Adobe MAXes Most Creatives In A Room Record

With more than 12,000 registered attendees, Adobe has blitzed the record for the most number of creative people gathered together in one room at its MAX conference in Las Vegas overnight.

Adopting a somber tone early in his presentation, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen offered his condolences to the victims of the mass shooting, which took place in Las Vegas only two weeks ago. Standing in front of the #VegasStrong, which can be seen all over Las Vegas right now, he said he spoke on all of behaves when our thoughts and prayers went out to the victims of such senseless violence.

Apart from the hashtag being prominently displayed across Las Vegas, you’d be hard pressed to notice any difference in the town, which has bravely gotten back on its feet.

Once the brief tribute was over, Narayen got down to business of putting on a dazzling show outlining the creative and marketing software developer’s prowess.

Significantly, Adobe’s chief technology officer Abhay Parasnis had a starring role alongside the executive vice president of the media business Bryan Lamkin.

Parasnis’ inclusion in the two-and-half-hour presentation signalled just how important technology in the company’s success, which has traditionally been more design focused.

The company’s stated mission is to change the world through digital experiences and it’s not hard to believe they’re well on their way to achieving that goal.

At the heart of the business’ strategy is its artificial intelligence engine Adobe Sensei. Announced only last year, the presentation today spent a long time outlining just exactly how the machine has learned already.

Tapping into Adobe’s more than 12 million customers, Sensei observes how users interact with the company’s myriad products and is able to then anticipate what a user will do next and suggest it for them. It promises to make the sometimes bewildering number of choices in a program such as Illustrator that much easier to navigate.

Importantly, Sensei stitches together Adobe’s three main cloud products: Creative, Experience (formerly Marketing) and Document.

The artificial intelligence engine is allowing Adobe to recruit many more users to its once highly specialized tools and opens up a much broader consumer play. Its linking of its various clouds gives it a formidable market position offering companies large and small alike a workflow superiority it refers to as content velocity.

With a market capitalisation of around $US75 billion, a figure which has increased by 50 per cent this year alone, the company is well placed to make a major acquisition to fill the one glaring gap its product offering; an ecommerce platform.

Putting all of that to one side, the company is certainly well placed in terms of adoring fans. Every time a new product announcement was made, the 12,000 strong crowd would woop and holler while giving generous applause. Now that’s customer loyalty!

Here’s the release summarising the product announcement:
Today at Adobe MAX, the Creativity Conference, Adobe unveiled the next generation of Creative Cloud, including four brand new applications, Adobe XD CC for experience design, Adobe Dimension CC for 2D to 3D compositing, Character Animator CC for 2D animation, and an all-new cloud-based photography service, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC. In addition, Adobe announced feature updates to its flagship applications including Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC and Premiere Pro CC, and ongoing expansion of its Adobe Stock service.

All of these updates include capabilities powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning platform, and are the latest in a series of innovations from Adobe that serve modern creative professionals and enthusiasts wherever and however they work. From the rapidly expanding system of mobile-first applications or the recent addition of branded, premium features to Adobe Spark, Adobe is building out a range of fast, flexible solutions for creative projects of all types.

“Adobe continues to lead the creative revolution, driving modernization and innovation that will accelerate the creative process across all platforms and devices,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Today, we unveiled a new generation of Creative Cloud, with a wide spectrum of capabilities—from new experience design, 2D animation and  3D rendering apps to an all-new, cloud-based photography service. These tools enable creative professionals and enthusiasts to express themselves and reach their full creative potential anytime, anywhere, on any device.”

In addition to seeing Adobe’s latest innovation, attendees will hear from the world’s best creative minds including designer Jonathan Adler, actor and director Jon Favreau, photographer Annie Griffiths and music producer and DJ Mark Ronson. MAX also brings together major technology companies such as Microsoft, CDW, Dell, Google, HP and Intel, as well as design-first, creative brands such as Coca- Cola, Airstream, Pantone and Moleskine. A livestream of the keynotes can be viewed on Wednesday, October 18 starting at 9:00 a.m.  PT here.

