Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 review: A meaty update – for some

Last year’s Creative Cloud update was the most significant since the inauguration of Adobe’s subscription payment model, so it’s somewhat predictable that 2015’s “milestone” release has been less extensive.

That’s not to say the applications haven’t benefited from some useful updates, but the biggest development this year doesn’t relate to the suite’s major software applications. Instead, the most significant addition in Creative Cloud 2015 is a new service that plugs into those apps: with Adobe Stock, Adobe is for the first time getting into the stock photography game.

Adobe Stock and Linked Assets

If the bank of images, illustrations and vectors in Adobe Stock looks familiar, there’s a good reason. Its 40 million or so images come directly from Fotolia, a stock image firm acquired by Adobe earlier in 2015. It won’t have had much chance to stamp its own ethos on the content just yet.

Rather, much of the work so far has been on integration with the Creative Cloud apps, and in this respect, Stock works in a similar way to Typekit. At its simplest, you can carry out a keyword-based image search from the Adobe Stock website, and then download images in the browser.

While this is possible with any stock-image website, with Adobe’s offering you can carry out searches directly from within the applications you’re working in. Search results appear in a web browser, but once selected, images are imported into your Creative Cloud Library folder, which can be accessed directly from within the CC applications themselves.

Adobe Stock isn’t free to Creative Cloud subscribers. Single images cost £6 each, while the basic subscription costs £20 per month for up to ten images; these aren’t prices that will scare other providers – not yet, at least.

Stock’s big selling point, however, is that users are able to download and work with free watermarked images from within Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, then update those images seamlessly with the full-resolution, non-watermarked versions, by simply clicking the “License image” option in the Library panel. 

That’s certainly an improvement over most stock-image workflows, but Adobe’s system needs some work. For instance, the web interface is basic, yet it still manages to confuse. If you click on an image for a closer view, the option to save directly into your libraries disappears. And, while working with watermarked photos is fine, it isn’t as effective a system for working with vectors and illustrations, as you can’t drill down into the individual components and remove or tweak elements until you purchase the photos.

In another cross-CC change, Adobe is introducing a feature called Linked Assets in 2015’s release. This builds on CC’s existing Libraries features, allowing users to keep commonly used graphics up to date across multiple projects. Edit the graphic, save it into your library and, as long as that graphic has been placed as a linked item, it will instantly update across all the projects in which it’s been used. 

There are improvements to CC’s sharing options, too, with Adobe adding the facility to email public URLs pointing to individual assets stored in your libraries. You can even send links to entire libraries if you want to.

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 and Adobe Lightroom CC 2015

With all the work going on in Stock, it’s perhaps understandable that the major applications haven’t received as much attention. Thus Photoshop’s big new feature isn’t new at all – it’s inherited from Illustrator.

Artboards allows you to set up several, differently sized workspaces within a single PSD file. It’s a feature aimed at those designing artwork for several device types at the same time – for an app and a responsive website, for example.

You get presets based on popular devices and screen sizes, plus the option to define your own custom artboards, should the need arise. The most powerful feature of Artboards is its  ability to work in conjunction with the new OS X-only Device Preview app, which can pipe previews from specific artboards directly to USB-connected iPhones and iPads for a real-time, real-world preview.

Both Photoshop and Lightroom gain a new tool as well. Dubbed “Dehaze”, this comes as part of Camera Raw, and proves remarkably adept at adding clarity to photographs that are low on contrast. It can also be used to add haze to an image for a more dreamy quality. Note, however, that those who purchase the standalone Lightroom 6 product won’t receive this update; it’s for CC subscribers only.

Elsewhere, there’s an overhaul of the Layer styles box, with which you can add multiple instances of the same effect to a layer – allowing the creation of multilayered drop shadows, for example. The Photomerge tool can now take advantage of Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill feature to plug in those tatty curved areas that appear along the top and bottom of multiphoto panorama shots. The Blur Gallery tools gain the ability to add noise for more naturalistic results.

