This year's annual update of Adobe's Creative Cloud set of applications—which includes professional design, photo, and video standards like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro—is more about a new service called Stock than the applications themselves.

To be sure, there are plenty of new features, and even a new mobile app called Hue for video professionals to match their videos' color grading to the colors in scenes shot with their iPhones. Adobe also committed to producing Android versions of its full suite of Creative Cloud apps: Brush, Color, Comp, Draw, Line, Photoshop Mix, Sketch, and now Hue.

Adobe Stock

Adobe Stock, which emerged from Adobe's January acquisition of Fotolia, is a repository of over 40 million images, vectors, illustrations, and video clips. Fotolia already has 3.4 million customers, and Adobe will maintain it as a standalone service alongside its integration with Creative Cloud. Non-CC members, meanwhile, can buy assets from Stock.

Morris said that 85 percent of people buying stock services are using Adobe software, and over 90 percent of the stock was created using Adobe tools. "We're going to raise the bar for what people expect from a stock service," said Adobe's senior marketing director for Creative Cloud, Scott Morris.

Creators can also sell their assets and get a 33 percent cut, compared with the industry standard of 25 percent.

You can work within any desktop apps with Adobe Library support, including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. You can search within the app for content and either download or sync it to your Creative Cloud Library. Stock content is watermarked until you license it, after which the non-watermarked version is swapped, retaining any edits you made to it.

You can either pay for an image license one at a time for $9.99 per image, or get a subscription. Options include 10 images per month for $49.99 and 750 images for $199.99 per month. But Creative Cloud members can get the 10-image plan for a reduced price of $29.99 per month, and quotas roll over to future months.

CreativeSync

Adobe has been working on its cloud infrastructure for several years to enable syncing of content and settings among its desktop and ancillary mobile apps. After a few early bumps, the company's cloud strategy seems to have gelled, and now gets new branding: CreativeSync. This builds on existing syncing capabilities, with the goal of allowing you to start up where you left off when you move to another device or app. The idea is that you edit once, update everywhere with Linked Assets in CC Libraries. The video applications—Premiere Pro and After Effects—don't yet have this capability, apparently.

Creative Cloud Application Updates

Each of the major applications also benefits from several new capabilities, in addition to CreativeSync. Adobe has sped up performance of InDesign and Illustrator, claiming a 10X improvement over CS6 for some operations. Those applications also get new custom chart, graph, and infographic capabilities. They now let you easily publish docs online. Photoshop gets a mobile design view, and now lets you design multiple art boards in a single document.

Muse has new responsive-design site creation tools. Premiere Pro gets "dramatically" simplified color workflows, smooth jump cuts, interruption-free preview, and a cool-sounding animation feature that lets you move 2D characters using your webcam. Photoshop now lets you add or remove haze from photos, add noise to Blur Gallery effects. Lightroom adds an HDR (high-dynamic-range tool) that combines shots with different exposures.

New features for Enterprise, Education, and Government customers include two new security features, letting them manage their own encryption keys and host their own storage. The company will also be integrating Creative Cloud with Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The new applications, apps, and services, including Adobe Stock, are available today. For a refresher, Creative Cloud subscriptions start at $9.99 per month for a Photography Plan, which includes Photoshop and Lightroom, single application subscriptions cost $19.99 per month, and the full suite is yours for $49.99 per month.