Adobe Rolls Out Creative Cloud Versions of Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects
Adobe has revamped its Creative Cloud service and formally rolled out new "CC" versions of many of its major creative desktop applications.
As Adobe announced back in early May, the company is abandoning its decade-old Creative Suite in favor of Creative Cloud. Launched about a year ago, Creative Cloud is Adobe's distribution point for native desktop and mobile applications. Applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro can be downloaded from Creative Cloud to a local computer or mobile device, just like a regular electronic distribution model. However, Creative Cloud, unlike Adobe's past electronic distribution efforts, is subscription-based. Users do not pay a single license fee for an application or suite. Rather, the service allows users to subscribe to and manage their Adobe software, with updates delivered as part of the subscription package. The service also provides storage and an online portfolio service called Behance.
The company has also revamped its education licensing for primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions.
As previously reported, Adobe will continue to support Creative Suite 6 but will not release any future versions of the Creative Suite or any of the individual Creative Suite applications. Instead, the company will only release Creative Cloud versions of those applications.
The first desktop applications released under the CC appellation include Photoshop, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, and Muse — all of which have also received new features and UI changes.
Photoshop CC incorporates features previously only found in the Extended version of Photoshop, including 3D tools. It also gains performance enhancements and adds conditional actions, a camera shake reduction feature, improvements to paths and shapes, and a new Smart Sharpen tool.
After Effects, Adobe's motion graphics and effects tool, also includes several new features, from 3D tools to filters to performance tweaks. Among the new 3D tools are support for importing Cinema 4D files as footage without pre-rendering and a new 3D camera tracker. It also includes a Refine Edge tool, a pixel motion blur filter, and an upgraded Warp Stabilizer tool called Warp Stabilizer VFX.
The other applications have primarily received various UI and workflow tweaks, though they've each received a minor feature enhancements as well:
- InDesign CC, a page layout and desktop publishing tool, also includes a QR code generator and new font tools;
- Illustrator CC includes a new type tool that allows users to manipulate individual characters as if they were objects;
- Adobe Muse CC, another Web design tool, adds parallax scrolling and in-browser editing;
- Dreamweaver CC includes a new CSS designer that provides visual tools for manipulating CSS properties and seeing the results in real time; and
- Premiere Pro CC adds the Lumetri Deep Color Engine, new audio controls, and built-in support for Apple ProRes (encoding only on Mac OS X 10.8), MXF-wrapped Avid DNxHD, Sony XAVC, and Panasonic AVC-Intra 200.
As previously reported, Adobe has also created new licensing programs for the education sector, including the Education Enterprise Agreement (EEA), which provides volume discounts based on the number of FTE staff and faculty at a school, college, or university. As Adobe described it: "The Education Enterprise Agreement program is an easy-to-manage, term-based licensing program that gives educational institutions access to the new CC apps. With this program, institutional customers can have the creative tools they need to be more productive, foster creativity in teaching and learning, and help their students develop essential digital communication skills." Specific pricing was not available at press time.
Individual and team subscription are also available for teachers and students. Plans start at $19.99 per month with an annual commitment. (Teachers and students must register by June 25 to take advantage of the introductory pricing.) A Teams subscription is also available for students and teachers, providing 100 GB of storage and various other services for $39.99 per month.
All of the new applications are available now. Additional details can be found on the Creative Cloud site.