Adobe MAX 2022: Changing Lanes

In October 2022, the annual Adobe MAX conference returned with both live and online sessions, rolling out the latest Creative Cloud apps and services. When I covered MAX last year, I noted that three of the themes driving new features were collaboration, creativity, and machine learning. This year Adobe doubled down on all three of those themes. The reasons for that have become even clearer over the past year. Last year I reviewed new features first, and then trends. This year, I think it’s important to flip that around and first talk about the industry trends motivating Adobe toward the feature sets they’re adding simultaneously across multiple Creative Cloud apps and services.

Major Shifts for Production Workflows

The foundations of digital production have shifted significantly since the early versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. As with continental drift, those shifts may have been imperceptible from year to year, but over a larger time scale they’re quite visible.

Traditional project workflows

In the 1980–1990s, the pioneers of digital creative production worked on desktop computers that stored their working files. When ready to hand off, files were delivered on disc media, by courier or express mail in the beginning, then later by uploading to local file server, FTP server, or to a file sharing service such as Dropbox. Many working pros (myself included) still use that workflow today. You can recognize this traditional process in several ways. It’s a serial process, “turn-based” as gamers would say: One person completes their work and sends the files to a waiting next person, who completes their work. This workflow is familiar to long-time industry veterans, so it’s still entrenched in many of today’s teachers, courses, and training materials.

Emerging project workflows

The workflows now taking hold can seem like the inverse

of long-held traditions. Instead of requiring a desktop application and computer, you work from a cloud server using a web browser or a mobile app. Going cloud-based pushes this further: Instead of sending files manually when finished, changes are continuously uploaded as you make them. Instead of team members waiting their turn, multiple team members can edit parts of the same project simultaneously, sometimes seeing others’ changes as they happen — what gamers would call a “real-time multi-player” process. And this is no longer exotic or rare; students commonly do it in Google Docs and Apple iCloud apps. Designers do it in Figma (Figure 1), which Adobe decided to acquire recently, for $20 billion in cash and stock.

Wider Access to Essentials

Not long ago, essential tasks such as color correction, object selection, and background removal required Photoshop, a desktop computer, and training in manual selections and masks. In recent years all of those requirements have fallen away. There are now many inexpensive alternatives to Photoshop that can make common adjustments such as color correction and can mask objects on layers. Now that affordable devices are now powerful enough to run features powered by what’s called machine learning or artificial intelligence (ML or AI), it’s practical to automate more advanced tasks such as creating a selection of a complex subject outline in an image. You used to have to be a Photoshop whiz to quickly remove an object or background, but machine learning now lets you do it in one click. You don’t even need an application to do it: ML-automated background removal is now built into operating systems such as Apple macOS 13 Ventura and iOS 16, and ML-automated content removal runs the Magic Eraser built into the Google Pixel smartphone. Background removal is just one example. Similar formerly skilled features in other fields such as page layout and video editing are being automated by machine learning.

