10 Creative Cloud tutorials for 2015. The 2015 release of Creative Cloud came with a whole set of new features, solutions and improvements that help bring to life our vision of a complete creative platform that connects mobile apps to desktop solutions in a seamless way. But we know that from understanding the breadth and depth of things you. This week (June 15) Adobe unleashed the latest version of Creative Cloud: Adobe CC 2015. This has been a much anticipated release for many designers and other creative professionals! There have been some substantial updates to many of the Adobe Applications, but also some completely new products and services have been introduced as well, such.

1. Creative Cloud 2015 System Requirements
2. After Effects Creative Cloud 2015

Adobe has announced and released its annual update to its Creative Cloud suite of tools. There is definitely something in it for everyone, as the suite now includes around two dozen applications across several platforms — 15 on the desktop and at least 8 on mobile — and encompasses just about every media. Here we’ll focus on some of the highlights, and then give you a rundown of the other enhancements.

Incremental improvements in Photoshop

Second to Lightroom (we wrote about its 2015 version when it launched earlier this year) the application of most interest to our readers is Photoshop. Adobe has provided a nice grab bag of features and performance improvements in the 2015 version, although nothing earthshaking. If you are a Creative Cloud paid subscriber, of course you get them all for free. If you aren’t already, then it is unlikely any are large enough to convince you to suddenly sign up.

For starters, there is a new Dehaze tool, which helps bring out contrast in low-contrast scenes. It is similar in functionality to the ClearView tool in DxO’s Optics Pro. Adobe didn’t have pre-release code we could test with our own images, but based on the sample images shown here, it does a great job on cutting through fog, haze, or other atmospheric effects that lower contrast. We’ll be putting it through its paces now that the application is available, and paying special attention to whether it avoids nasty artifacts when used on images with varying amounts of haze and texture.

Adobe Dehaze sample before and after images show how it can greatly reduce the effect of fog

A more subtle enhancement in Photoshop 2015 is the ability to add noise to Blur Gallery effects, in order to create more natural looking results. Also, recognizing the growing importance of creating assets for mobile devices and multiple targets, Photoshop has added a Device Preview capability, as well as support for multiple art boards in a single file. Performance improvements in Photoshop 2015 include speedups of 120x for the Healing Brush and Patch tool (over the CS6 version). Android users get some love as well, with formerly-iOS-only Photoshop companion apps Color CC, Shape CC, Brush CC, and Photoshop Mix all being made available this month.

CreativeSync: Design once, use everywhere

Adobe has been working really hard to make it easy for its users to move from device to device. The latest iteration of this is CreativeSync, that allows you to synchronize any of your files and assets across devices. It is paired with an integration of Creative Cloud Libraries into Adobe’s major design applications, so that you can make use of your brushes and other assets easily from any of your Creative Suite programs. Adobe has extended this capability to its new Adobe Hue application (previewed at NAB as “Project Candy”) that allows videographers to capture images of uniquely lit scenes and create “Looks” out of them, for use in their video projects.

DIY Character animations

One of the coolest new features of CC 2015 is the Character Animator. It is an extension to After Effects that allows you to quickly record animations of 2D characters (Puppets), including facial expressions, lip movements, and other actions. It uses your webcam to track your head movement and facial expressions, and map them onto the puppet. Similarly, your microphone is used to move the puppets mouth as if it was speaking or singing the same words. For other actions, mouse-enabled control points are provided.

The result is a simple and fun way to create fairly reasonable cartoon animations involving one or more characters. After following a quick Getting Started tutorial, I was able to successfully animate the included puppets by changing my facial expressions, speaking, and dragging non-facial control points with my mouse. The heavy lifting part of Character Animator is the creation of appropriate puppets, if you can’t find one that fits your needs. You can create them in Photoshop or Illustrator, but unless you find a similar character to start with online, all the various pieces have to be created and instrumented.

Adobe Stock: Super-integrated stock library, mixed bag for photographers

With CC 2015, Adobe has completed its integration of royalty-free (RF) stock library Fotolia. Its 40 million RF images will be easily accessible from within Adobe’s design applications including Photoshop and Premiere Pro. What makes Adobe Stock unique is the extent of the integration. First, if you download and edit a watermarked preview image, when you purchase a license your edits are transferred to the full version. That’s an amazing time-saver for anyone who needs to do comps or proofs to submit for approval before licensing images or graphics for their final product. Second, as part of Adobe’s CreativeSync capability, you’ll have access to your licensed images from all your devices.

