Adobe at its Max 2021 on Tuesday announced updates to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Fresco, and Photoshop Express. The company also introduced updates to the Content Authenticity Initiative to help combat visual misinformation and protect digital rights of content creators.
Photoshop and Illustrator are getting greater interoperability and tons of new features to enhance your creativity, Adobe announced. It announced the updates to Photoshop and Illustrator at its Max 2021 virtual conference on Tuesday. Alongside Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe updated Fresco with a Motion feature. Lightroom has also added premium preset packs, while After Effects has added features including Multi-Frame Rendering and Speculative Preview. Photoshop Express is also getting features including a Makeup toolkit. There are also updates to Content Authenticity Initiative — the programme that Adobe announced two years back to help combat visual misinformation and protect digital rights of content creators. Adobe has improved Photoshop on desktop with an updated Object Selection Tool that lets you select an object by just hovering over it on the image. There is also a new Mask All Objects option in the Layer settings to let you generate masks for all the objects detected within your layer with a single click. Additionally, Photoshop has included new Neural Filters that use the company’s Sensei AI machine learning to provide an enhanced photo editing experience. These new filters are currently available in beta stage, though the company has promised to improve them over time on the basis of user feedback. One of the most interesting beta Neural Filters is Landscape Mixer that helps users to create new scenes by combining two landscape images. There is also a Colour Transfer filter that transfers the colour from a reference image to an original one to provide a distinct touch and feel. For realistic composites on the basis of machine learning inputs, there is a Harmonisation filter. It adjusts the hue and luminosity to create new results. Adobe has also introduced some new public filter releases that include Depth Blur, Superzoom, Style Transfer, and Colourise. Gradients on Photoshop have also been improved with three different mode types, namely Classic, Perceptual, and Linear. Photoshop has also added support for Apple’s Pro Display XDR to provide full, high dynamic range, along with more richness. The MacBook Pro (2021) models are likely to get better photo editing through the update as they come with the Pro Display XDR. The new MacBook models and other Apple devices that are based on the company’s M1 chips have also received an improved Export As functionality on the latest Photoshop version. It is touted to be faster than evern and built on top of a new set of export APIs to provide better colour profile handling and side-by-side comparison between export settings. Adobe has also announced better interoperability between Photoshop and Illustrator by allowing copying of vector shapes such as rectangles, polygons, circles, lines, and compound paths from Illustrator to Photoshop. “We also have support for compound paths, shapes, using Pathfinder, and clipping masks. Additionally, groups and layers are pasted into Photoshop as closely as possible as authored in Illustrator,” the company said in a blog post. Photoshop has also received improved language support for type layers that have unified typographical support for scripts and languages across the world, including Arabic, Hebrew, Indic scripts, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. In addition to changes aimed at desktop users, Photoshop for iPad has been updated with support for Camera Raw files.
