Adobe revs up Creative Cloud for 2014 with emphasis on mobile devices
Adobe's new 'Ink' and 'Slide' digital stylus and ruler for Apple iPads.
Adobe has today announced its 2014 strategy for Creative Cloud, its suite of imaging, video document and publishing tools that, until last year, you could purchase outright as the Adobe Creative Suite. Adobe has revealed some interesting evolutionary improvements and additions to many old desktop favourites but clearly the emphasis is on serving what Adobe sees is a massive increase in the demand for increasingly powerful tools for use on mobile devices.
It may surprise you to know that Adobe first unveiled its Creative Cloud strategy as long ago as October 2011. Almost exactly a year ago Adobe released the first Cloud versions of of its Creative Suite and other Windows and Mac desktop applications, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, etc. These arrived in the knowledge that if you wanted to own a licence, outright, to use these applications your last chance was to purchase Creative Suite 6. At its end of life Adobe won't be bringing out CS7, instead you will have to embrace a limited time renewable licence and download everything.
It's probably fair to say that this news was greeted by the majority with dismay and even anger. It was seen as a cynical ploy to extract a premium from loyal Creative Suite Users. Adobe's argument that they were making Creative Suite tools more affordable and even more flexible to use was difficult to accept. But with Microsoft also going down the cloud licensing route with Office 365, albeit without any pledge to stop providing outright purchase options, Adobe has weathered the storm and has reported healthy customer growth in recent months. Many of those who could justify spending a grand or two on one of the off-the-shelf suites realised that Creative Cloud was indeed more flexible and better value over time; you get access to the top versions and more of the Creative Suite line up and assuming a suite has a life cycle of 3-5 years, the sums add up in favour of Creative Cloud. You also get 20GB of cloud storage and services and the use of Behance if you want access to potential customers of your creativity. If you only need on application, there is an pricing avenue for you, but in general if you want two or more applications you will have to pay for the full licence.
The Photography deal
There is one exception; a new photography plan which includes Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, plus mobile and online Lightroom tools and the 20GB online storage and Behance service, for £8.78 per month (full CC licence paid annually is just under £47 per month although if you already own CS3 or later you can get 40% off your first year).
Adobe Photoshop Mix brings some of Photoshop's high-performance tools, like Content Aware Fill, to the iPad thanks to the Creative Cloud doing the heavy-lifting in the background - if you have an Internet connection.
With the Photography licence you also get free access to Adobe's mobile smart device apps, including their new Photoshop Mix app (iPad only to start with) which offers selected finger-friendly Photoshop functionality with Adobe's cloud servers doing some of the heavy computation in the background as long as you are Internet-connected - the demos were actually very impressive.
Smart devices and new Ink and Slide
Adobe says that it sees rapidly increasing demand for creativity tools on smart devices and has even developed some hardware accessories for this market, enter the Adobe Ink and Slide, a digital pen or stylus and a digital ruler. The stylus has a pencil-style tip that lights up in different colours according to the mode it is in. It can be used to draw and paint freehand or in tandem with the ruler it can be used to create precise vector graphics. The industrial design of the hardware looks great and we look forward to trying it out. Slightly concerning is that Adobe aren't saying anything about Android device support for Ink and Slide. You can now buy Ink and Slide in the US for $199 and it will be coming to Europe later in the year.
Desktop application improvements
As Adobe doesn't have to store up developments for periodic product refreshes like it had to with the Creative Suite programme, improvements and additions to functionality of applications can be rolled out as soon as they are ready. Creative Cloud users see their applications evolve over the year. Nevertheless, Adobe was able to show off a number of feature additions and improvements at its preview briefings recently. Photoshop CC now offers an additional Blur Gallery motion effects for creating a senses of speed and motion. A Focus Mask lets you select areas of an image according to how sharp the areas are. There are new Content Aware capabilities which can blend background colours more convincingly. Layer Comps have been enhanced to save time by changing the visibility, position, or appearance of one layer and enabling you to preview the change reflected in all other layers. If you have a touch-screen enabled Windows 8.1 PC or tablet Photoshop CC now embraces swipe and pinch gestures.
On the video side there are performance improvements to Mercury Engine Playback hardware-accelerated video rendering, which both Photoshop CC and Premiere Pro CC can benefit from. There are also improvements to the way your files and supplied resources are stored and accessed from the cloud. Adobe has also improved its Web-authoring tools, Dreamweaver and Muse.
Conclusion
Certainly, if you are at the cutting edge using all the latest features and experimenting with mobile smart devices, well iPads at the very least, Adobe's strategy for Creative Cloud looks interesting, attractive and even fun. It does demand a long term financial commitment; nothing has changed there. Personally, I have been slow to adopt Creative Cloud but the latest updates and exciting smart device app tools, both in software and hardware form, from Adobe are exhibiting a motivational force that I can certainly feel.
