Adobe Max 2019 Recap

by Taylor Slattery | December 1, 2019

Adobe Max wrapped up last month and there were a lot of exciting announcements made. If you’re an iPad user or have been looking to make the leap to a more portable work environment, 2020 is shaping up to be the year to do so. Adobe has recently been shifting a great deal of focus towards developing apps for the iPad, a space they’ve been notably absent in. In addition to the recently released Fresco, Adobe’s painting app that utilizes Adobe Sensei AI to mimic physical mediums, a fully functional Photoshop was finally released for the iPad. The layout and tools have been redesigned with the tablet format in mind. The app doesn’t yet include the full suite of tools found in the desktop version, but according to Adobe, they are on the way. For the time being, the app includes the most commonly used tools allowing desktop Photoshop users to complete tasks on the go, a definitive step in the right direction.

2020 will also mark the release of Illustrator for the iPad. Like Photoshop, the tools and functionality of Illustrator have been completely redesigned for the iPad. Based on the demo, the ability to use gestures and its smart predictive abilities make it a strong contender for even the desktop equivalent. Both Photoshop and Illustrator make use of cloud-based files that will allow creators to access their documents on both iPad and desktop environments, making for seamless transitions between working on the go and in the office. If you are a creative cloud subscriber, both apps will be available to you, with app-specific subscriptions available to those who are not.

Another app that was released during the conference is Adobe Aero. Aero bridges the gap between 3D and 2D, allowing users to use flat Photoshop layers as well as 3D files from Dimension to create interactive AR environments. The app requires no coding knowledge and also pairs nicely with 3D assets created in popular third-party software like Cinema 4D.

Photoshop CC also received a fairly robust update, with the most-talked about feature being the new object selection tool. In function, the new selection tool is similar to the magic wand tool, though in use it’s identical to the rectangular marquee tool. Simply drag out a box around the object you’d like to select and Adobe’s AI creates a tight selection around it. Manually selecting shapes in Photoshop is an art in and of itself, and any tool that can expedite the process is a welcome addition.

Thanks to apps like Instagram TV and TikTok, an increasing amount of video content on mobile devices is being viewed in portrait mode. For content creators, finding a way to make a single piece of content work for both landscape and portrait viewing can be a challenging task. A new update coming to Adobe’s Premiere Pro aims to address this problem. It uses AI to keep the most obvious content in frame. This will save editors from having to constantly reframe footage filmed in landscape to fit in a vertical frame.

Adobe is developing several new tools in the realm of AI and gave brief demonstrations of some of them at Max Sneaks. One such tool is called About Face. It’s able to detect when an image of a face has been manipulated digitally. There were also a couple of audio-oriented tools, called SoundSeek and Awesome Audio. The former of which is able to identify and remove unwanted filler words, and the latter which can improve audio quality by removing background noise. Two animation-specific tools were also teased. Go Figure uses motion tracking to borrow movements from recorded footage and quickly animate the movement of characters in After Effects. Sweet talk performs a similar function but syncs audio to the movement of character’s mouths, eliminating the need for lots of tedious animation. A new Photoshop camera app is also in development. It makes use of Adobe’s Sensei AI to help create a more approachable experience for those who are not comfortable editing photos in Photoshop. It will also include a collection of artist-submitted filters, similar to what we’ve seen on Snapchat and Instagram.

Another future edition coming to the creative cloud is the ability to live stream from within the apps themselves. Unlike popular third party streaming software like OBS, the screen recorder will give special consideration to the tools being used and other software-specific insights users might like to see. The goal being to bridge the gap between online and traditional learning environments where instructors are able to teach by doing.

It was quite an eventful conference and with all that Adobe announced, 2020 is sure to be an exciting year to be a creative.

Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.

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