Computer software company Adobe has announced today a number of new initiatives for both its photo editing tool, Photoshop and its metaverse-creating program Substance 3D. The program developer have also announced further updates for data analysis system Adobe Analytics and their customer-data platform, Real-Time CDP.
Adobe Supercharges Photoshop and Lightroom with Multi-Surface Updates
Adobe today unveiled major updates to Creative Cloud applications Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, delivering significant new features, benefits and value to customers. Today’s updates deliver new editing and usability enhancements to Photoshop on the Web (beta), leverage Adobe Sensei AI and machine learning to help simplify complex workflows for creatives and streamline cross-device (desktop, web and mobile) collaboration workflows for Photoshop and Lightroom users.
“These innovative, AI-driven features for desktop, web and mobile make it fast and easy to create great images anywhere with Photoshop and Lightroom,” said Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president of Adobe Creative Cloud. “We’re continuing to add new capabilities to Photoshop on the Web, making it not only a great way to collaborate on projects but also to facilitate key edits in your browser.” Belsky unveiled these updates from a customer event in Paris. They include:
Neural Filters in Photoshop put the power of cutting-edge AI and machine learning into the hands of creatives. Built to help lower barriers to creativity, Neural Filters have emerged as one of Photoshop’s most popular AI-powered tools. They dramatically reduce complex workflows into easy-to-use, transformative solutions for photo editing and manipulation. Over 300 million Neural Filters have been applied to creative work by more than four million creatives to date.
Adobe today previewed a powerful new Photo Restoration Neural Filter designed to help users bring old or damaged photos back to life by detecting and eliminating scratches and other minor imperfections in seconds.
Adobe also announced updates to Photoshop on the web (beta) including:
- New, easy-to-use editing features like Curves, Refine Edge, Dodge and Burn, and Smart Objects conversion;
- Mobile browser access for fast and easy reviewing and commenting;
- Onboarding and learning content for new creatives and citizen creators who were previously unfamiliar with Photoshop; as well as
- Performance and UX enhancements
Today’s updates to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic deliver powerful new editing capabilities and time-saving workflows for photographers. Notable additions include:
- The ability for photographers to quickly trim and apply edits to video clips in Lightroom using the same editing sliders and presets used on photos (desktop and mobile);
- AI-powered Adaptive Presets for applying different effects to distinct parts of a photo (Lightroom desktop, Lightroom Classic, Adobe Camera Raw);
- Key workflow enhancements for adjusting intensity of presets (Lightroom desktop, mobile, web, Lightroom Classic) and comparing photos side-by-side (Lightroom desktop);
- AI-powered Auto Red Eye Removal (Lightroom desktop and Adobe Camera Raw)
- New Premium Presets (Lightroom desktop, mobile, web, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw); and
- Expansion of Remix capabilities to Lightroom mobile and web.
For complete details on the Lightroom Ecosystem release, visit the Adobe blog.
The Photo Restoration Neural Filter is coming soon to Photoshop on the desktop, and Photoshop on the web is available at https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/photoshop to anyone with a Photoshop subscription.
The latest releases of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are now available and can be downloaded via the Creative Cloud Desktop app. Updates to Lightroom mobile are rolling out globally starting today and can be downloaded in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
As Adobe continues to harness the power of AI, it is guided by principles of accountability, responsibility, and transparency.
Adobe Advances Metaverse With Powerful New 3D and Immersive Experiences
Adobe have also announced major updates to Adobe Substance 3D – a suite of tools and services that support 3D content creation from the beginning to the end of your project – expanding on the tools’ extensibility and performance. Updates include a 3D Materials SDK for developers, powerful new plugins, and native Apple M-series chips support for Painter, Designer, and Sampler. The company also previewed innovations from Adobe Research focused on new ways to design, create, and deliver engaging and realistic immersive experiences, and showcased how leading brands are using Substance 3D tools to build unique customer experiences. Additionally, Adobe announced that Substance 3D applications will be free to teachers and students worldwide.
