Is there an inner filmmaker inside of you just itching to get out? Maybe they’re keen to embrace animation and VR? Well good news then: Adobe is ready.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that content — things like photos and video and animation — were actually fairly static. You watched them on your devices, and you didn’t connect with them, at least not like the way you can now.
My my, how things change.
These days, the content consumption that we have made available to us is just as interactive and exciting as the content creation available to filmmakers, to photographers, to designers, and ultimately to creators, because with the advances in computer technology — in screens, in virtual reality, and these tiny supercomputers we’re all carrying around with us all the time — it can be easy to forget that technology is providing so much to shape and warp our lives.
If you happen to be a creator of these sorts entertainment and edutainment experiences, that means you have a whole bunch more things to play with, and while it’s exciting for people to view, it’s just as exciting for you to play with, as you have more options for expressing your ideas with.
Quite a few of the creators out there would be putting their attention into products released by Adobe, and that’s hardly no surprise given the breadth of software produced by the brand in order to let you bring those ideas to life, and this year the feature list has expanded a bit more to let you have even more fun and take advantage of the newer technologies.
For instance, the previously previewed Project Felix has now gone final and had become Adobe Dimension, a creative little 3D tool that allows folks who may not be super familiar with 3D the opportunity to blend the digital 3D world with that of the 2D.
Have a product that you need to show inside a 2D piece of art you’ve worked on? This will do that, potentially making those Photoshop jobs a little easier.
Speaking of Photoshop, it now gets more brushes as Adobe acquires the KyleBrush website and its owner Kyle T. Webster joins Adobe to make brushes that that little more realistic for Photoshop. Lightroom now connects with Photoshop better, complete with a a way of letting you browse your Lightroom photos more easily, while Camera RAW can pick colour ranges specifically in the RAW file and change the colour settings more easily.
And if you’re doing that whole 360 degree VR thing, Photoshop can now edit them.
In fact, if you happen to be doing more VR, both Premiere’s video editing and After Effects post-effects will offer tools for those, as Premiere gets the ability to edit VR from inside a VR helmet, while After Effects handles both VR and 3D, and does so with the help of a graphics chip (if your computer happens to have a dedicated graphics chip). Adobe announced that recently, and it hasn’t taken long to see the company roll it out, making us excited to see what creators can get to work on.
Adobe also has a cool animation tool for people to play with that has come out of beta, and it’s a very cute one. Previously used on “The Simpsons”, it’s called Adobe Character Animator, and it will let you attach your character art to a skeleton and use your computer’s webcam to match your face to the character’s face. Ever wanted to make your own animated show? Well now it’s a little easier, you just need to start with art.
And if you happen to never use any of these apps, but you do rely on Lightroom for your photo collecting, organising, and processing needs, a heads up because “Lightroom Classic” is what your app has become.
It will still be around for some time to come, but Adobe will also have a cloud edition of Lightroom made available to help make images editable from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or even a web browser.
That’s called Lightroom CC, and it aims to get the cost down for photographers and photo enthusiasts who like working online, providing 1TB of backup storage and Lightroom CC for a little over $14 per month locally.
A 20GB option will still be available for the same monthly price which includes Lightroom CC, the desktop-bound Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop CC, with those prices the same whether or not you’re a student, teacher, or just some regular person who loves editing photos.
Everything else, however, will just be a regular part of the CC packages, so if you have one of those as it is, you’re about to get a few updates.
