Adobe announces big updates to Photoshop, Illustrator, and more

Few people thought an app as complex and compute-intensive as Photoshop would be possible on the web. But Adobe today launched a web version of not just Photoshop, but also Illustrator, along with several new online experiences.

Some qualification is required, however. As when Adobe launched Photoshop on the iPad, it’s not the entire set of Photoshop and Illustrator tools, but the web apps let you open documents and do basic editing. They also let you comment on and share work with collaborators. The Photoshop web app is labeled as beta, and Illustrator on the web is an invite-only private beta.

The web versions rely on the same Cloud Documents required in the iPad versions of the Creative Cloud software. Adobe has already taken the Creative Cloud management app to the web. Two completely new online features you access from that interface join the web versions of old standbys: Creative Cloud Spaces and Creative Cloud Canvas.

Creative Cloud Spaces is an online repository for your team’s assets, with collaboration and shared content in one interface. You can access it either from the Creative Cloud web interface or within Photoshop, Illustrator, XD, and Fresco on desktop or iPad. Creative Cloud Canvas is what it sounds like—an online collaborative workspace. Contributors can, according to Adobe’s blog, “place shapes, text, stickers, images, and working files from other Creative Cloud apps” onto a canvas that a team can collaborate on in real time.

Adobe dogfooded the new web tools with its own staff to get feedback on them. “The Adobe Design team has worked with these new tools over the past few months, and they’ve changed the way we work together,” says Adobe’s vice president of design, Eric Snowden. “Putting teamwork and collaboration at the heart of Creative Cloud democratizes access and creates transparency around creative projects like never before.”

Application Updates: Photoshop and Illustrator

But it’s not all web and cloud at Max. The good ole installed programs on desktop and tablet see some nifty new features as well. Photoshop gets a more powerful Object Selection tool with hover auto-masking. That’s what it sounds like: You go to the Object Selection tool and it uses Adobe’s Sensei AI to detect all objects in the image. A related menu option, Layer > Mask All Objects, creates separate masks for all the objects detected in a layer.

Neural Filters, launched at last year’s Max show, get a boost, too. The new Landscape Mixer filters let you change a scene’s season, from, say, summer to fall, or to make a midday scene look like it was shot at sunset. Another theme with the new AI is harmonization. By this, Adobe means that masked objects can be rendered in the colors and tones of the filter. So, if you have a portrait on one layer and a landscape on another, the color and tone are blended on both. Another filter, Color Transfer, lets you apply the colors and tones of one image to another. Other Neural filters that see updates include Depth Blur, Superzoom, Style Transfer, and Colorize.

An old Photoshop standby, Gradients, gets a major update: Now you have three choices Classic mode, Perceptual mode, and Linear mode. Perceptual is based on how we perceive light and looks best to me.

Designers will rejoice that you can now paste vector shapes from Illustrator into Photoshop while maintaining edit capabilities. There are plenty more updates, which you can read about in Adobe’s Photoshop blog post.

The iPad version of Photoshop gets a huge update with the addition of a single feature: Camera Raw capability. The inability of the iPad app to intake Raw camera files was a big gap between it and the desktop program.

The installed desktop version of Adobe Illustrator doesn’t see huge updates, aside from the web version previously mentioned. It does get an enhanced 3D panel with updated lighting and shading that takes advantage of ray-tracing technology and adds direct access to Adobe Substance 3D materials. The iPad version of Illustrator gets a technology preview of the Vectorize image-tracing tool.

Even More Updates: Lightroom, Premiere Pro, and After Effects

Lightroom is the favorite software of serious photographers in both its Classic and non-classic flavors. The newfangled Lightroom now includes something I first saw in the Picsart app—the ability to submit your work to the broad community for them to work their own editing magic on your picture. This is called Community Remixing. AI-recommended presets appear in the program, too.

Both flavors of Lightroom get new masking tools, including luminance, color, and multiple masking capability. Moving the photo apps closer to Photoshop are their new Select Subject and Select Sky tools. Additional presets and automatically recommended presets for things like food, travel, and architecture, as well as helpful new crop tool options, round out what’s new in the photo software.

The big news for Adobe’s video-editing software lately has been the company’s acquisition of frame.io, the industry-standard online video collaboration platform. And one of the nicest new things in Premiere Pro is Simplify Sequence, which gets rid of unused tracks, gaps, and effects for a much simpler view of the timeline. Format support now extends to 10-bit and HDR media from mirrorless cameras and iPhones, with color management and hardware acceleration.

The new Remix, which smoothly changes song lengths to video lengths, goes to public beta at Max. In my testing of a similar feature in CyberLink PowerDirector, these tools are dependent on the musical genre, so I’m eager to see how Adobe’s new tool performs.

As for motion graphics, After Effect performance boosts include multi-frame rendering, speculative preview, composition profiler, and a reimagined render queue. Read about all these in the Max video app blog post.

The animation program, Adobe Character Animator, now lets you start a Puppet Maker animation without the need for Photoshop or Illustrator, and a cool transcription-based lip-sync tool lets your character speak written text with accurate mouth movements.

Combating Disinformation

Two years ago, Adobe launched the Content Authenticity initiative, which gave creators a way to verify the authenticity of their work. Newly announced at Max is Content Credentials, a beta tool available in Photoshop, which offers a way for the creator to attach secure metadata that verifies the work’s authenticity.

Interested parties can go to the Verify website (now in beta) and upload an image file to check its authenticity. Adobe Stock, the company’s answer to ShutterStock, now provides Content Authenticity info for all uploaded content. Adobe is also working with government and industry leaders to combat deepfakes and created a technical standard for tracing media origins.

The online Adobe Max “creativity conference” is free for anyone who wants to avail themselves of it, and features celebrity presenters including Kenan Thompson, Tilda Swinton, and Bryan Cranston. Head to max.adobe.com to join.