Exclusives

Adobe introduced several new enhancements, features and integrations on Oct. 18, the first day of its annual Adobe MAX creativity conference, held in Los Angeles and virtually through Oct. 20 this year.

The three main themes for the 2022 conference are the speed and ease for all creators; collaboration being the future of creativity; and emerging tech, platforms and formats, Deepa Subramaniam, VP of product marketing, professional creativity at Adobe, said during a virtual press briefing just before the conference.

Highlights among the announcements on the conference’s opening day were new Creative Cloud (CC) features and Camera to Cloud (C2C) integrations with RED Digital Cinema and Fujifilm that Adobe said “will enable the world’s first in-camera to cloud workflow.”

Those new integrations “will streamline the media delivery process by transferring media directly from cameras to Frame.io, with no intermediate hard drives or memory cards required,” according to Adobe.

Adobe acquired cloud video collaboration platform Frame.io in 2021. At the time, Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, chairman and president, said it would help Adobe reach new customers.

The “game changing technology” featured in the new integrations “will alleviate some of the biggest pain points around the current media delivery process that’s time-consuming and expensive,” Adobe said Oct. 18.

RED’s V-Raptor and new V-Raptor XL cameras will be able to transfer RAW or ProRes Proxy files and metadata captured on set directly to the cloud, according to Adobe. The new innovation will be available in late 2022, Adobe said in a Frame.io blog post.

Fujifilm’s X-H2S, meanwhile, will be “the world’s first digital stills camera to integrate with Frame.io and will remove the need to run SD cards between photographers and editors at live events,” Adobe said.

“When paired with the FT-XH file transfer attachment to establish an internet connection, photography workflows will be fully cloud-based, with Frame.io supporting high-resolution RAW files with loupe, navigation, and annotation tools,” Adobe said in the blog post.

New features and updates to CC video tools, meanwhile, include H.264 encoding and selectable track matte layers for After Effects, GPU-accelerated Lumetri scopes and 2x faster motion graphics templates for Premiere Pro and new Motion Library in Character Animator, Adobe said.

“After nine years away, I’ve actually just returned to Adobe to help drive Adobe’s digital imaging, photography, video, and design businesses forward,” Subramaniam told reporters, before providing a sneak peek at the product innovations coming to CC.

“Creativity is trailblazing through different industries and has shown staggering growth, solidifying it as an integral part of everything that we do today,” she said.

Adobe’s recent future of creativity study indicated that over 165 million creators joined the global creator economy in the past two years, she told reporters. Also, “one in four people are contributing to online spaces, reshaping the future of work, social causes and mental health,” she added.

New artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features across CC allow creators to “automate mundane, repetitive and highly complex tasks, providing them with more time to create,” she pointed out.

“Creators are moving faster than ever and, with Adobe Express, one of our newest tools, creators both new and experienced can quickly create eye-catching content and publish it to social media, all from just one app,” she told reporters.

Adobe, meanwhile, is “committed to exceptional innovation across our category leading video photography, design, illustration and 3D creation,” she said. “With this year’s MAX releases, we are introducing several cutting edge features that let creators really stay in the flow and spend more time doing what they love.”

And, “with the power of AI and machine learning, we’re taking digital imaging to the next level,” she said, noting Adobe is introducing new features to Photoshop to make it easy for you to focus on creating.”

Photoshop for desktop improvements “provide enhanced selection tools where you can hover over an image to quickly select complex objects like the sky, the foreground and hair,” she told reporters. “This saves time and lets you get more precise and high quality selections while preserving detailed edges.”

She went on to say: “With one click, delete and fill, you can easily select and remove an object with the object selection tool. The area that is removed will then be filled in automatically using content aware fill in a single action.”

Adobe also previously introduced “guides enhancements to leverage learnings” from the company’s InDesign guides capabilities, “giving you more options to learn how you want and more control over every aspect of your creation,” she said.

Copy paste live text from Illustrator, meanwhile, gives users the ability to “seamlessly bring Adobe Illustrator type layers into Photoshop as editable type layers,” she said. “This helps ease user workflows by enabling people to continue editing their type directly in Photoshop.”

Photoshop on the iPad is also getting updates that she said have been “fan favorites” on the desktop version.

For example, “with remove background, you save time by quickly isolating the main subjects from the background and can select the most prominent subject in an image with a single tap,” she said. “To then remove the background with content aware fill, you can remove unwanted objects or distracting elements from photos by drawing a selection around an area to instantly replace it with new image details from surrounding areas.”