The Adobe Report, October 2017: Adobe Max Edition

It’s October and that means Adobe Max is here. Adobe Max is an annual event held by Adobe Systems where major updates are announced and Adobe promotes its latest technology. The conference also provides sessions, labs, and workshops where attendees can learn and get inspired. This year the pre-conference labs were hold October 16 and 17 and the main conference runs October 18-20. Today’s keynote came with a lot of news about the Creative Cloud.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will delve into more details on some of the individual items in this release, but for now, here is the overview. One of the big items is the new Lightroom CC photography service, effectively a new face on Lightroom. It’s a cloud-centric service for managing your photos online from anywhere. You can access your photos and edit them from your laptop, desktop, tablet, phone, or anywhere on the web. And you can now organize your photos without having to tag them, using the Adobe Sensei system for intelligent searching via imbedded artificial intelligence. It comes with 1 terabyte of cloud storage, with additional storage available for purchase.

For those who still want to work on the desktop the way you have since Lightroom was first released in 2006, there is Lightroom Classic CC, which comes with significant performance updates, new editing features, and Color and Luminance Range masking. There are also Lightroom mobile updates (for iOS and Android), Lightroom for web, and Adobe Portfolio with integration to Lightroom.

Adobe Photoshop CC comes with better brush organization and performance improvements, brush stroke smoothing, a new curvature pen tool, variable font support, and access to Lightroom photos in the Start screen and search. Adobe Illustrator CC brings a contextual properties panel, artboard improvements, a puppet warp tool, and variable color and font support.

Premiere Pro CC has immersive 360 and VR workflows and added motion graphics templates. You can work on multiple projects simultaneously. After Effects, along with the immersive 360 and VR workflow additions, also has data-driven animation and improvements to the GPU performance for motion blur and render layer transformations. Adobe has also released Team Projects 1.0 for collaboration workflows on video projects. InDesign CC now has endnotes and paragraph borders, object position and height styles, text in CC libraries, and typographic enhancements.

For designers, there is Adobe XD, an all-in-one cross-platform UX/UI tool for prototyping and designing websites and mobile apps. There is also Adobe Dimension CC (formerly Project Felix) which gives designers the ability to create 3D images with the ease of 2D. Adobe Character Animator is a new 2D character animation tool for animating characters made in Photoshop or Illustrator with live body movements, facial expressions, and vocal sounds. You control gestures with a keyboard or MIDI device.

Adobe has changed some of the pricing. The Creative Cloud Photography Plan with 1TB is $19.99/month. It includes Photoshop and Lightroom, Lightroom CC for mobile and web, Adobe Spark with premium features, Adobe Portfolio, and 1TB of cloud storage. If you currently have a Creative Cloud subscription, the plan is $14.99/month for the first year.

The Lightroom CC plan, for those who don’t want/need Photoshop, offers the rest of the 1TB plan listed above for $9.99/month. If you do want Photoshop, but don’t want the 1TB of storage space, there’s the regular Creative Cloud Photography Plan for $9.99/month. Of course, Lightroom CC has been added to the Creative Cloud All Apps plan with 100 GB storage. This will now be priced at $52.99 as of March 1, 2018. This 6% increase is the first increase in price since the Creative Cloud was introduced in 2012.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a part of my daily workflow and indispensable to my work. The company keeps coming up with ways users can be more flexible and forward-thinking in our processes. That’s why Adobe’s Creative Cloud is so valuable to my production and why I highly recommend it.