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As if they are some sort of secret, or something, Adobe dropped a bunch of fantastic new features on Creative Cloud users this summer...and didn't tell anyone. So we're telling you now!
Out of the blue, Adobe dropped a bevy of nice new features on Creative Cloud users. With AdobeMAX just a couple of months away, and the next upgrade release, having new features to play with is a welcome surprise.
When Adobe switched to the subscription model in 2011, requiring us to start paying a monthly fee to use their software, one of the promised benefits was to get upgrades when they were available instead of waiting for the next major upgrade.
Well, maybe I’ve forgotten something, but it doesn’t seem like there has been a lot of that in the past ten years. It feels like Adobe, generally, gives us the new features with its annual version upgrade each October.
Surprise!
Not all of the features have us jumping out of our chairs with excitement. Time will tell. For now, the list that follows are the features have them staying up late playing on our computers. Julia has her favs, I have mine, so we’ve divvied this list up.
Recently featured as my “Mind Blower of the Week,” this new feature literally changes the way we adjust photos in bulk. The days of opening an image, then selecting the subject to make targeted adjustments, photo after photo, are over. Now, thanks to this amazing gift, we can select multiple images in Bridge, open them in Camera Raw, then, using the Select Subject or Select Sky features, selections are adapted to the subject or sky of EACH photo. In Lightroom or Lightroom Mobile, Select Subject and Sky can be applied to an image, then copied to apply to others in bulk for the same adaptive application as in Camera Raw.
If you select multiple photos in Adobe Camera Raw, then select subject or sky, then make an adjustment, each selected photos mask with adapt to the subject or sky of that photo, making unique selections for each photo. Same in Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, except you have to apply the mask to an image first, then copy the mask setting to apply to multiple images. Either way, it’s a huge time saver. It also works in Adobe Camera Raw when syncing settings from one image to others.
On the show, I used three photos of three different kids on a water slide. The three kids were all in different locations and different positions, all coming off the end of the slide. To increase the contrast of the kids to the background I used the Select Subject Masking option, then adjusted exposure and contrast, etc. I then selected the other images and synced them, including the Select Subject Mask. All three images were adjusted the same, except the mask changed to map to the subject of each image.
It’s witchcraft, I tell you.
Another nice enhancement is that it’s now easier to invert a mask. Say you want to select everything but the sky, but that would be a tough selection. Now you just select the sky, then invert the mask.
I was really excited to see this feature. Not because I’m a big fan of Lightroom, because I’m not. What excites me is that for people who don’t want to learn a new tool for adjusting video, this is huge. And I’m one of those people.
The image adjustment tools for Lightroom, Lightroom Mobile, and Adobe Camera raw are essentially the same. Learn one and you’ve learned them all. I’m a big fan of a Bridge/ACR workflow, so knowing I can use Lightroom or Lightroom Mobile to adjust video with a toolset I already use daily in ACR is a big win.
We don’t have ALL of the tools for video that we have for photos, but we have enough to get the job done. We can also trim the video. It is NOT a video editor. It simply allows us to take those videos where the color is too warm, or cool, and balance, that, and bump up the contrast and saturation if you want. There are other powerful adjustment tools, too, but I’m simplifying for this article.
So now your videos can match your images.
Get this: you can copy adjustments made on a photo and paste them onto a video so the color matches. And with Lightroom Mobile, you can actually do this on your devices in the field.
Then you can export it as a .mp4 for upload, sharing, or bringing into Express for more controls.
One last point, which is really a hope: With the new adaptive select subject and sky capabilities in Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, I hope to see that applied to video, as well. Fingers crossed.
If you’re an Adobe Camera Raw user, like me, you might shrug your shoulders at this feature and say “Well it’s about time.” Yes, we’ve had this for years in ACR. But, better late than ever, right?
I think this is less of a problem than it used to be. Red eye is caused when the flash is too close to the lens and the pupils are wide open due to low light. The devices and cameras now make it pretty hard for this to happen, but it still does.
So if it IS a problem for you, and you want to work in Lightroom, now you have a solution. The tool is nested in the healing tab and it’s pretty simple to use. Once in the healing tab selections, choose the icon that is obviously for red eye (hint: it’s the one that’s not the bandaid). Once there, you can either click Auto Correct to let Lightroom do the detecting for you, or you can manually do it by taking the tool, starting in the center of the pupil, then dragging outward.
