The 2017 Adobe Max was jam packed with new announcements across dozens of design apps. You will see many news articles surrounding each of these new tools and features and creative ways to use them, but this article will give you a brief overview of what changes they announced at their live keynote event. And here they are:
What’s new in Adobe Illustrator
- 30% faster
- Now supports 1000 artboards compared to 100 previously
- Variable font control. You can change the weight, width, serif height, and more for any font
- Puppet warp for vector graphics. Instead of selecting anchor points of an arm of a character, for example, and trying to move and rotate the arm, you can use the puppet warp to define pivot points and change the position more naturally.
Learn more about Adobe Illustrator
What’s new in Adobe Capture
- Type capture. You can now take pictures of fonts and adobe type will give you a list of typekit fonts that are similar
Learn more about Adobe Capture
What’s new in adobe stock
- Reverse image search. Drop a picture in the search area and adobe stock will find thousands of similar images that you can choose from.
- Greater control in filtering searches of images. Filter by things like depth of field and vivid color
- Dynamic filters. If you’re searching for pictures of stars, for example, you can filter the star density and size.
What’s new in Adobe photoshop Sketch
- You can use all photoshop brushes in sketch now. All brushes are synced through Adobe CC
- Timelapse. With one tap, create a video timelapse from drawing. Share video to social media.
Learn more about Adobe Photoshop Sketch
What’s new in Adobe Photoshop
- Layer styles and Libraries. Add layer styles to a shared library to use across multiple projects.
- Microsoft Surface Dial support. Use Microsoft’s hardware dial to control settings.
- New Pen Curvature tool. Click around to make anchor points as usual but when you click a 3rd point, the Pen Curvature tool will interpolate the curve from these 3 curves to make curves more natural. Points remain entirely editable after the fact.
- Finding brushes is a problem of the past. New brush organization. Rename folders and see brush previews in each folder.
- Brush Smoothing. If your brushing is shaky or the beginning and end of your brush trail has unwanted curves, brush smoothing will let you control how smooth you want that path and if you want to remove unwanted whips at the beginning or end of your brush path.
Learn more about Adobe Photoshop
What’s new in Adobe XD CC
- Adobe XD is officially out of Beta. It is now 1.0
- Support for CC libraries built into app. Drag media created in photoshop or other adobe products and drag directly into Adobe XD. If you make a change to that image in photoshop, just save and the changes are live in Adobe XD.
- Assets Panel. Centralized place to keep symbols, character styles, and color swatches. You can update any of these and changes reflect across entire project.
Coming Soon in Adobe XD CC
- Collaboration Features. This includes collaboration and handoff for designer and developer workflow.
What’s new in Adobe Dimension (Formerly Project Felix)
- Out of beta and available to use right now.
- Extend your designs on to physical products in 3D.
- Lighting, perspective, camera, material is all editable in a scene.
- Thousands of stock assets in Adobe Stock optimized for adobe dimension. This means you can download a bag of chips or a billboard to place your design on.
- Add patterns on objects
- Drag graphics onto objects, resize, reposition and preview live.
- Add custom photographs in the background. When you do this, it detects environmental light, camera perspective and ground plane of the background image and places your objects contextually in the scene to automatically add more realism.
- Render out a photoshop file for further editing after you’re done.
- Multiple layers in photoshop. Select mask components to change hues, saturation, etc.
Learn more about Adobe Dimension
What’s new in Adobe Spark
- New premium features.
- Custom brand your posts, videos, or pages. Click “Add brand” button and you can add your logo, brand colors and fonts and it presents you with template themes to illustrate how your brand will look on future content.
- New brand manager. When you create multiple brands, you can update any Spark Page, Spark Post, or Spark Video to use any of the custom brands.
- Add alternate versions of logos, secondary colors and fonts to a custom brand.
What’s new in Lightroom CC
- Complete and seamless photography experience across desktop, mobile, and web.
- All images sync on cloud any changes are instantly saved on the cloud
- Smart Keyword searches with sense. No need to add your own keywords, you can search for cats, horses, cars that are in the desert, etc. It will find them all.
- Local adjustments on all devices. Use the graduated, brush, or radial edits tools across any device.
- New sharing settings. Share instantly to adobe portfolio or with colleagues or friends.
What’s new in Premier Pro
- Responsive design positioning. Pin layers to other layers or the video frame. When the layer size or video frame changes, the layers remain in positions relative to where they are pinned.
- Responsive design time. Title or animation sequences can preserve fixed timing at the beginning and end of the timeline even when you expand the length of the animation. The animations in between will still expand or contract.
- Motion graphics templates in Adobe Stock. Access thousands of motion graphics templates with complete editability.
- 3D video – Adjust content like text or graphics to be flat or spherical in environment with features like VR plane to sphere effect.
- 360 VR transitions. Add transitions like Lightrays and light leaks and the view frame will transition instead of the VR entire frame.
- Editors can now edit with a headset with spatial and sonic audio experience.
What’s new in Character Animator CC
- Now out of beta
Learn more about Character Animator
What’s new with Adobe Sensei
Adobe sensei is an artificial intelligence engine that works seamlessly across all CC apps. It’s meant to amplify human intelligence, not replace it.
Some of the features announced:
- Continually learns from hundreds of millions of assets.
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Purpose built with deep understanding of design domains.
- Everyone is training sensei with their cloud content
- Computational creativity. Trains itself on video, illustrations, designs.
- Experience intelligence. Brands and businesses can drive measurement to all experiences created.
- Content – Discovers meaning from content.
- Example uses of Sensei: Face tracking in character animator, font recognition, Anticipating next tools before you search for it.
- Sensei seamlessly integrates in context with your workstyle.
Sneak Peek of the future of Sensei
Natural interaction
- Blue dot within adobe Apps will represent Sensei suggestions.
- As you drop an image, sensei will pop up suggesting tags and recognizing objects within an image.
- Ask sensei questions in photoshop like “find some images based on my sketch” Sensei will search Adobe Stock to find useful assets.
Content Intelligence
- Searches through hundreds of millions of images.
- Sensei can suggest backgrounds from stock. Sensei filters through hundreds of millions of other images providing context aware search filters. If you have an image of stars, you can search for star density and size as a filter option.
- Take images of people and drop them in. Sensei suggests other versions from your photoshoot that may work better. Filter your photographs by whether they look to the left or right, if it shows her face, or space suit, etc.
- Sensei suggests things like smart masking photos. One click and your image is automatically masked.
Design intelligence
- Learns from styles you develop and suggests them in the future. You can select text, type in a title and you see some treatments you’ve used in past projects to click and apply.
- In XD if you have an app you’ve created, use creative assistant to change assets or styles.
- Talk to sensei and say things like “Create iphone 8 layouts of my artboards” and sensei will suggest a re-layout for the iPhone that you can click and drag onto your artboard. Sensei also wires the mobile app in prototype saving tons of work.
Creative Graph
- You can interact with intelligent decisions. In this graph you can revisit what an image would have looked like if you made other intelligent decisions.. In the current flow that you’ve gone through. You can change characters, etc after your design is finalized. Very versatile.