Adobe Issues Major Creative Cloud Update

Adobe today is updating several of its Creative Cloud offerings while launching dozens of new products as well. It is, as the firm puts it, an explosion in creativity.

“Creativity is having a renaissance because it helps us connect with each other, even when we’re remote,” Adobe’s Scott Belsky writes in the announcement. “It helps calm the stress of this turbulent time. And creativity is powerful.”

Here are just some of the updates and new products that Adobe is launching today.

Photoshop. Adobe’s flagship offering is picking up a new Select Subject Portrait tool, powered by Adobe Sensei, which makes it easier than ever to accurately select even the most complex foreground subject—think curly hair—with just a single click.

Lightroom. Lightroom is getting new Local Hue controls that make it easier to make fine-grained changes to things like skin tones without affecting the color of the entire image. Additionally, a new feature called Versions lets photographers experiment with different editing approaches to the same image and keep as many as they like, Adobe says.

Premiere Rush. Adobe’s simple, all-in-one video editing app will soon pick up a new Auto Reframe tool, which transforms a video shot horizontally to a vertical or square format without losing the focus of the action. This feature will be available in a public beta later this month and will ship to all Rush users later this year.

InDesign. A new Share for Review feature in InDesign provides one-click sharing so that designers can choose colleagues who need to review the document. Users can review, reply to, and resolve questions directly in InDesign.

CC Libraries. Adobe is extending its Creative Cloud Libraries into Spark Post, its simple creativity tool for what it calls “sometime-creators.” Now, design teams can share all their company’s approved fonts, colors, logos, and other design assets with colleagues to ensure everyone is using the company’s correct look and feel.

Adobe XD. Adobe’s mobile and web app design tool is getting a lot of new features. Stacks provide a way to arrange objects in columns or rows and set the spacing between them with automatic adjustments. Scroll Groups make prototypes behave more like live websites and apps by adding scrolling animations to feeds, lists, carousels, galleries, and other objects. Design Tokens let designers add custom names to colors and character styles in the Assets panel that are automatically published into downloadable CSS files for developers. And with the new Chart for XD plugin, it’s easy to add data visualizations to designs with just a few clicks.

There’s a lot more. Be sure to check out the Adobe website for more information.