It doesn’t really fix it. It puts a grey, feathered object over it, blocking the red pupils. You can delete these later if you change your mind and want the red eyes back.
Making selections in Photoshop just keeps getting easier and more precise, and now we have even better hair refinement for portraits and other photos with hair and fur.
This trickles down into many tools, but the Object Selection Tool itself now does a better job on edges, and especially hair.
Beyond that, they’ve improved HOW selections are made, giving you the option of doing in on your computer, like we’ve always done, or asking the Cloud Gods to help out. Selecting edges using the artificial intelligence of Sensei in the Creative Cloud slows things down a bit, but the selections are even better.
Then you can use the Select and Mask with the new Refine Hair button at the top and REALLY get accurate edges. Play with some of the other controls and magic can happen.
The harmonization filter in Photoshop caught me off guard! One of those "let's see what this is" features turned into a three-hour compositing session that was a ton of fun. This Neural Filter is a real gift for all compositing artists, concept artists and photographers.
The filter, found in Photoshop under Filters > Neural Filters > Harmonization lets us use a target layer as a reference to match another.
Simply put, Photoshop matches the color, hue, saturation, and brightness of one layer to another. A genius way to create perfect compositing. It's so simple and fast, that I got carried away creating a giant squirrel-walnut scene on the beach. Like you do.
What once took a lot of work, adjustment layers, and brainpower, is now so quick and easy that I'm thinking about starting a Composition of the Week as a new hobby.
I suggest you download this filter, which is still in beta, as soon as possible and dive into the wonderful world of compositing. It's a lot of fun!
I get to do a lot of infographics in my work. And the infographics I do can often get very text heavy, relying on bulleted lists and numbers to convey the message.
If you’ve ever created bullets in Illustrator in the past, you know how slow it could be. First you had to create the bullet, either with Opt + 8 or using the Glyphs Panel. Then you had a few ways to deal with multiline bulleted text, and none of them were good, really.
Those days are over, now, thanks to the new Bullets and Numbering feature.
It’s so easy to use, although limited. Applying them is much like in Word, and other programs like that, in that the basic functionality is built in and all you have to do is press a button, or enter a trigger character plus space, to get it going. For sub tabs or numbers, just tab in again and it automatically adjusts. Simple.
Sadly, you can’t really customize the bullet characters (you have four to choose from) and you can’t apply Character Styles to them, but it’s better than what we’ve had for the past 35 years.
We will show you some tricks and hacks to get around SOME of the limitations on Digiversity.tv LIVE, but for truly unique designs, you may have to refer to the “old school” list above.
Just a few weeks ago, I googled the search term "Adobe Illustrator History Panel" as I was working on a major illustration project. I found myself a short time later on Adobe Support Community where other users were poetically expressing their pain about the missing History Panel. No luck.
Looking at the same thread today, a big "Solved" looms there as the headline. Yes, it has arrived. Adobe Illustrator has its own History Panel! Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day.
It’s a bit like time traveling. We can go back to any state, visually, instead of Edit> Undo or Cmmd / Ctrl + Z. We can go forward again to any state without Edit> Redo or Cmmd / Ctrl _ Shift + Z. WARNING: Unless you do ANYTHING while on that state. So if you go back to a state to look at it and want to go to another state, either before, or after, go for it. But when you are on a state then change something, all states after that state are replaced with whatever you just did.
It’s important to know that these states are not saved with the document, so if you close out, you lose them all and when you reopen the document you’ll only see “Open” until you do something.
Particularly useful is the little icon in the lower right corner "Create new document from current state." It does exactly that. It creates a new document from the current state when you click on it.
A very special use case comes to my mind. Recolor Artwork! Once I have created a color variant of an illustration, I can create a new document with the click of the button, then return to the starting point in the original document using the History panel to try out more options.
The possible History states can be increased up to 200 under General > Performance > Others.
I shouldn’t complain after my wish for a History Panel came true so unexpectedly. But… I only have one small suggestion for improvement. History snapshots like in Adobe Photoshop’s History Panel would be an ingenious solution to create variants of a design without creating a new document each time. Maybe the Adobe gods will listen to this wish as well.
Inconspicuous and unobtrusive is the new button in Illustrator's latest 3D panel. With just one click, I can turn any 3D object into a sexy wireframe. The geometry of the 3D object is transformed into a geometric grid, which also makes hidden edges and surfaces visible.
