Artboards in Photoshop, the Adobe Character Animator in After Effects, Adobe Stocks, and many other feats

Jun 16, 2015 07:36 GMT  ·  By

Adobe released its yearly update for the Creative Cloud offering, and as usual, in classic Adobe fashion, premiered with lots and lots of useful features.

Almost all CC apps were updated, and this year should be a milestone in the company's history, providing a few features that sound good when you read them and are probably even better when you use them.

Photoshop CC got the main bulk of the updates

First off, let's start with Photoshop, the company's flagship product. As announced a few days ago, Artboards are coming to Photoshop, cloning their functionality from Illustrator artboards.

These allow users to create multiple design variants in the same place and preview them without having to open multiple files at once, or save different variants to different files.

There's also Device Preview, a feature that lets developers connect different iOS devices and see a preview of what they're doing, but this works only with iOS 8 or higher, though.

Photoshop Design Space was added for people working in Web, app, and interface design. This tool is still in alpha stage of development, but it can be used to preview UIs for one or more device types using pre-packaged prototypes.

Library-linked smart objects are now available as well, working like locally-linked smart objects, allowing designers to propagate changes to their files to other team members, all done via Adobe's cloud.

Other changes include better performance for the spot healing and patch tools, better export settings, updates to the 3D rendering engine, and improved noise handling for blur effects.

Other CC apps were updated as well

Illustrator wasn't left behind either, this year, the app receiving the bulk of updates to its engine, making it 10 times faster than the last Creative Suite version (CS6). Also, the zoom now works 10 times deeper, and the app also received a new component for easily building charts and graphs.

After Effects CC, the company's video effects tool now features a face tracking feature which should make it easier to apply special FX to moving actors. There's also a webcam-to-character synchronization feature dubbed the Adobe Character Animator, which allows film editors to animate and record character dialog using a webcam instead of complex animation timelines.

Premiere Pro, the company's other video editing-related tool, which is much more complete than After Effects, now has better color correction tools, access to CC libraries, and a morphing tool for merging video cuts together.

Other CC apps were also updated, minor tweaks here and there, but what you see above is the bulk of the changes, the features you'll want to use from now on.

Adobe Stock integration will be available for all CC clients

Last but not least, the introduction of Adobe Stock integration allows developers to use watermarked, low-fi photos for their projects, and if everything looks good, provide them with the option to buy the image's license.

When this happens, the low-fi version of the image is replaced with the original high-resolution photo, all without the designer having to manually update his project files.

While this feature can be highly useful in Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe Stock is available for all CC users, not just those working with static imagery.

Here's a collection of YouTube clips detailing all the new features. If this sparked your interest, you can always go to the Adobe CC YouTube channel to view more.

You can download the latest version of Adobe's Creative Cloud edition from Softpedia, getting the appropriate version for your operating system: Windows and Mac OS X.

New features in Adobe CC 2015 (12 Images)

Adobe Photoshop CC Design Space
Adobe CC 2015 Device PreviewEasy add or remove noise from blurred images
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