Adobe Max 2019: all the top announcements

At the kickoff keynote for Adobe Max, the company’s massive annual creativity conference, 15,000 designers and creatives cheered as Photoshop on the iPad was unveiled onstage. The long-anticipated app had been teased since last year’s conference, and the air in the Los Angeles Convention Center was filled with excitement as attendees finally got to try it out in between workshop sessions and panels hosted by inspirational speakers. But online was a different story, as negative reviews poured in on Twitter and YouTube, confirming early reports that the app was missing key features and felt unfinished.

On YouTube, the first search results for Photoshop on iPad populate videos calling the app “disappointing” and “bad for colorists.” One gets straight to the point, with the title, “RANT: Photoshop for iPAD SUCKS”. The sentiment is the same on Twitter, with artists questioning why the app is missing features that competitors like Procreate and the Affinity suite already offer on the iPad, and for a one-time fee, no less.

Adobe is developing live-streaming features that are built directly into its Creative Cloud apps, the company announced at its annual Adobe Max creativity conference. A beta version of the feature is currently available to a whitelisted group of users on Adobe Fresco. The feature gives users the option to go live and share a link for anyone online to watch and comment on their streams.

Chief product officer Scott Belsky compared the experience to Twitch but with an educational component that could filter videos for users who want to learn how to use specific tools.

Adobe is previewing a bunch of experimental features that could one day come to its apps, including several that use AI to manipulate images and audio.

The features were revealed during Adobe’s Sneaks event last night at the company’s annual Max creativity conference, and this year, the features made heavy use of the Adobe’s Sensei AI platform. Sneaks is where apps like Adobe Fresco and features like content-aware fill were first previewed, so there’s a good chance that some of these tools may appear in a Creative Cloud app near you in the future.

Adobe is previewing an R&D feature for After Effects that can automatically track human movements and apply them to animations. The body tracker detects human body movement in source videos to generate track points for 18 joints across the arms, torso, and legs, which can then be transferred to the character that’s being animated. Similar to how Adobe’s Character Animator can track facial expressions, the feature could be a quick way to create 2D body animations.

The feature can also create a contour mask around the body, which can be used in a variety of ways, like video color grading and highlighting the foreground. It can also be used to easily create an outline around a subject you want to remove with content-aware fill, which automatically fills in a selection based on its surroundings. The feature is also useful for adding motion graphics or other objects to the tracked body — for example, if you want to animate a scene in which the characters play basketball, you can make it so that the basketball stays tracked to the character’s hands.

Adobe is updating Photoshop CC today with a handful of new features, the highlight of which is an exceptionally handy new subject selection tool. The new tool, which now takes the top spot under the Magic Wand tool, lets you drag a box around an object, and Photoshop will automatically create a selection around the borders of the object it thinks you’re highlighting. That could be as simple as a box or as complicated as a fluffy dog.

If you’ve ever spent time carefully mousing around the edges of an object or person you need to edit in a photo, you’ll know why this new tool will be such a huge help. It can be a time-consuming process, especially if you need to get a clean selection. Things like hair can be particularly hard. We’ll have to see just how good Photoshop’s AI is at getting that right, but anything close would still be a very helpful start. Adobe says it’s improved edge selection from the prior version of this feature (which was tucked away in a menu and could only select what it believed to be the subject of an image, not any object of your choosing).

Adobe has announced a partnership with TikTok that will let Premiere Rush CC users publish to the platform from within the video editing app. This makes Premiere Rush the first third-party app that can upload content directly to TikTok.

Premiere Rush is an all-in-one mobile spinoff of some of Adobe’s more powerful video editing software. Originally debuted in 2018, it’s meant to be used for quick, on-the-go editing, tailored for YouTubers and other online creators. Essentially, the app lets you shoot video, edit it, and then optimize the export for various platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and now TikTok. One of those export options is the aspect ratio. Depending on the platform it’s intended for, you can make the final video square, portrait, or even drill down to choose a 9:16 ratio, which is one of TikTok’s most popular aspect ratios.