Adobe stock puts 40 million royalty-free images at your fingertips from within your Adobe design application

Adobe promotes the undoubtedly large (it calls it vibrant) marketplace of Adobe Stock as a great way for creative professionals to make money selling images and graphics. I’m not sure at all about that. Bulk subscription plans for Adobe Stock allow customers to purchase images royalty free for only pennies each. Adobe will be sharing 1/3 of its revenue with the creator, but in some cases that will be less than $.10 per license. Unless an image goes massively viral (and somehow avoids being pirated in the process), it would take licensing thousands of images to equal a solid rights-managed license from a more conventional stock agency. This trend is happening with or without Adobe participating, but I do find it disturbing that Adobe doesn’t at least offer a rights-managed option as a gesture to supporting photographers and artists equally with the web and graphic designers who benefit from the inexpensive availability of quality images.

Feature rundown

Some of the other interesting new features in Creative Cloud 2015 include support for charts and infographics in Illustrator, improved color workflow, and smoother jump cuts, across the video applications, and better online publishing support in InDesign. Muse gets more partner widgets, access to Typekit fonts, and upgrades to its standard’s compliance. Dreamweaver, once the most popular website creation tool, isn’t left out either. It gets improved support for responsive design — a must in today’s highly-mobile world — better device previews, and improvements to its code editor.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud 2015 release is available for immediate download. Pricing remains unchanged, at $50/month for the entire suite, and $10/month for the Photographer plan that gives you Photoshop, Lightroom, and associated mobile apps. There are other options for educational use and corporate licensing. All the applications have full-functioning trial versions in case you want to see what you’re getting.

Since we launched Creative Cloud in the spring of 2012, our vision has been to give creative professionals everything they need for their modern, connected creative process. The 2015 release of Creative Cloud delivers on that vision of a creative platform that lets you work seamlessly across desktop and mobile devices—with deep integration between our mobile apps and our desktop apps, a connected assets-based workflow, a vibrant and growing marketplace, and community features built right in.

What’s new?
Of course we never hold back on bringing you the latest cool features. This Creative Cloud release includes new Adobe magic and incredible performance boosts to your favorite desktop apps. The companion mobile apps bring that Adobe magic to your devices, and now there are even more ways for you to use the powerful, connected mobile-to-desktop workflows to create your best work. Due to popular demand, we’re adding two new iOS mobile apps to Creative Cloud, and Android support for four of our most popular mobile apps.
And to further accelerate your creative process, today we’re introducing Adobe Stock—our brand new service with deep connections to Creative Cloud and integration into your favorite desktop apps. Search, manage and purchase from 40 million curated Adobe Stock images directly within the new CC desktop apps.

At the heart of Creative Cloud is Adobe CreativeSync—an exclusive technology that ensures that your files, photos, fonts, vector graphics, brushes, colors, settings, metadata and stock images from Adobe Stock instantly appear in your workflow right where you need them. CreativeSync lets you start your creative work on any device and seamlessly pick it up on another. From initial idea to finished work, CreativeSync is the engine that lets you create wherever you are.

More Adobe magic and huge performance improvements in fifteen desktop apps:

• In Adobe Photoshop CC, Artboards lets you make multiple layouts of different sizes in a single document, and the new Device Preview shows how designs and interactivity will look and adapt on mobile. The Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Patch tools have been turbocharged with Mercury Graphics Engine enhancements, so you get results up to 120 times faster than you would if you were using CS6. And be sure to check out the new Photoshop Design Space (Preview Technology), a streamlined experience optimized for designing websites and mobile apps.
• Adobe Illustrator CC is the fastest version yet—ten times faster and ten times more precise than CS6. Thanks to a new Mercury Performance System boost, you can pan, zoom and scroll faster and more smoothly, and zoom into your artwork to create and edit with incredible precision. And should your system crash before you’ve had a chance to save, just relaunch the app and your work will be restored.
• Adobe InDesign CC gets its own Mercury performance surge with twice as fast zooming, scrolling, and paging through complex documents. InDesign CC now also lets you publish and distribute documents with a single click.
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC includes Dehaze, a stunning new feature (also available in Photoshop CC) that lets you eliminate fog and haze from images—even underwater shots. Or you can add haze for artistic effect.
• Adobe Premiere Pro CC continues to lead the video industry and this is our best release yet. The intuitive and powerful Lumetri Color panel helps you make instant color corrections, and Morph Cut magically smooths and polishes jump cuts and dialogue pauses to deliver a polished interview. With brand new Creative Cloud Libraries integration, Premiere Pro CC takes full advantage of CreativeSync technology so assets like color “Looks” and graphics flow seamlessly between Adobe mobile apps and Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, Photoshop CC and more.
• Adobe After Effects CC dramatically improves your productivity with new support for Creative Cloud Libraries so all of your assets are at your fingertips. Uninterrupted Preview allows you to adjust a composition’s properties and even resize panels without interrupting playback. Make sure you also check out the groundbreaking new Character Animator, which tracks your movements via webcam and transposes them onto a 2D character.
• Adobe Dreamweaver CC reduces the effort to create mobile websites with support for responsive design to create production‐ready websites that dynamically adapt to various screen sizes, and includes the ability to preview and test websites on multiple devices in real time.
• Adobe Muse CC has instant access to the fonts in Typekit, making it easier to get your web designs done faster. Adobe Muse can also integrate blogs, shopping carts, and more using new widgets downloaded from the Library panel.

