At its annual Max conference, the creative software giant reveals online versions of its flagship apps, along with the Creative Cloud management console. New features come to Lightroom and Premiere Pro, too.
Few people thought an app as complex and compute-intensive as Photoshop would be possible on the web. But Adobe today launched a web version of not just Photoshop, but also Illustrator, along with several new online experiences. Some qualification is required, however. As when Adobe launched Photoshop on the iPad, it’s not the entire set of Photoshop and Illustrator tools, but the web apps let you open documents and do basic editing. They also let you comment on and share work with collaborators. The Photoshop web app is labeled as beta, and Illustrator on the web is an invite-only private beta. Adobe Photoshop on the web offers core editing functionality. The web versions rely on the same Cloud Documents required in the iPad versions of the Creative Cloud software. Adobe has already taken the Creative Cloud management app to the web. Two completely new online features you access from that interface join the web versions of old standbys: Creative Cloud Spaces and Creative Cloud Canvas. Creative Cloud Spaces Creative Cloud Spaces is an online repository for your team’s assets, with collaboration and shared content in one interface. You can access it either from the Creative Cloud web interface or within Photoshop, Illustrator, XD, and Fresco on desktop or iPad. Creative Cloud Canvas is what it sounds like—an online collaborative workspace. Contributors can, according to Adobe’s blog, “place shapes, text, stickers, images, and working files from other Creative Cloud apps” onto a canvas that a team can collaborate on in real time. Creative Cloud Canvas Adobe dogfooded the new web tools with its own staff to get feedback on them. “The Adobe Design team has worked with these new tools over the past few months, and they’ve changed the way we work together,” says Adobe’s Vice President of Design, Eric Snowden. “Putting teamwork and collaboration at the heart of Creative Cloud democratizes access and creates transparency around creative projects like never before.” Application Updates: Photoshop and Illustrator But it’s not all web and cloud at Max. The good ole installed programs on desktop and tablet see some nifty new features as well. Photoshop gets a more powerful Object Selection tool with hover auto-masking. That’s what it sounds like: You go to the Object Selection tool and it uses Adobe’s Sensei AI to detect all objects in the image.
