Creative professionals who want to work seamlessly across both desktop and mobile devices will want to take note of today’s announcement here in Los Angeles that the latest release of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Creative Cloud includes nine new mobile apps that will bring the company’s marquee products — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Premiere — to mobile devices.
The major version release includes a number of new features for the 13 desktop tools that make up the Creative Cloud suite as well as introducing support in Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC for the touch screens of Microsoft Windows 8 devices, including the Surface Pro 3.
The key to this new integration Adobe has forged between desktop and mobile is an all-new Creative Profile, a collection of existing project files, creative assets and other capabilities that move with a designer from app to app and across devices. Creatives can “start projects on mobile and finish them on the desktop,” Scott Morris, senior marketing director of Creative Cloud, said in a media briefing last week. “All these (mobile) apps work on their own but are deeply, deeply connected to the desktop” so work is no longer done in silos, Morris said.
During the briefing, Adobe demonstrated what I thought were some wickedly cool new capabilities, especially a new category of what the company is calling “capture” apps. For example, designers can take a picture of anything in their environment — a brick wall, a tree in autumn, a sunset — and capture the colours in that picture for use in their work. Similarly, a high-contrast photo of any object — a piece of furniture, an animal, or a hand-drawn font — can be converted into vector art and used in a number of the Creative Cloud tools. The same approach can be used to turn a photograph into a brush that is then used to paint within one of the tools.
Adobe is also getting into the third-party app business, announcing the public beta of a software development kit that will let developers create mobile apps that connect to Creative Cloud. And the company is levering the popularity of Behance, its portfolio showcase for creative work, by introducing Creative Talent Search that it hopes will expose creatives to job opportunities.
The new Creative Cloud release was unveiled at the company’s AdobeMAX conference that runs in Los Angeles today and tomorrow.