“Smart brands are getting “metaverse-ready” by growing their 3D and immersive content creation capabilities. That means that creative artists with expertise in 3D have a wealth of opportunities,” said Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president of Adobe Creative Cloud speaking at a customer event in Paris. “These innovations provide new superpowers to the rapidly growing number of creative people using Substance 3D.”
The growing importance of 3D and immersive content has contributed to strong demand for Substance 3D tools across gaming, entertainment, and e-commerce industries. 3D content creation also continues to grow into a core skill for creative professionals as more brands prepare for the metaverse and other immersive experiences. Substance tools have seen a strong 100 percent year-over-year growth, with now hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.
Adobe announced multiple updates across the Substance 3D Collection, including:
- Native Apple M-series chips support for Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler, enabling 3D content creators to work faster than ever before. All three tools are part of the Substance 3D Collection, the only end-to-end solution for 3D visuals and experiences.
- To make the power of Substance materials as accessible as possible, a new Substance 3D Materials SDK allows developers to write their own plugins and use the Substance 3D Material and Model engines inside other applications. A new Substance 3D Automation Toolkit provides features for automating Substance files-based tasks.
- A Substance Materials Plugin in Photoshop joins an existing plugin for Illustrator – which is already used by hundreds of thousands of Illustrator users – and helps save users time and eliminates numerous steps needed to create texture and design variations and 3D effects. The latest update to the Substance 3D Plugin for Unity enables artists to load, apply and modify Substance parametric materials directly inside the Unity engine, a development platform for creating 2D and 3D multiplatform games and interactive experiences.
- Expanding capabilities into 3D sculpting workflows, Adobe will also release Substance 3D Modeler to customers later this year. Modeler introduces an intuitive approach to 3D modeling that frees users from previously complex and technical constraints. The desktop and VR tool enable a vast range of creative possibilities, including the creation of concept art, sketching and prototyping, the crafting of detailed characters or props, or even sculpting an entire scene.
“Incorporating Adobe Substance 3D into our product design and development processes has unlocked a new level of creative freedom for the HUGO BOSS team,” said Sebastian Berg, Head of Digital Excellence at HUGO BOSS AG. “The emergence of the Metaverse presents exciting opportunities for the fashion world, and Adobe Substance 3D tools are an integral part of our approach, as we execute on our plan to develop 80% of our collections on a digital basis by the end of this year.”
“Visualisation is one of the keys to success in accelerating decision making, strengthening the link with creative direction and reducing our time-to-market by validating the product in the marketing touchpoints,” said Guillaume Meyzenq, SVP Consumer Category Running, Outdoor & Sportstyle, Salomon. “The Adobe Substance tools allow us to reinforce the user experience, offer us a lot of flexibility and a reduced adoption time for the designers by importing digital assets from other tools.”
“The mix of simplicity and raw power of what I can do in Adobe Substance 3D Modeler is staggering. It’s the gold standard for two handed sculpting,” said Bay Raitt, a 3D graphic novelist and principal UX designer at Unity. “With a set of perfectly chosen controls, Modeler is deceptively simple to use, but as your skills improve it is worthy of deep mastery for even the most dedicated sculpting and world building tasks.”
Adobe Research, a world-class organisation with research scientists, engineers, artists, and designers who shape experimental ideas into innovative technologies, today previewed research projects designed to power future Metaverse experiences:
- New AR and 3D shopping tools from Adobe Research and Adobe Commerce bring rich online information to the in-store shopping experience. Customers can scan products on their mobile devices to access personalised shopping insights, product price comparisons, reviews, and product details. This helps customers make better in-store purchasing decisions and gives retailers the tools to adapt to customers’ needs in real-time. B2B companies can also use this technology to optimise warehouses.
- Adobe today previewed a new intelligent method for optimising load time while maintaining visual fidelity for optimal AR customer experiences. The new AI-powered approach allows brands to deliver a high-quality AR experience in a fraction of the time it would normally require by prioritising AR content that is most likely to be relevant to the viewer first based on their movements within the physical space. This will help brands alleviate the common challenges stemming from slow load times on large AR scenes. This technology will be integrated into Adobe Aero later this year.
