Highlights from the Adobe MAX 2016 keynote.
This year’s Adobe MAX keynote felt a bit different from the past couple of years announcements as Adobe heavily focussed on the new apps built from ground up rather than going into detail for the usual softwares like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. All the new apps are designed to take advantage of the new paradigm in computing, mobile devices and tablets. World is changing in terms of the devices we use in our daily lives so it’s showing the shift in creative app development as well.
The appropriately named keynote ‘The future of creativity and design’ was all about how we are starting to and will use mobile devices more and more in the creative field. Your creativity shouldn’t be compromised by the tools and devices so Adobe is looking ahead and starting to deliver on the new age of creative productivity.
So, here are some of the highlights from the keynote:
Adobe Felix
Built from ground up, Felix is an app for combining 2D and 3D to create photo realistic renders. It looks like a great tool for editing and rendering product visuals in one place rather than rendering your 3D objects in a separate software and composite in another.
There is a Magic wand for selecting elements of a 3D object which is brilliant! And aligning 3D objects to the horizon of a 2D image is effortless with just one click.
Public beta will be available towards end of this year and I can’t wait to check it out!
Adobe XD
This app is great for designing beautiful user experiences and prototyping right inside one app. It comes with UI elements from different platform like iOS, android etc so it’s super handy to drop in standard UI elements and speeding up your workflow.
There have been a few public beta released for this already but this keynote Adobe detailed on expanding the platform to all the main platforms, macOS, iOS, Android and Windows.
Windows is particularly interesting because they are building it as a Universal Windows app which means the same app should technically work on windows 10 desktop, tablets and mobile devices.
And they also had Surface Studio on stage to demo the new XD app on windows 10.
Adobe Sensei
Adobe sensei is a machine learning technology that Adobe is adopting in all of their apps. Machine learning is the next big thing where the software learns and gets better with the data it’s fed.
Adobe Typekit
Adobe has finally introduced marketplace to Typekit with a catalogue of around 10,000 paid fonts. It’s great to have all your font needs fulfilled from one services.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop templates are now available right inside the app. It’s great for those last minute requests when you don’t have time to start your design from scratch.
Adobe stock image search is built right into photoshop and the best new feature is definitely the ‘Find similar’ option for stock photography.
Adobe Stock
A lot of new additions to this. From 4K video footage to 3D models and photoshop templates. Adobe stock is growing into something much better than similar stock websites. And the advantage is definitely using it right within the apps with no need to switch between browser and apps. Replacing watermarked footage is very quick with just a single click.
Searching similar images by using one of your images has been added to Adobe Stock which works similar to Google image search by images.
Reuters editorial images are also coming to Adobe stock which is great news for finding editorial content.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Deadpool was fully edited in Premiere Pro and quite a few in the movie industry are starting to use Premiere Pro and creative cloud. Shows how powerful Premiere Pro is when it comes to Editing. Colour correction for specific elements of the footage is now also available in Premiere Pro.
Adobe After effects
Now you can use basic Cinema 4D tools right with in After Effects. This is great news for people who are not to familiar with 3D but still want include 3D in their work flow.
Highlight of this keynote was definitely the speaker Jason Levine, what a fabulous Jesus looking rockstar creative head. He also made a song about creative cloud and made the whole crowd sing with him. What a catchy tune too.
Adobe MAX is on till 4th November with more detailed workshops happening throughout the day.
You can also watch the entire keynote presentation online (if you’ve got two hours to kill!).
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