Reviews |Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro updates announced

Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro updates announced

News

Adobe has announced a raft of updates to its Creative Cloud software with an emphasis on the increasing the speed and ease of creation, easier collaboration and use of emerging technology, platforms and formats. More AI powered features are being rolled out across Creative Cloud to help automate boring, repetitive and complex tasks.

The most exciting developments for photographers are the changes introduced to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom with new Sensei-powered features. Photoshop for desktop gets some improved selection tools that enable complex objects to be selected simply by hovering over the the relevant part of the image. It’s also possible to remove an object and apply content-aware fill with one click so it looks like the object was never there.

Photoshop for iPad will also get Remove Background to isolate a main subject from its background and Content Aware Fill is set to make it easier than ever before to remove unwanted objects from images.

Photoshop and Lightroom both benefit from machine learning which enhance their ability to recognise subjects. It’s even possible to mask all the objects in an image and Photoshop’s Object Selection tool can recognise finer hair for better subject selection in portrait images.

Lightroom also gets more advanced AI powered masking and the new Select People tool can automatically detects a human then create a mask for each aspect such as their facial skin, body skin, eyebrows and eyes – even differentiating between the whites of the eyes, the pupils and the irises. Objects can also be selected simply by scribbling over the subject in the image or dragging a selection box around them. Once that’s done, Lightroom refines the selection automatically.

There are also presets that can be used to make one-click enhancements to images, for example, to enhance eyes, whiten teeth, smooth hair and darken eyebrows.

Adobe is also introducing a beta version of a new ‘Share for Review’ feature to Photoshop. This is designed to make it easier for photographers to work collaboratively with others. Files can be shared to allow co-editing or a version of a file can be shared for review. Comments from the review are automatically shared with the creator.

Adobe Premiere Pro updates

Adobe Premiere Pro, the popular video editing software gains flexible alignment controls, the ability to bulk-edit titles in the timeline, Motion Graphics templates that are two times faster than before and support for the Arri Alexa 35 camera.

Frame.io

Frame.oi was recently incorporated into Adobe Creative Cloud for easier collaboration in video creation. Camera to Cloud was introduced to enable sharing direct from the camera to the cloud, and at Adobe Max, Adobe has announced integrations with Red Digital Cinema cameras and Fujifilm cameras.

With Red cameras the integration allows rapid sharing of video files without the need to transport storage drives, so the editing process can start earlier than normal. With the new Fujifilm X-H2S, images can be directly uploaded to Frame.io in the background, creating an instant backup or allowing image editors or touch-up artists to get to work quickly in Lightroom or Photoshop.