Accelerating Creativity with Adobe Sensei

As part of this Creative Cloud release, Adobe continues to embed artificial intelligence capabilities across the entire system of applications and services with Adobe Sensei. These Sensei-powered features enable creators to go from concept to completion much faster and bring the power of advanced technology and deep learning to accelerate the creative process.

Next Generation Creative Applications

Adobe XD CC: Developed in open partnership with the design community through a public beta, Adobe XD is the all-in-one cross-platform solution for designing and prototyping mobile apps and websites. Created by designers for designers, Adobe XD delivers the necessary speed, precision and quality to go from static comps or wireframes to fully interactive prototypes in minutes.

Adobe Dimension CC: Previously Project Felix, Dimension gives graphic designers the power and flexibility of 3D with the ease and simplicity of working with 2D. Dimension enables graphic designers to quickly create and iterate on photorealistic 3D images to realize branding and packaging designs in real-world settings.

Adobe Character Animator CC: Previously in beta and launching today, this 2D animation tool helps bring still image artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator to life. Character Animator has been showcased on primetime shows including “The Late  Show” with Stephen Colbert, “The Simpsons” and Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money.” New features include pose-to-pose blending, new physics behaviours and visual puppet controls. Adobe Sensei also helps improve lip-sync capability by accurately matching mouth shapes with spoken sounds.

All-New Lightroom CC Photography Service

Lightroom CC is Adobe’s all-new cloud-centric photo service for editing, organizing, storing and sharing photos – from anywhere. Designed for professionals and enthusiasts, Lightroom CC features a more intuitive user interface, enables powerful editing in full resolution, and automatically synchronizes changes across mobile, desktop and the web. Lightroom CC makes organizing photography collections easier with features like searchable keywords that are automatically applied without the hassle of tagging. And Lightroom CC makes it simple to share photos on social media.

Adobe also announced performance and editing updates to Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC, previously known as Photoshop Lightroom CC, which continues to focus on a more traditional desktop-first workflow. More information about Lightroom CC is available in this press release.

New Innovation and Performance Enhancements Across Flagship Applications

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC: Previously known as Photoshop Lightroom CC, Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC features performance and editing improvements including an enhanced Embedded Preview workflow that enables users to scroll through large sets of photos to select a subset of images significantly faster than before.

Adobe Photoshop CC now offers significantly expanded photography support, major improvements in learning and getting started, and enhanced overall performance.

Adobe Illustrator CC delivers multiple workflow, user experience and performance improvements.

Adobe InDesign CC now offers designers more control over their workflow with an improved user experience that allows them to complete common tasks faster and more easily access the tools and assets they use frequently.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC introduces deep collaboration features, state-of-the-art immersive 360/VR workflows and Responsive motion graphics controls.

Adobe After Effects CC improves the efficiency of motion graphics creation by streamlining your ability to create data-driven graphics and deliver high-quality VR and 3D results. And it does it all faster with GPU performance enhancements.

One-Click Access to Assets and Inspiration

New integrated assets, expanded services and education resources help customers get started and realise their creative potential, including:

Adobe Stock expands its asset collection with the introduction of hundreds of professionally-created motion graphics templates for video users in Premiere CC and After Effects CC. The most comprehensive creative marketplace now has over 100 million assets including photos, illustrations, videos and vectors.

Adobe Typekit now leverages Adobe Sensei to provide a whole new way to search for fonts. Users can submit their own photos of type and find similar fonts available on Typekit. The new Typekit visual search technology is also the first Adobe Sensei-powered service that will be available to third-party developers.

Inspiration and Education: Adobe announces additional investment and expanded resources to help customers get started and realize their creative potential. This includes the launch of AdobeLIVE on Behance, a livestreaming channel where 10 million Behance community members can learn from and inspire each other. The channel now features 24 hours of weekly programming, and will expand to 24/7 programming starting in 2018.

Scaling Creativity and Design for Business

Adobe XD, Dimension and Adobe Stock are being adopted by global brands and agencies to deliver engaging experiences at scale across devices and channels. Design is more critical to businesses than ever before and companies like HP, Boosted Boards, Vice Media, Viacom and Dentsu Aegis are leveraging Adobe XD and Adobe Stock in Creative Cloud. New integrations between Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud, part of Experience Cloud, help businesses deliver content velocity across creative-to-marketing workflows.