Native Apple M-series chips support for Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler and the Substance Materials Plugin for Photoshop are available today. The Substance 3D Plugin for Unity will be available later this month, and Substance 3D Modeler, currently in beta, will be available later this year.
Starting this summer, Adobe will expand free access to Substance 3D applications to teachers and students worldwide. Universities subscribing to the Creative Cloud All Apps plan already have free access to Adobe Substance 3D applications. Additionally, Adobe is partnering with schools on 3D and immersive curricula including RUBIKA DESIGN Valenciennes Design School in France and the ArtCenter in Pasadena, California.
Next-Generation Adobe Analytics Delivers Customer Insights From Streaming Media and the Metaverse
Adobe have also announced new services in Adobe Analytics, delivering a single workspace for brands to unify data and insights across all media types, now including the metaverse and streaming media. With global brands adopting Adobe Analytics, Adobe also introduced a new service to seamlessly transition data from other analytics products while preserving historical compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
“Delivering personalised customer experiences is a top priority for every business in every industry, and the key to making it happen is connecting real-time insights across all aspects of the customer journey,” said Amit Ahuja, senior vice president, Adobe Experience Cloud platform and products at Adobe. “With support for Metaverse and Streaming Media channels, Adobe Analytics continues to lead the industry as the only true omnichannel analytics solution for customer engagement.”
Adobe Analytics is the solution of choice across industries, providing insights for brands to understand the effectiveness of cross-channel experiences and marketing campaigns. In the retail sector, 9 of the top 10 U.S. brands rely on Adobe Analytics to understand shopper journeys that move from online to in-store. In travel, 8 of the top 10 hotel chains and 7 of the top 10 U.S. airlines lean on Adobe to enhance digital services as demand picks back up. Adobe Analytics is also leveraged by 8 of the top 10 financial services institutions, 9 of the top 10 media companies and 8 of the top 10 healthcare companies. It is widely used across the public sector and educational institutions as well.
As consumer habits change and more daily life moves online, brands have had to connect more data sources in areas such as e-commerce, social media and support centers, to form a clear picture of customer engagement. At the same time, a growing audience around streaming media and immersive experiences has created new opportunities for forward-looking teams. Adobe is introducing new innovations to help brands capitalise on these trends:
- The Metaverse: Adobe Analytics is at the forefront of supporting data from emerging channels, including voice assistants and the connected car. Today, Adobe is previewing support for Metaverse analytics, as more brands begin to embrace immersive and 3D experiences. With a rearchitected platform, Adobe can now seamlessly extend the reach of Adobe Analytics to new and emerging channels. In the Metaverse, brands will be able to measure and analyse specific events, such as the volume of engagement with 3D objects and immersive experiences, as well as collecting interactions across multiple metaverses. This data can then be combined with insights across other channels like the website or mobile app, to understand changing consumer preferences. With Adobe Creative Cloud and immersive design tools like Adobe Substance 3D, Adobe is uniquely positioned to help brands design, deliver, measure, and monetise experiences in the Metaverse.
- Streaming media: While streaming is a key investment for the entertainment industry, other sectors such as retail and banking continue to prioritise video and audio content. Adobe is introducing new capabilities today for brands to understand how streaming fits into the overall customer journey. Through Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), teams can tie digital media consumption to engagement on other channels like social media, websites and offline channels. A retailer, for instance, can see the types of content that drive social engagement and/or in-store activity, to deliver personalisation and drive retention efforts.
- Partner ecosystem: Adobe now has hundreds of third-party integrations with top technology solutions including AppsFlyer, Branch.io, Brightedge, Genesys, Hootsuite, Invoca and Medallia. Each is accessible in the Adobe Exchange marketplace, and Adobe now has a community of over 4,300 active partners across technology providers, system integrators, agencies, and developers. This enables Brands to combine data sources from chat bots to call centers to advertising campaigns with Adobe Analytics behavioral data to understand customer experiences holistically.
Adobe introduced a new service today that makes it easy for businesses across industries to switch to Adobe Analytics:
- Seamlessly bring data together: Brands are sitting on mountains of data, as the digital economy continues to expand. With the bulk data insertion API now available, teams can move or activate any volume of historical data into Adobe Analytics. It covers any online or offline channel, allowing brands to transition data sources from point-of-sale devices, CRM systems and mobile applications.
