The annual Adobe Max conference, which is taking place both in-person in Los Angeles and online from Oct. 18-20, includes news about significant updates to nearly all the applications in its Creative Cloud suite, as well as the launch of a new application, Substance 3D Modeler.
Expect a slew of other product announcements covering AI, collaboration, 3D, video, and photography software across 100+ online sessions and over 200 in-person sessions featuring celebrity guests like artist Jeff Koons, music producer Steve Aoki, producer Sian Heder, and actor Kevin Hart.
Photography Software
Most people associate Adobe with its flagship product, Photoshop, and the company is always adding new whizzbang digital image manipulation tools to the software.
At this year’s Adobe Max, Photoshop gets even more impressive selection tools that now let you do one-click delete and fill operations. It also gets guideline improvements and lets you copy and paste live text between Illustrator and Photoshop.
The improved object selection tool detects more object types and has greater accuracy. According to Adobe, it “recognizes complex objects and regions such as the sky, buildings, water, plants, different types of flooring and ground (e.g., mountains, sidewalks, streets).”
The new One-click Delete and Fill option, as its name suggests, lets you hover over a detected object and remove it, filling in the background with a single keystroke: Shift-Delete. New guide options let you customize those lines that help you line up elements in your image to an unprecedented degree. You can specify pixel position, color, and the number of rows and columns.
To protect your intellectual property and prevent fakes, Adobe’s Content Credentials feature lets you attach attribution info to your work at export. Adobe's also adding multiuser and multidevice workflows and a cloud service (called Verify) to save file space.
Lightroom
Adobe’s industry-standard workflow software for pro photographers, Lightroom, also sees updates at Max. Some of the same automatic selection and content-aware remove tools from Photoshop have now come to Lightroom. Select People and Select Objects are now in both Lightroom Classic and the new cloud-emphasizing version (which is confusingly just called “Lightroom” by Adobe). You can select multiple people, body parts, or just the background. Also new are Adaptive Presets for portraits, sky, and subject. These use Sensei AI-powered masking to adjust only appropriate parts of the image; for example, you can choose teeth whitening or eye enhancement.
One big improvement for me is that you can finally get a side-by-side comparison of the original image and your edited version—something that other photo applications have long offered. Lightroom’s side-by-side view has only worked with two different image files till now, so you’d have to create a duplicate to compare your edits.
Illustrator and Design
Probably Adobe’s next most popular application after Photoshop is Illustrator, the industry-standard design software. With Adobe Max 2022, the program sees the new Intertwine feature, which Adobe’s VP of Product Marketing for the Creative Professional division, Deepa Supramaniam, says offers “an innovative way to overlap and weave together shapes or text to create depth and dimension that automatically transforms with your design.” Also new for the app are advanced 3D effects and textures, and its web version is progressing in private beta.
Illustrator’s companion drawing app, Fresco, gets Free Transform and Liquefy tools, as well as vector outline and jitter brushes, and automatic color palette creation from images.
Video Software
Premiere Pro and After Effects are also major players in their fields of video editing and motion graphics, and Adobe offers Character Animator for 3D cartoonlike animations. That last app gets an enhanced motion library, with 350 full-body animation captures from professional actors. Premiere Pro sees more titling options, including flexible alignment and bulk editing. Motion graphics templates have been sped up by a factor of 2, and the software now supports the Arri Alexa 35 camera.
After Effects gets native H.264 encoding, Select Track Matter Layer (which lets you designate any layer as a matte), and over 50 new animation presets in a redesigned interface.
3D Software
Though Adobe is in the process of removing 3D modeling from Photoshop, the company is far from abandoning the category, and the launch of Substance 3D Modeler at Max 2022 is ample evidence of this. Since its 2019 acquisition of Algorithmic, the developer of the industry standard Substance apps for material and texture for gaming and entertainment, 3D has been a push for Adobe, with its Substance 3D lineup of tools.
The new Substance 3D Modeler application has been in beta since April, but its released version debuts at the Adobe Max show. According to the company, the new application is for “creating concept art, sketching and prototyping, blocking out game levels, crafting detailed characters or props, or sculpting an entire scene.” It allows creators to switch between desktop and VR views of their work, and offers symmetry, both organic and hard surface sculpting. The tool joins other members of the Substance 3D Collection of software, which includes Substance 3D Assets, Stager, Painter, Sampler, and the node-based Designer for creating materials, lighting, and patterns.
New tools are also being introduced for other members of the Substance 3D Collection, like a 3D Capture tool in Sampler that can turn a group of photos into a 3D model. Note that the Substance 3D Collection is not included with a Creative Cloud subscription but requires its own $49.99 per month subscription.
Collaboration
With more and more knowledge work being done remotely, collaboration tools are key. Two options in Creative Cloud supply this need: Share for Review and Co-edit. Photoshop and Illustrator’s new Share to Review feature lets collaborators see live updates to your image and comment in real time right within the program—no more opening a web browser to do all this. That said, collaborators who don’t have Photoshop installed can still see your work in a browser. The co-editing option lets multiple designers work on a piece in live real-time.
On the video front, Adobe’s acquisition of frame.io, the dominant video production collaboration platform, has become part of Premiere Pro. It’s Camera to Cloud feature lets videographers send media directly from their hardware to the cloud, and now supports Fujifilm and RED cameras.
For more detail on Adobe Max announcements, head to Adobe's blog and read our reviews below: