Adobe has announced some interesting updates to its Creative Cloud suite but perhaps the most exciting is the changes that are being made to Adobe Camera Raw.
Adobe Camera Raw is the raw file editing software that comes with Photoshop and is part of the Photography Plan which cost £9.98/$9.98 per month. It uses the same engine as Adobe Lightroom, which is also included in the Photography Plan.
The new user interface looks much cleaner than the previous one and it’s possible to hide the image name on the thumbnails to make the preview larger. In addition, the thumbnails can appear at the side of the main preview or along the bottom of the screen.
Adobe has also decided to move the tools which until now were arranged at the top of the screen. Instead, they are on the right side next to the sliding controls. It’s designed to make everything a bit more intuitive and while it will take some getting used to, it looks great.
In addition, the crop tool now rotates the image when it is rotated, making it easier to see that you’ve got the edit correct.
Adobe Photoshop: Select Subject Portrait
Anyone who regularly shoot portraits will be interested in the Sensei-powered Select Subject Portrait. It still uses the same Select Subject control, but Photoshop is now tuned to recognise portrait subjects to make it easier to mask people photos for selective editing.
Adobe Lightroom
In Lightroom, Adobe is promising some significant speed improvements.
Both Lightroom and Photoshop also get a new Hue control in the local adjustments tools . That means you can adjust the Hue using a gradient or brush if you want to target just the area that needs editing.
Usefully, the update also enables version creation so you can save multiple versions of the same image. Clicking on the Versions button reveals the existing versions and enables you to create new ones.
Adobe is also extending the ability to contribute to the Discover destination to enable others to learn from your work. Users will be able to see images from other Lightroom users and see the edits that they made to transform the original image to the final version.
Video
As well as integrating access to stock audio files into Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe has added a few nice enhancements to its easy-to-use Premiere Rush video editing app. Of these, Auto Reframe looks to be of the most useful for anyone looking to publish their video to different platforms.
Auto Reframe allows you to select the main subject and keep it centred within the frame whatever the aspect ratio.
There will also be a Pan and Zoom tool that adds movement to still images by automatically animating the scale and position of the image over time.