Adobe Unleashes Wave of Imaging Innovation

Photoshop CC for the iPad, Project Aero, Project Gemini, Dimension CC 2.0 and a major update to Photoshop CC.

Today we made the most exciting announcement of my career at Adobe so far — we are expanding Photoshop CC, real Photoshop CC, across devices to enable you to be creative anywhere. Today we showed a preview of Photoshop on the iPad, but we will gradually add new operating systems and form factors when they are ready.

This means you will be able to open and edit a PSD on an iPad, using the same tools you are familiar with on the desktop, and achieve the exact same results from editing operations. Then seamlessly (if you want to) open that same PSD on your desktop and keep going, or complete all your work on the iPad. This is real Photoshop on the iPad, the same underlying code and algorithms you rely on every day, with a reimagined user experience to take advantage of the uniquenesses of the device.

The funny thing about this is, it’s an obvious evolution. Of course, this is what you want from us. But it’s only recently with the beefier power of devices (tablets and phones) that we were able to turn this into a real experiment inside Adobe. Can we actually reproduce real Photoshop on an iPad or phone? And once that experiment produced such surprisingly positive results (the performance kind of blew our minds), we were able to turn it into a formal project. Today, we preview it to the world — and soon we deliver the first version to you.

Here’s what we’re announcing today for the Photoshop portfolio at Adobe:

Photoshop CC on the desktop is the center of the system, and offers unlimited creativity for image compositing, photo editing, designing websites and mobile apps, digital painting, and 3D and AR workflows. This is the same familiar Photoshop you’ve used for years, updated with new features. In addition, we previewed that we will sync PSDs and other content across an ecosystem of new creative applications. Big feature update shipping today. Ecosystem connection will ship in the future.
Photoshop CC on the iPad is the newest piece of the system, bringing real Photoshop to mobile devices with an approachable user experience and the power and precision needed for image compositing. People can use the mobile version of Photoshop on its own or as a partner to Photoshop on the desktop. Preview today. Ships in the future.
Cloud documents is another new piece that makes PSD files accessible across the system. You can open and edit a PSD on an iPad, open and edit the same PSD on the desktop — whatever order suits your creative needs. Photoshop brushes will also be synced with Project Gemini. Preview today. Ships in the future.
Other focused applications like Dimension CC, Project Aero, and Project Gemini each deliver huge and unique benefits themselves, and extend the value of the Photoshop system for you.

- Dimension gives designers accessible 3D workflows. A big update (2.0) is shipping today.
- **Aero **gives designers the ability to create AR experiences. Preview today. Ships in the future.
- Gemini is a focused drawing and painting app for devices like the iPad. Preview today. Ships in the future.

Photoshop in its mobile form, Project Gemini, the cloud document system that connects them all together, and Project Aero were previewed today at Adobe MAX and will ship in the future.

Photoshop CC for the desktop and Dimension CC 2.0 are each shipping big updates today, at MAX 2018.

Each of these is described in this blog post.

Learn more about today’s release of Photoshop here.

Adobe Photoshop CC on the iPad

Recently two Photoshop engineers proposed this crazy idea to try to run Photoshop on the iPad using the real Photoshop code. We told them to give it a try, but don’t tell anyone in case it doesn’t work. Inspired by this, our design team also started to reimagine the Photoshop user experience on a device. A few months later we had “proof of life,” real Photoshop launching on an iPad. Today we revealed it, and much more, to you.

With Photoshop on an iPad, designers and photographers no longer need to be tethered to their desktops. Instead, you can do real work that is powerful, quick, and transformative right on the iPad either as a companion to your desktop, or away. Plus, you can take advantage of the tactile-pencil-and-touch environment to work directly on the canvas using the world’s most powerful creative application, Photoshop.

Open and edit PSDs in Photoshop on the desktop or the iPad and seamlessly sync them between the two.

Edit using Photoshop on the iPad with the same familiar tools you love on the desktop, with the benefits of the pencil, touch, and mobility.