- Intelligent Data Mapping: Data preparation is a major hurdle for brands during the migration process, as teams often have to reformat their data to fit a new analytics platform. Adobe Analytics is providing flexibility for brands to bypass the preparation work, while also avoiding data destruction. As data comes through, Adobe Analytics preserves the underlying structure, while also suggesting new ways to measure the customer journey. Brands can also retroactively apply dimensions to historical data, such as new attribution models.
New Adobe Real-Time CDP Innovations Drive Personalisation For Global Brands
Today, Adobe also announced innovations for its customer data platform (CDP), Adobe Real-Time CDP, to help brands transition from third-party cookies to first-party data. As businesses across all industries adopt Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe is introducing enriched customer profiles with commerce, AI powered targeting, new privacy and security tools and Segment match across channels.
Adobe Real-Time CDP, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, now delivers real-time data with more than 24 trillion audience segment evaluations and over one petabyte of data processed on average per day, helping global brands deliver personalised experiences to millions of customers in real-time. Customers include Change Healthcare, Coles, Dick’s Sporting Goods, EY, General Motors, Henkel, Major League Baseball, Panera, ServiceNow, Telefonica, The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, T. Rowe Price and TSB Bank.
“Businesses that invest in putting their first-party data into action are the ones that will deliver personalised experiences and beat the competition,” said Anjul Bhambhri, senior vice president, Adobe Experience Cloud at Adobe. “With changing consumer expectations in the digital economy, the time to move away from third-party cookies is now and brands need to adopt a first-party data strategy to stay relevant.”
“We needed a complete picture of every person who banks with us, from their history to their needs, to how they move through the customer journey, and that meant centralising our data on a single platform,” said Mike Gamble, director of analysis and design at TSB Bank, “The rich insights we get from Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform informs our personalisation strategy to enrich customers experiences. Most importantly, we can deliver that richness consistently online and offline because our decisions are based on every interaction in that customer’s past.”
“The Home Depot made early investments in providing omnichannel shopping experiences, and these digital and physical assets continue to guide our strategic priorities,” said Melanie Babcock, vice president of Integrated Media at The Home Depot. Our expanded partnership with Adobe will enable us to enhance the customer experience even further, driving personalisation at scale and further optimising The Home Depot experience across online and in-store. Adobe Real-Time CDP enables brands to gather first-party data and employ consent-based practices to build rich and actionable customer profiles, segment audiences and deliver personalised experiences to customers. Innovations include:
- Enrich customer profiles with Adobe Commerce (Magento): Now available in beta, retail brands using Adobe Commerce can link first-party commerce data to Real-Time CDP and other Adobe Experience Cloud applications. This allows brands to use insights from shopping and browsing behavior to build rich customer profiles and deliver more personalised shopping journeys.
- AI for Advanced Targeting and More Efficient Pipeline Building: Now available, predictive lead and account scoring for Real-Time CDP B2B (Business-to-Business) Edition and Real-Time CDP B2P (Business-to-Person) Edition enable brands to create a more efficient pipeline by identifying people and accounts likely to become sales opportunities using Adobe Sensei-powered intelligence.
- Built-in privacy and security tools and Healthcare Shield: Now generally available, Real-Time CDP is HIPAA ready with Healthcare Shield, a new Adobe Experience Platform offering, empowering healthcare brands subject to HIPAA to securely leverage certain types of sensitive personal data to deliver personal experiences throughout the healthcare customer journey. Real-Time CDP will also introduce new privacy and security enhancements designed to manage customer data. These enhancements include encryption control, tools to automatically honor policies around consumer consent or preferences, and attribute-based access controls – critical functionality for organisations operating in highly regulated industries and for those that want to ensure that data sets are being used as intended.
- Segment Match in Real-Time CDP: Now generally available, Segment Match enables Brands to manage and activate audience data across multiple channels and use Adobe’s governance and consent tools to manage and enforce how audience data is collected, and for what purpose.
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