Meet Adobe Stock
We know that Creative Cloud members are avid users and creators of stock imagery so we’re thrilled to introduce the Adobe Stock marketplace.

What makes Adobe Stock so unique?

• First, Adobe Stock includes 40 million beautiful, high-impact photos, illustrations and graphics covering virtually every subject, so you can jump-start any print, web or mobile app project.
• Next, there’s the deep integration of Adobe Stock with Creative Cloud and the CC desktop apps that you rely on. You can launch Adobe Stock directly within CC desktop apps, add watermarked images to Creative Cloud Libraries and then access and work with images across multiple desktop tools such as Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, After Effects CC and Premiere Pro CC. We’ve made it incredibly simple to work with watermarked images in comps.
• Finally, when you’re ready to license an image for finished work, you can do it directly within the desktop application you’re working in. Any edits you made to the watermarked image are magically applied to the purchased full‐resolution image (thank you CreativeSync) saving you loads of time going between your comp and finished design.

Adobe Stock is available starting today in 36 countries and 13 languages and stock.adobe.com is a beautiful and easy- to-use standalone web site where you can purchase, download or sell stock images. While anyone can purchase Adobe Stock, an exclusive discount for Creative Cloud members lets you save up to 40% on the “10 images per month” plan. If you’re simply looking for one perfect image, pricing begins at $9.99 and we also have plans for power stock users.

For more details, read “Adobe Stock: Shaking Up The Stock Content Market.”

A new era of mobile-to-desktop connections
Since Adobe first introduced our family of Creative Cloud-connected mobile apps, we’ve championed mobile’s importance to the creative process. Today, we’re thrilled to broaden our platform support, and add more apps to the family.

By popular demand, Adobe Shape CC, Adobe Color CC, Adobe Brush CC, and Adobe Photoshop Mix are now all available for Android in the Google Play Store.

(formerly Project Candy) makes it effortless to capture and share production “looks” that combine quality lighting and color schemes for video, film and broadcast. Now the light and colors captured with an iPhone camera can be reflected across any video footage in Premiere Pro CC or After Effects CC.

Adobe Preview CC gives Photoshop CC designers precise, real‐time previews of their mobile designs.

Creative Cloud 2015 System Requirements

Creative Cloud Libraries are more powerful than ever
The power and potential of Creative Cloud Libraries—to access images, colors, type styles, brushes, and files when and where you need them—is now even better, and available from more apps with support for Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC. Integration with Adobe Stock lets you download royalty‐free images and vector graphics directly to Creative Cloud Libraries for effortless managing, sharing and use of stock content. We’ve also made Creative Cloud Libraries more powerful with support for Linked Assets, which allows you to update an asset once and automatically incorporate those changes within every document or project.

After Effects Creative Cloud 2015

Get the Creative Cloud 2015 release now
Today’s updates to CC desktop tools, mobile apps, and services are immediately available to Creative Cloud members. You can see all that’s new in the Creative Cloud 2015 highlights videos.

If you haven’t tried Creative Cloud yet, you can try all of the latest features with free trials of our desktop apps, or get started by capturing your ideas and inspiration with one of the free mobile apps. Even if you recently tried any of our apps, you can try them again for another 30 days; we’re excited about all the innovations and we want everyone to get the chance to take the new apps for a spin.

We think you’ll love everything that’s new, and we can’t wait to see what you make.