Anything you do on the iPad is seamlessly synced to the desktop, so you can now use the best device for the task you want to accomplish with no compromises. No exporting, importing, converting to different formats, or fixing whatever didn’t properly convert. It all just seamlessly works.

View layers and other key tools in a way that is optimized for the touch screen.

Photoshop on iPad: This isn’t something new, it’s familiar. It’s the real thing.

It shares the same code base as its desktop counterpart, so there’s no compromises on power and performance or editing results.
Creative work you do in Photoshop on the desktop you can also do on your iPad, with the exact same PSD files with the edits right where you left off. We will release a smaller set of features on the iPad first so we can ship the 1.0 version to you quickly, and gradually add the rest over time.
When you open it, you’ll find a toolbar with the core iconic tools and powerful layer system for advanced control. You’ll also find selections and masking, filters, adjustments, and much more.
But we’re completely rethinking the user experience for a modern touch device. You’ll find it familiar, but also adapted in smart ways for the device.
We’ve designed Photoshop on iPad with natural touch gestures in mind to speed up workflows.

Join me on this exciting adventure to expand real Photoshop across devices. To get updates and news about our progress toward the 1.0 release, sign up here.

Project Aero

One of the most exciting new projects at Adobe is Project Aero, which we previewed today in the MAX keynote. It is a new augmented reality (AR) authoring tool that will enable creative people to tell interactive stories with digital content set in the real world. Aero is built for designers and artists so they can create amazing AR experiences without code while achieving a high creative standard. Today we showcased our collaboration with Adidas with a demo of an AR-powered retail store of the future, unveiling the possibilities of immersive design experiences.

Photo courtesy of Pat Lenz and Zuzka Kurtz.

We believe great content and compelling experiences will drive adoption of AR. We hear from our customers every day that they need easy-to-use tools to create these AR experiences. With Project Aero, we plan to empower the world’s designers to make delightful AR experiences that will drive the next wave of consumer adoption for AR.

Aero is currently in development at Adobe with a private beta, which we will gradually open up to more people in late 2019. To get periodic news about Aero, sign up here.

Project Gemini

Over the past year, Adobe has made significant investments for our many customers who paint and draw — last year we announced that Kyle Webster has joined Adobe, bringing his amazing brushes to our customers. Simultaneously, we introduced many painting and brush improvements in Photoshop. This year we have added the amazing new symmetry painting to Photoshop (see below).

Today, Kyle unveiled Project Gemini, a dedicated drawing and painting app for the iPad oozing with amazing new painting and illustration capabilities — new types of paint and painting interactions that will enable you to create digital art that was impossible before. Built on Photoshop’s powerful painting engine, adapted with the latest painting inventions, and modernized for mobile hardware, Project Gemini is a focused drawing and painting app with professional tools in a familiar, streamlined, and easy-to-understand interface.

Content you create in Project Gemini will also sync with Photoshop on the desktop. Plus, your Photoshop brushes will be available to you across both applications, seamlessly synced.

Project Gemini was previewed today at MAX and will ship in the future. Sign up here to receive periodic emails and info about Project Gemini.

Adobe Dimension CC

Go here to download today’s release of Dimension 2.0.

We launched Dimension 1.0 last year as a new tool to help graphic designers incorporate 3D into their workflows. Dimension is the first 3D tool targeted specifically at 2D designers, with a familiar user experience and deep integration with the design tools you already use and love — especially Illustrator and Photoshop. We’ve seen broad adoption — from teams in large enterprise, down to individual designers — for use cases from product mockups, to brand visualization, to creative play. If you haven’t tried it yet, I recommend you do so. We have received extremely positive reviews from customers about how introducing easy-to-use 3D radically speeds up their workflows.

With this release, we made significant improvements to the material system and usability — we’ve introduced a new native rendering engine, giving customers the option to use the Dimension renderer for faster interaction and render preview times. We have also added big improvements to our integration with Illustrator and Photoshop, and support for Autodesk FBX, STL, and Sketchup file 3D-model formats.