This representation is, of course, helpful to understanding a 3D object in its entirety without moving it in space. This is useful when I want to explain the shape of a 3D object to fellow artists or customers without sending them the 3D file.
When converting a 3D Object into a wireframe, I get a graphic with vector lines that is fully editable.
I can change line weights, apply brushes, change colors, fill areas with the paint bucket and develop new interesting graphics.
It allows graphic designers and illustrators to try out a new visual style without having to learn new 3D software or work on a 3D model for a long time. I can also very well imagine it being a quick and easy way for game designers, or concept artists, to incorporate cool wireframes into their designs.
The wireframe feature is, in my opinion, a small, indistinguishable button that holds huge graphical potential and is definitely worth a day of experimentation.
After Illustrator's cool new 3D panel was introduced last year, we all quickly realized what feature Adobe needs to add as soon as possible: Map graphics to 3D objects (which was possible in the old 3D panel, by the way).
Our cries were heard and it is now possible since May 2022 (version 26.3.1) to drag our own graphics into the material window of the 3D panel.
What's really cool is that Illustrator also takes blend modes and effects into account.
The newly introduced feature is a checkbox in the render settings of the 3D panel. I can select each mapped graphic individually and choose to render it as a vector in the render settings.
This setting gives me an unpixelated vector view of my graphic. However, this only works if the graphic consists of vectors.
Here you can clearly see the difference between the mapped graphics. The graphic with the white lines on the ball on the left side are rendered as vectors.
The graphic on the ball of the right side are pixelated, although they are vectors. Only the setting in the 3D panel makes the graphics appear sharp.
So there you go, a nice, healthy serving of useful, even powerful, new features. It’s nice that Adobe has given a variety of features for multiple audiences.
It seems to me that it shows that Adobe is listening, too, by offering us updates with fixes and features based on feedback. They’ve even made it easier for us to give feedback when using some of these features, like the masking tools. So take advantage of that and let them know what you want. Perhaps you’ll see it show up in a future upgrade and you can brag to your friends and coworkers that “That feature was my idea.”
Out of the blue, Adobe dropped a bevy of nice new features on Creative Cloud users. With AdobeMAX just a couple of months away, and the next upgrade release, having new features to play with is a welcome surprise.
When Adobe switched to the subscription model in 2011, requiring us to start paying a monthly fee to use their software, one of the promised benefits was to get upgrades when they were available instead of waiting for the next major upgrade.
Well, maybe I’ve forgotten something, but it doesn’t seem like there has been a lot of that in the past ten years. It feels like Adobe, generally, gives us the new features with its annual version upgrade each October.
Surprise!
Not all of the features have us jumping out of our chairs with excitement. Time will tell. For now, the list that follows are the features have them staying up late playing on our computers. Julia has her favs, I have mine, so we’ve divvied this list up.
Recently featured as my “Mind Blower of the Week,” this new feature literally changes the way we adjust photos in bulk. The days of opening an image, then selecting the subject to make targeted adjustments, photo after photo, are over. Now, thanks to this amazing gift, we can select multiple images in Bridge, open them in Camera Raw, then, using the Select Subject or Select Sky features, selections are adapted to the subject or sky of EACH photo. In Lightroom or Lightroom Mobile, Select Subject and Sky can be applied to an image, then copied to apply to others in bulk for the same adaptive application as in Camera Raw.
If you select multiple photos in Adobe Camera Raw, then select subject or sky, then make an adjustment, each selected photos mask with adapt to the subject or sky of that photo, making unique selections for each photo. Same in Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, except you have to apply the mask to an image first, then copy the mask setting to apply to multiple images. Either way, it’s a huge time saver. It also works in Adobe Camera Raw when syncing settings from one image to others.
On the show, I used three photos of three different kids on a water slide. The three kids were all in different locations and different positions, all coming off the end of the slide. To increase the contrast of the kids to the background I used the Select Subject Masking option, then adjusted exposure and contrast, etc. I then selected the other images and synced them, including the Select Subject Mask. All three images were adjusted the same, except the mask changed to map to the subject of each image.
It’s witchcraft, I tell you.
Another nice enhancement is that it’s now easier to invert a mask. Say you want to select everything but the sky, but that would be a tough selection. Now you just select the sky, then invert the mask.
