To say Adobe has a wide-reaching range of products is certainly nothing short of an understatement. Its programs easily cover the entire gamut of creative applications from graphic design to photography to video and audio, but yet the company always seems to be able to come up with something new.
The buzz word for this year is “content velocity” and that basically refers to the speed at which content is being created. Now, literally every device can be used to create new material on the go. New user interfaces will thus be required, and Adobe is using machine learning to push the possibilities even further.
1. Adobe Sensei
Adobe is looking at making everything from collaborating with creative pros across the world to selling your work globally easier. And so, its engineers have been working on a new framework called Adobe Sensei, which is a set of services that uses artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and deep learning to tackle complex experience challenges.
A lot of the information that Adobe Sensei was built on was derived from the interaction that Adobe’s customers have had with its products over the years. And this allows it to do tools as simple selecting a range of objects with the same color tone, or determining what content to fill a selection with.
Adobe believes it can get Adobe Sensei smart enough to even recommend you the best tool for the task. This will leave you free to be creative, and it seems that Adobe’s intent is for the platform to be a source of wisdom that also learns from you, so it only gets better with time.
2. Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a prime example of this. Drawing on the strengths of Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, XD was first showed off last year as Project Comet, but has now been unveiled as a public beta. It’s built for performance and speed, with what seems to be a new modular approach applied that will allow you to easily create and share designs.
With XD, design takes a device-based approach. For example, if you’re designing a mobile app, every page of your app can be laid out on a single page, and you can simply click and drag to create links from one page to another. Better yet, you can convert graphics into elements that can be shared across pages.
Adjust the shape or color of a button element for example, and that change will be instantly reflected across all instances of the button. Consider how you’ll probably want to share things like background images across multiple screens, and you can imagine the time savings this will bring.
And one more plus point – XD has the ability to allow you to preview your designs on different devices in real-time! So if you’re designing an iOS app, you can see exactly how your design looks on the intended device. The Windows version will come will full touch and writing support, so that will certainly be something to look forward to. The beta should be available in the first half of 2017.
3. Project Felix
Next up, was Project Felix. This is an undertaking by Adobe to simplify 3D for designers, offering them an easy means to create and edit simple 3D models without prior 3D modeling experiences. By pulling 3D models from a preset library (or by purchasing appropriate ones from Adobe Stock), you can easily create a 3D scene.
You can use a magic wand tool to select elements of the 3D model – without having to break up the model into smaller pieces – and then apply different materials to it. Extra 3D elements can also be added to the scene, and you can rotate elements in all three axes till they fit perfectly.
Project Felix also allows you to easily add graphics to the scene. The program is smart enough to automatically account for the new background if the material in your object is reflective. What’s more, accounting for the lighting in your background is a simple one-click fix. The beta for this is supposed to be available later this year for paid members of Creative Cloud.
4. Project Nimbus
Another new development is Project Nimbus. This is a desktop service powered by the cloud that incorporates a lot of what Adobe has learnt from its mobile photo-editing apps to allow for seamless editing from mobile to desktop.
Machine learning means that you can use ordinary terms to find items in your library even if they aren’t properly tagged. Any edits made using Nimbus are non-destructive and we’re told the focus of this development is in the user experience, allowing you to seamlessly shift between edits of your original images stored in the cloud, and not just the smaller instances pushed to your mobile device.
5. Adobe Stock
Finally, Adobe Stock was a constant throughout the presentations in that this is now fully integrated with the programs in Creative Cloud. It now supports visual search, whereby you can simply drag and drop an image into the Adobe Stock website to start a search.
Images that match the style, lighting and content of what you provide will be found, and you can refine the results further with text. This has been developed by adding years of human interaction into Adobe Stock’s machine learning algorithms, and the results are certainly magical.
Also of note is that Reuters is entering a partnership to bring video and photography to Adobe Stock. That brings over twelve million images of news, sports and entertainment from the Reuters’ archives, so it is certainly a boon to creatives.
Adobe Stock now offers over 60 million royalty-free high-quality photos, videos, illustrations, graphics and 3D models, as well as templates – which are a new type of asset designed to help you easily start new products.
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