Some things to look forward to in this version of Dimension:

Interoperability with key Adobe products and the larger 3D ecosystem:

**Illustrator and Photoshop support. **Big improvements to workflows with Illustrator and Photoshop.
**Support for popular 3D file formats. **Support for Autodesk FBX, STL, and Sketchup file formats so designers can work with files created in SketchUp and other 3D modeling apps.

Greater control over materials and the canvas area, empowering creativity and fine tuning:

**Material layers. **Layer-based graphics and materials system unlocks potential for various effects, such as foil treatments, multiple logos and patterns, and more.
**2D canvas. **The Dimension canvas has been updated to have familiar 2D zooming, panning, and resizing controls.
**Render size print controls. **Using print controls lets you easily configure the size of your canvas based on physical units and print resolution settings.
Usability improvements. Improved depth-of-field controls, camera undo/redo, sampler tool, improved Match Image environment lights.

Rendering and publishing enhancements:

**New Dimension renderer. **Introduced a new native rendering engine, giving users the option to use the Dimension renderer for faster interaction and render preview times.
Multiple render setup. You can now take advantage of saving camera bookmarks in render mode. Easily select the saved views you want to render and set up all of them at once.
Publish to share online (beta). In addition to 2D image renders and layered Photoshop file exports, Dimension now supports publishing for online sharing and commenting (beta). You can now publish a Dimension scene and generate a unique URL to share. Colleagues, clients, or friends can interact with the scene in a 3D web-based viewer.

For more details on what’s new today and in recent Dimension releases, go here.

Adobe Photoshop CC

Learn more about today’s release of Photoshop here.

I’m in my lucky 13th year working on Photoshop, and it continues to be an honor to unveil the team’s work each year. Today is the 20th release of the product (#10 for me!), and we continue our focus on workflow velocity and ease of use, and of course throw in some amazing new capabilities. Take a look:

Auto-Update

First, some practical details about installing and updating Photoshop:

When you click Update or Update All to update your apps in the Creative Cloud desktop app for the first time, you will get a dialog box with an option to keep your apps up-to-date automatically. Select Enable Auto-Update now to enable this feature.

You can also enable auto-update for all apps from preferences or manage auto-update for individual apps.

For more details, see our HelpX site.

Content-Aware Fill

We’re thrilled to announce an improved Content-Aware Fill experience. Now you can choose the pixels to include and exclude from the surrounding parts of a photo to seamlessly fill your image.

We give you a live preview panel of how your pixel selection will determine the final fill, so you can watch the image change as you brush on or erase the source content, all before committing the change. Once confirmed, the non-destructive output setting will automatically create a new layer with the selection, providing the intended visual output, while leaving your original image untouched.

This new Content-Aware Fill is a big upgrade that will give you the advanced controls you’ve been asking for with that powerful tool.

Frame Tool

Have you ever struggled to modify the size of an image? Wished there was an easier way to mask texts and shapes? What do the two even have in common? The new Frame Tool!

The new Frame Tool lets you create a placeholder for an image size or shape, and will auto-scale your image to fit the shape. Additionally, you can convert any shape or text layer into a Frame for easy masking. Simply create a text layer, convert it to a frame by selecting the option from a right-click menu on the Layers Panel, and add your image. An image can come from anywhere: Adobe Stock, Libraries, or drag and drop from anywhere else.

Symmetry Painting

Introducing Symmetry Painting to Photoshop. Use this technique to create mirrored brush strokes along a symmetry axis like the beautiful mandala image above. Last year, we released the amazing new feature as a tech preview*. This year, we unleash it to everyone along with some additional new functionality like radial and mandala painting capabilities.

Watch this video made during our tech preview phase to see just how powerful and creative it is.

For more info about it, read this blog post by Julieanne Kost, also written during the tech preview period.

New Home Screen and Improved In-App Learning

In this version, you’ll find a radically redesigned home screen to make it significantly easier for you to get started, and return to it to open assets. We’ve also added a “What’s New” section in the home screen so you can learn about all the newest features.For customers learning Photoshop, the home screen shows you Learn content and connects to our in-app tutorial system. Plus, we’ve added a tutorial “tour” through a real PSD to help you get started.