I was really excited to see this feature. Not because I’m a big fan of Lightroom, because I’m not. What excites me is that for people who don’t want to learn a new tool for adjusting video, this is huge. And I’m one of those people.
The image adjustment tools for Lightroom, Lightroom Mobile, and Adobe Camera raw are essentially the same. Learn one and you’ve learned them all. I’m a big fan of a Bridge/ACR workflow, so knowing I can use Lightroom or Lightroom Mobile to adjust video with a toolset I already use daily in ACR is a big win.
We don’t have ALL of the tools for video that we have for photos, but we have enough to get the job done. We can also trim the video. It is NOT a video editor. It simply allows us to take those videos where the color is too warm, or cool, and balance, that, and bump up the contrast and saturation if you want. There are other powerful adjustment tools, too, but I’m simplifying for this article.
So now your videos can match your images.
Get this: you can copy adjustments made on a photo and paste them onto a video so the color matches. And with Lightroom Mobile, you can actually do this on your devices in the field.
Then you can export it as a .mp4 for upload, sharing, or bringing into Express for more controls.
One last point, which is really a hope: With the new adaptive select subject and sky capabilities in Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, I hope to see that applied to video, as well. Fingers crossed.
If you’re an Adobe Camera Raw user, like me, you might shrug your shoulders at this feature and say “Well it’s about time.” Yes, we’ve had this for years in ACR. But, better late than ever, right?
I think this is less of a problem than it used to be. Red eye is caused when the flash is too close to the lens and the pupils are wide open due to low light. The devices and cameras now make it pretty hard for this to happen, but it still does.
So if it IS a problem for you, and you want to work in Lightroom, now you have a solution. The tool is nested in the healing tab and it’s pretty simple to use. Once in the healing tab selections, choose the icon that is obviously for red eye (hint: it’s the one that’s not the bandaid). Once there, you can either click Auto Correct to let Lightroom do the detecting for you, or you can manually do it by taking the tool, starting in the center of the pupil, then dragging outward.
It doesn’t really fix it. It puts a grey, feathered object over it, blocking the red pupils. You can delete these later if you change your mind and want the red eyes back.
Making selections in Photoshop just keeps getting easier and more precise, and now we have even better hair refinement for portraits and other photos with hair and fur.
This trickles down into many tools, but the Object Selection Tool itself now does a better job on edges, and especially hair.
Beyond that, they’ve improved HOW selections are made, giving you the option of doing in on your computer, like we’ve always done, or asking the Cloud Gods to help out. Selecting edges using the artificial intelligence of Sensei in the Creative Cloud slows things down a bit, but the selections are even better.
Then you can use the Select and Mask with the new Refine Hair button at the top and REALLY get accurate edges. Play with some of the other controls and magic can happen.
The harmonization filter in Photoshop caught me off guard! One of those "let's see what this is" features turned into a three-hour compositing session that was a ton of fun. This Neural Filter is a real gift for all compositing artists, concept artists and photographers.
The filter, found in Photoshop under Filters > Neural Filters > Harmonization lets us use a target layer as a reference to match another.
Simply put, Photoshop matches the color, hue, saturation, and brightness of one layer to another. A genius way to create perfect compositing. It's so simple and fast, that I got carried away creating a giant squirrel-walnut scene on the beach. Like you do.
What once took a lot of work, adjustment layers, and brainpower, is now so quick and easy that I'm thinking about starting a Composition of the Week as a new hobby.
I suggest you download this filter, which is still in beta, as soon as possible and dive into the wonderful world of compositing. It's a lot of fun!
I get to do a lot of infographics in my work. And the infographics I do can often get very text heavy, relying on bulleted lists and numbers to convey the message.
If you’ve ever created bullets in Illustrator in the past, you know how slow it could be. First you had to create the bullet, either with Opt + 8 or using the Glyphs Panel. Then you had a few ways to deal with multiline bulleted text, and none of them were good, really.
Those days are over, now, thanks to the new Bullets and Numbering feature.
It’s so easy to use, although limited. Applying them is much like in Word, and other programs like that, in that the basic functionality is built in and all you have to do is press a button, or enter a trigger character plus space, to get it going. For sub tabs or numbers, just tab in again and it automatically adjusts. Simple.
Sadly, you can’t really customize the bullet characters (you have four to choose from) and you can’t apply Character Styles to them, but it’s better than what we’ve had for the past 35 years.
