This morning, Adobe announced and released major new features and numerous collaboration and productivity enhancements to Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Lightroom, XD, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and more. I know you probably read it on all major sites and blogs, however as an Adobe user, especially a Photoshop user for a long time I’d love to highlight 2 new features. These features, if existed 15 years ago, would have saved me so much time.
1) Select Subject Portrait in Photoshop
I have a photo of me with my normal, terrible hair. That is the benchmark for me. How hard it is to remove the subject from the background. Note, that is a 15 year old photo, so I have been trying to do that through generations of Photoshops. This time, I have to say, it’s the simplest one. Photoshop’s new Select Subject Portrait, powered by Adobe Sensei, makes it simple to choose your friend’s image and get all the complexity of her hair or other details with just one click.
Me and my terrible hair perfectly selected and masked. I hope Adobe Sensei can fix or comb it next time for me :)
2) Match Font update
Match Fonts is a Sensei AI machine learning feature that enables you to identify fonts that appear in your images. Originally released in Photoshop a few years ago, here’s how it works: the AI algorithm detects and recognizes the font in a photograph; maybe you have a picture of text on a wall, in a sign, on the side of a car, etc. In the example above, I have a photograph of some greenery beside a new year’s card with text written on it. The algorithm somehow determines that the pixels in the image are text, figures out what font it is, and then searches through your fonts to find a match for that text. If you want, you can also download a matched font from Adobe Fonts.
There are many more updates for all major applications. I highly recommend that you check them out. Below is a list of links to see each one of the blog posts. I especially liked the updates to Adobe XD as well, including Stacks and Group Scrolling.
- Photoshop
- Photography (Lightroom)
- Adobe XD
- Illustrator
- Video & Audio
- Premiere Rush
- InDesign
- Adobe Fonts
- Adobe Aero
- Substance Alchemist
- Behance & Adobe Live
- Adobe Animate
- Creative Cloud Collaboration Features
Additionally, Adobe wanted to spotlight a few stats around Creative Cloud product usage over the past few months that you may find interesting:
- Photoshop on iPad has been downloaded over 2 million times and customers have created over 5 million cloud documents with Photoshop on iPad.
- Adobe has seen an uptick from social content creators leveraging Premiere Rush to keep up with the growing demand for online video content. The app has seen a 75% increase in monthly active users quarter over quarter.
- Over 1.5 million users started an in-app tutorial in Lightroom last month and over 3 million viewed an inspirational edit.