Additionally, last year we brought you in-app tutorials. This year, we’ve added a lot more content as well as the ability to learn those concepts using your own assets.

Many Small Changes with Big Impact

Continue to Undo

Yes, it’s true! We’ve modernized undo. With this release, CMD-Z is now a regular continuous undo that moves backward in sequence from the last activity performed to the very first.

Automatically Commit Changes

Now, when you click on a new tool, layer, on the canvas, or off the canvas, Photoshop will automatically commit your changes after a text, crop, place, or transform entry. When in these modes, you’ll no longer have to find the tiny check mark in the top bar, or hit return. Just as you’d expect, in one seamless step, you can commit your previous changes, and select a new tool or layer.

Transform Proportionally

Pixels, images, and Type Layers will now transform proportionally by default. You won’t have to hold down the shift key while scaling an image anymore.

Double-Click to Edit Text

Wish you could double-click a Type Layer to edit your text? So do we! You can now double-click a Type Layer with the Move Tool to begin editing text.

Hide Layer Reference Point

We know it can be challenging to get started in Photoshop. That’s why we’re making improvements to help minimize accidental moves. With that in mind, we’ve hidden the reference point that used to show up as a target in the middle of a layer.

Prevent Accidental Panel Moves

We’ve added a new panel lock, which will prevent any accidental moves while you work. When you’re ready to move your workspace around, just unlock the panel. Additionally, we’ve made the UI more resistant to unintended moves.

Blend Mode Preview

See changes to the blend mode appear live on the canvas while scrolling over the different modes, without having to commit first.

Match Font with Japanese Fonts

Search Japanese fonts with the Match Font search function. Match Font is a function to analyze texts included in selected areas of images. Using Adobe Sensei, it detects similar fonts from system or Typekit fonts.

Five New Southeast Asian Scripts

We have added support for five new Southeast Asian scripts to Photoshop: Thai, Burmese, Lao, Sinhalese, and Khmer. Photoshop is also bundling a small assortment of Southeast Asian fonts, which will allow our users to take advantage of this feature. These additional scripts are available when you select “Middle Eastern and South Asian” text layout through the Type preference or paragraph panel fly-out menu.

Top Customer Requests

You asked and we listened. Here are just some of the requests we’ve addressed in this release that came directly from you and from the feedback site.

Distribute spacing (like Illustrator): “Ps can already distribute objects by evenly spacing their center points. But if your objects are different sizes, you get uneven spacing between them.” You can now distribute the spacing between the objects.

Math in number fields: “Ps has many entry fields where you need to type in a numeric value and sometimes I need to do math.” You can now type in simple math operations like 200/2, which gets calculated as 100 and inputs that final value into the field. This is very useful when trying to quickly get to a multiple of a value, or divide something.

Ability to see long layer names: “If your layer name is long, Ps cuts off the end of the name with ellipses …” Now Ps will retain the beginning and end of your layer name, but put the ellipses in the middle of the layer name.

**And a few more things like **… Flip Document view, Lorem Ipsum text, and customizable KBSC for Select and Mask.

For more details on what’s new today and in recent Photoshop releases, go here.

Give Us Feedback

Once you’ve updated to the newest version of Photoshop, don’t forget to leave us feedback about your experiences. The quality of Photoshop wouldn’t be what it is today without our passionate and loyal customers around the world. Giving us regular feedback helps us to find and fix issues that we may otherwise not know about. We are listening.

Here are a few ways that you can provide feedback:

Wow — you made it to the end

This is a long post (for you and for me) because we’re releasing a lot of stuff.

Today is by far the largest product announcement and launch experience of my career on the Photoshop team, and at Adobe. We have never delivered so much amazing new innovation to customers on the same day. I can’t wait to see what you create!

Enjoy,

Pam Clark
Senior Director, Photoshop Portfolio

* What is a tech preview?

Occasionally, Photoshop ships with technology preview features that you can turn on and try out. These features are not yet production-ready, so exercise discretion while using them. Learn more about tech previews here.