The long-awaited Photoshop for iPad is available to download today, and to keep the momentum going, Adobe is announcing that it’s also developing Illustrator for the iPad, to be released by the end of 2020. The vector graphics program has been optimized for the tablet and features core Illustrator tools like paths and typography, in addition to some new tools developed specifically for the touch experience.

Similar to how Photoshop on the iPad has its Cloud PSD files, Illustrator on the iPad will have Cloud .AI files that can be synced across Creative Cloud and opened from either the desktop or iPad. Cloud documents can be downloaded to the device and made available offline, so you can continue to work on your files in situations where you don’t have Wi-Fi, like on airplanes.

Adobe’s new Auto Reframe feature, which uses artificial intelligence to automate the process of editing and cropping video for various social platforms, is now available in Premiere Pro, the company announced today as part of its slew of product releases at the annual Adobe Max conference.

Adobe first detailed Autoframe earlier this year, and it works by analyzing individual frames and ensuring that a square or 16:9 crop doesn’t cut off the action or result in an awkward framing job.

Adobe is launching a free AI-powered Photoshop Camera app, available now to a select group of users as a limited preview for iOS and Android devices. The camera uses Adobe’s artificial intelligence platform, Sensei, to recognize the subject in photos — whether it’s a selfie, landscape, or food — and automatically suggest which image filters to apply. Filters can be used on the screen in real time, or applied to images taken from the camera roll. The app will feature filters from select artists, and users in the limited preview will be able to create their own.

Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis told The Verge that while powerful apps like Photoshop and Lightroom exist, users have to first get over the learning curve of photo editing. Photoshop Camera aims to simplify this task, automatically making adjustments in the viewfinder based on the technical content of the photo like dynamic range, tonality, and scene type — so that everyone, not just professionals, can make the right edits to their photos. That’s not to say that the app doesn’t offer manual image adjustment features for users to fine-tune photos and make nondestructive edits — there’s a settings tab that lets users adjust details like shadows, highlights, vibrance, and exposure.

Adobe is releasing its augmented reality app Aero today at its annual Max conference. The free iOS app lets designers build AR experiences without coding knowledge. Instead, the app makes use of Adobe programs, letting users import 3D files from Dimension and 2D layers from Photoshop and Illustrator to create interactive experiences.

Aero is meant to be intuitive for designers without 3D design experience, letting users build AR scenes inside the app with step-by-step instructions. The app can also be used with third-party software like Maya and C4D. Users can place scalable objects into scenes viewed through their phone or tablet cameras, and add animation triggers that react to touch. Artists can also add interactive experiences by drawing the path of motion for an object to follow.

Nearly a year after it was first announced, Photoshop for the iPad is finally here. Adobe is unveiling the app at its annual Max design conference today, and it has published a blog post celebrating the launch of version 1.0. The app has been redesigned for the context of a mobile device and includes many of desktop Photoshop’s core tools, particularly around compositing, retouching, and masking. Not everything is here, but Adobe says this first version is just the starting line.

“This is the beginning,” writes Photoshop product manager Pam Clark. “The first version of Photoshop on iPad is focused on ... common tasks and workflows that we know will be useful for most Photoshop users.” Adobe is careful to note that more features will be added over time, as the company’s labeling of the app as “real Photoshop” led to some early reports of beta testers ending up disappointed that the software wasn’t what they had hoped for.

Adobe Fresco — the company’s drawing and painting app that had originally launched earlier this year on the iPad — is coming to Windows, the company announced today alongside a slew of other news. Like the iPad version, the Windows version of Fresco is free for Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers or $9.99 / month for non-subscribers.

According to Adobe, the first version of Fresco for Windows is meant for pen devices, like the Microsoft Surface Pro or the Wacom MobileStudio Pro.