New Features for Adobe Users of Creative Cloud Announced Today

The information is out and here are the details.

For All Users: Photoshop and Illustrator now supports Retina displays, what is called HiDPI.

For Creative Cloud Users: The rest of the updates are for users for Creative Cloud users only. As Adobe announced earlier with the onset of Creative Cloud, users would get early updates as they are released, rather than waiting for the next version of the application. Today, Adobe is showing that they are keeping that promise and releasing new features as the engineers finish them.

Photoshop Updates available today:

  • Conditional Actions. Actions now can contain if/then statements. This makes it nice for running an action on a batch of images and having the results change depending on the image, for instance, if the image is horizontal or vertical and you’re trying to put your watermark on the bottom right corner. Conditional actions can help you with this.
  • Liquify and Blur Gallery as Smart Filters. By changing a layer to a smart object, you can now run the Liquify or the new Blur Gallery filters (like Iris Blur and Tilt Shift Blur) as non-destructive filters. That means you can go back and change your settings and even reverse your settings and your original file is never harmed.
  • Apply Blur Gallery Filters to movie clips. I’ve written about how to write a batch action to blur a series of images and then creating a movie clip from that, but now you can even run the blur filters right on a movie clip, right in Photoshop.
  • CSS in Photoshop. Import and export CSS code to and from Photoshop. This is a great tool for Photoshop users who design websites, or who need to match colors and pieces of to websites.
  • Crop Tool Refinements with width/height/resolution, crop to front image, and other new workflow timesavers.
  • 3D enhancements including improved live (OpenGL) previews of shadow effects and additional control over illumination using 32-bit color picker to create glow effects.

Muse Updates available today:

For those users of Muse (like me), with only being 6 months old, it already has had some awesome updates, and more are coming today. As of today, you can now design specifically for tablets and phone size screens, use the swipe features of those devices, and your website will detect and deliver the appropriate content automatically.

For those unfamiliar with Muse, it is a great tool for making an interactive website without coding. I’ve always designed my own websites and started years ago with complete coding, and moved to better and better programs as they’ve come out. My latest portfolio website was completely designed with a pre-release version of Muse.

Muse is one of the applications available as a part of the Creative Cloud.

Team Memberships:

For those businesses with multiple employees that need to use Adobe products, of perhaps you have contractors that you need to provide access to Adobe products, there is now a Team version of Creative Cloud, and it’s easy to give new members a ‘seat’ or cancel existing seats. You just pay a monthy fee for each seat.

Collaborations:

Syncing features have been updated to allow easier collaborations and sharing of files across teams as well as non-team uses that have been given access.

How to Update Today

Click ‘Update’ in your Adobe Application Manager (usually top of the screen for Mac users), or open Photoshop/Illustrator and click Help > Updates. For Muse updates, just open Muse and you’ll be asked to install the new update.