There’s also an interesting preview feature that showcases Photoshop working with an interface entirely developed in HTML5. Dubbed Design Space, it’s essentially a cut-down version of the current Photoshop UI – too simple and unresponsive in its current state for serious use, in fact – but, ultimately, its inclusion could be Photoshop’s most significant update in years. In a world increasingly moving to the use of entirely online, platform-independent tools, could the ultimate end-game for Creative Cloud be online apps? I’d like to think so.

You can read our full Photoshop CC 2015 review here

Adobe Illustrator CC 2015 and Adobe InDesign CC 2015

So, the photographic applications benefit from a decent number of new features; the rest of the core apps haven’t been so lucky, however. Headlines for Illustrator, for example, include a performance boost and a (currently) limited update to the charting tools. 

The former comes thanks to improvements to the Mercury Playback Engine and support for GPU acceleration, allowing real-time click-and-drag panning and zooming – just like Photoshop, in other words.

The new Creative Cloud Charts feature is part of Adobe’s “Technology Previews”, and as such, will remain unfinished for the foreseeable future. As the names suggests, this isn’t a conventional upgrade to the application’s existing capabilities. Instead, Creative Cloud Charts is a hybrid, cloud-based service, which rather peculiarly requires chart values to be entered in a browser instead of a traditional dialog box.

The graphs themselves appear in Illustrator as normal, but this isn’t a graphing tool in the normal sense. In fact, it’s aimed specifically at the creation of infographics, with the ability to scale graphics based on values rather than plain bars or columns. 

Finally, for Illustrator at least, the application gains a crash-recovery feature, similar to that of InDesign. If you run out of battery mid-task or Illustrator crashes, you can now pick up where you left off when the app restarts.

InDesign’s major new feature is Publish Online, another Technology Preview, which allows you to share documents over the internet via the browser. Available through the File dropdown menu, this mirrors your InDesign document to a publicly accessible URL, and is able to preserve even the most advanced features – such as animations and embedded video – all using the magic of HTML5.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015

Like Photoshop, Adobe’s video-editing powerhouse gains a couple of big new features and a handful of smaller changes. 

The major changes focus on colour workflow. Premiere gains the real-time video scopes previously only available in Adobe’s SpeedGrade application, and Adobe has also added a new set of colour-correction tools via the Lumetri Color panel. This opens up more refined colour correction to videographers and film editors.

Slightly less universally important, but nonetheless useful in certain circumstances, is the new Morph Cut feature. This uses face tracking to remove material in interview sequences, and smooth out jump-cuts by interpolating (morphing) between frames, with the idea that you don’t need to apply a distracting crossfade or cut to B-roll. It works well, too: depending on the mobility of your subject’s face and head, it can be tough to tell where the transitions are if you’re not looking for them. 

Adobe After Effects CC 2015

After Effects takes a similar tack to Premiere Pro, with one enormously practical, yet rather dull, update and a couple of more eye-catching changes. The first will have an enormous impact on anyone who spends their days creating and applying effects in After Effects: at last users can make changes to an open project – adjusting parameters and so on – while a preview is playing, without it pausing.

The Face Tracker and Character Animator features are a bit more fun. Face Tracker, as you might expect from the name, allows you to apply effects to people’s faces within a clip and have them follow that face around the frame. It’s handy if you need to blur out a child’s face in a news clip, for example, but it goes deeper than that: individual features such as the eyes, nose and mouth can also be tracked.

Intriguingly, that data can then be exported for use in the new Character Animator application, which is currently in preview. With this application, you can either use captured facial information from After Effects to animate 2D characters’ features, or use your webcam to capture facial movements and apply them in real time. 

Apps, other updates and verdict

There are other changes of note, including Dreamweaver’s improved tools for responsive website design, the integration of Typekit with Adobe Muse and the introduction of the Adobe Photoshop Mix, Brush CC, Shape CC and Color CC mobile apps to the Android platform. In most cases, the other improvements are small and incremental. Yet it continues to amaze me that Adobe can find anything at all to add or make better; it’s applications are already so powerful, and Creative Suite so vast and all-encompassing, that it’s increasingly difficult to determine from where the next killer update will come.

Perhaps features such as the new HTML5 Design Space interface, Creative Cloud Charts and the move into stock photography point the way. Adobe is slowly but surely shifting its behemoth online; it can’t be long before the whole package follows suit.