We will show you some tricks and hacks to get around SOME of the limitations on Digiversity.tv LIVE, but for truly unique designs, you may have to refer to the “old school” list above.
Just a few weeks ago, I googled the search term "Adobe Illustrator History Panel" as I was working on a major illustration project. I found myself a short time later on Adobe Support Community where other users were poetically expressing their pain about the missing History Panel. No luck.
Looking at the same thread today, a big "Solved" looms there as the headline. Yes, it has arrived. Adobe Illustrator has its own History Panel! Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day.
It’s a bit like time traveling. We can go back to any state, visually, instead of Edit> Undo or Cmmd / Ctrl + Z. We can go forward again to any state without Edit> Redo or Cmmd / Ctrl _ Shift + Z. WARNING: Unless you do ANYTHING while on that state. So if you go back to a state to look at it and want to go to another state, either before, or after, go for it. But when you are on a state then change something, all states after that state are replaced with whatever you just did.
It’s important to know that these states are not saved with the document, so if you close out, you lose them all and when you reopen the document you’ll only see “Open” until you do something.
Particularly useful is the little icon in the lower right corner "Create new document from current state." It does exactly that. It creates a new document from the current state when you click on it.
A very special use case comes to my mind. Recolor Artwork! Once I have created a color variant of an illustration, I can create a new document with the click of the button, then return to the starting point in the original document using the History panel to try out more options.
The possible History states can be increased up to 200 under General > Performance > Others.
I shouldn’t complain after my wish for a History Panel came true so unexpectedly. But… I only have one small suggestion for improvement. History snapshots like in Adobe Photoshop’s History Panel would be an ingenious solution to create variants of a design without creating a new document each time. Maybe the Adobe gods will listen to this wish as well.
Inconspicuous and unobtrusive is the new button in Illustrator's latest 3D panel. With just one click, I can turn any 3D object into a sexy wireframe. The geometry of the 3D object is transformed into a geometric grid, which also makes hidden edges and surfaces visible.
This representation is, of course, helpful to understanding a 3D object in its entirety without moving it in space. This is useful when I want to explain the shape of a 3D object to fellow artists or customers without sending them the 3D file.
When converting a 3D Object into a wireframe, I get a graphic with vector lines that is fully editable.
I can change line weights, apply brushes, change colors, fill areas with the paint bucket and develop new interesting graphics.
It allows graphic designers and illustrators to try out a new visual style without having to learn new 3D software or work on a 3D model for a long time. I can also very well imagine it being a quick and easy way for game designers, or concept artists, to incorporate cool wireframes into their designs.
The wireframe feature is, in my opinion, a small, indistinguishable button that holds huge graphical potential and is definitely worth a day of experimentation.
After Illustrator's cool new 3D panel was introduced last year, we all quickly realized what feature Adobe needs to add as soon as possible: Map graphics to 3D objects (which was possible in the old 3D panel, by the way).
Our cries were heard and it is now possible since May 2022 (version 26.3.1) to drag our own graphics into the material window of the 3D panel.
What's really cool is that Illustrator also takes blend modes and effects into account.
The newly introduced feature is a checkbox in the render settings of the 3D panel. I can select each mapped graphic individually and choose to render it as a vector in the render settings.
This setting gives me an unpixelated vector view of my graphic. However, this only works if the graphic consists of vectors.
Here you can clearly see the difference between the mapped graphics. The graphic with the white lines on the ball on the left side are rendered as vectors.
The graphic on the ball of the right side are pixelated, although they are vectors. Only the setting in the 3D panel makes the graphics appear sharp.
So there you go, a nice, healthy serving of useful, even powerful, new features. It’s nice that Adobe has given a variety of features for multiple audiences.
It seems to me that it shows that Adobe is listening, too, by offering us updates with fixes and features based on feedback. They’ve even made it easier for us to give feedback when using some of these features, like the masking tools. So take advantage of that and let them know what you want. Perhaps you’ll see it show up in a future upgrade and you can brag to your friends and coworkers that “That feature was my idea.”
Julia Zieger is a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and concept artist with a diverse range of styles and visual language. She is known to put a lot of effort, detail, and knowledge into her presentations and projects to educate other designers and illustrators.
I'm just a guy who was lucky to have made MANY mistakes creating files since 1987...and learning from those mistakes. Always trying to find a better way, I've learned the techniques you see in these videos on real projects over 35 years (plus many more doing paste-up).
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