able to start tracking voice and movement – live – letting the performer become, in effect, the animator.

Not forgetting mobile use, new here in Capture CC is pattern generation, whilst Photoshop Sketch witnesses the introduction of Layers. In Illustrator Draw the Layers user interface has been redesigned and in Photoshop Fix newly introduced is intelligent space management and metadata preservation. Comp CC affords compatibility with more document types, such as Facebook pages.

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