Creative Clouds Gathering

There’s no doubt that production workflow changes and more capable consumer-level editing technology raise questions about major Creative Cloud applications. With each annual upgrade, the main Creative Cloud applications regularly grow in power and capability; by now many have only limited direct competition in terms of their full feature sets. The applications also grow in size: The typical installation size of Photoshop CS3–CS6 was around 550–650MB, and today, Photoshop 2022–2023 occupies around 5GB — almost ten times as much storage space. As the feature set grows, so does the learning curve; it’s increasingly challenging for a student to digest the deep and wide feature sets of the major Creative Cloud apps. And yet, it’s been difficult to imagine what circumstances would change all of these trends — until now. What’s happening now is that we’re finally seeing how traditional Creative Cloud applications could be challenged. The evidence is in the moves Adobe recently made to adapt its applications and services for emerging workflows. On the Creative Cloud side, you’ve doubtless noticed the numerous ways that Adobe has tried to adapt to emerging workflows, such as cloud documents that can sync desktop work with mobile apps, and share features for review and collaboration. These efforts help, but there are issues. Many traditional Creative Cloud users, trained on serial local desktop workflows, resist the numerous prompts to move files and workflows to the cloud. And for good reasons; their clients and organizations may be heavily invested in the workflows they’ve refined over 20 to 30 years. From another direction, people trained in emerging cloud-based multi-user cross-device workflows find that the traditional Adobe applications are not sufficiently adapted to that new, agile way of working. Many of these users simply pick up new tools designed from the ground up for emerging workflows…tools that are not from Adobe. These tools tend to be cloud-based, multi-user, with collaboration built in, and often affordable and with a free tier. To defend against more affordable options simple enough to produce great results quickly, such as Canva, Adobe unified its cloud-based Adobe Spark family into Adobe Express (Figure 2). But the biggest move Adobe made in the past year was to acquire the cloud-based, collaborative rapid design tool Figma. You can speculate on the reasons why — maybe to acquire the technology faster than it could be developed in house, maybe to remove rapidly rising Figma as a competitor, maybe to keep it out of the hands of another large company — but you can get a sense of the priority Adobe assigns to having a position in emerging workflows that they decided the Figma acquisition was worth $20 billion, about one-fifth of the market value of Adobe. Another reason designers like Figma is that, being developed 30 years after Illustrator and Photoshop, its tools meet current needs well while being simpler and easier to learn.

With all of this Adobe activity going on outside the traditional Creative Cloud applications, some of it perhaps unnoticed by many veteran Creative Cloud users, how did those trends shape Adobe MAX 2022? That’s the next question to answer.

Driving to the MAX: 2023 Creative Cloud upgrades

With all of that background in mind, it’s easier to understand why certain patterns of new features have recently appeared across applications. Adobe machine learning, branded Adobe Sensei, seems to be a rich source of new and enhanced features for several Creative Cloud applications where new features have been less common in recent years. New ML-based features lower the learning curve for challenging tasks. Cloud and collaboration features are increasingly integrated, particularly related to the Share button you may be noticing at the top of more application windows. If some features promoted at MAX already seem familiar to you, that may be because some were already released in recent updates. In other words, MAX 2022 was not just about announcing new features, but also about reviewing what’s changed since Max 2021. Let’s take a look at the new (and new-ish) features in specific applications.

Adobe Photoshop 2023 (version 24)

Adobe Sensei machine learning powers several enhancements in Photoshop, including an improved Object Selection tool that recognizes more types of objects such as landscape elements, water, and architecture, for even faster selections. One-click Delete and Fill (Figure 3) replaces a selection using Content-Aware Fill when you click the Object Selection tool to select an object and then press Shift-Delete.

A new Neural Filter, Photo Restoration, improves scans of damaged photo prints. It includes an effective Scratch Reduction option. This filter is labeled as in beta — good enough to use, but not yet considered complete. Outside of machine learning, Photoshop also includes other enhancements: The Materials panel lets you use Substance 3D materials in Photoshop, both as nondestructive layers and as brush presets. In addition to the existing Share collaboration feature, Share for Review (Figure 4) is now available as a beta feature. The difference is that Share allows multi-user editing, and Share for Review is for review comments only. Content Credentials (beta) has been updated and, if you enable it, it’s integrated into features such as Export As. Content Credentials is an industry-wide effort to create tamper-evident history and attribution that helps identify who modified an image, intended to discourage misinformation such as fake images. In the public beta release of Photoshop, a new Illustrator-like gradient editor promises to free us from the stack of dialog boxes normally needed to edit a gradient. The public beta also tests a Live Gaussian Blur filter, a preview of how Adobe might modernize its filters in Photoshop and other applications.

Adobe InDesign 2023 (version 18)

Although available only in a public beta, the introduction of InDesign cloud documents holds the same potential that cloud documents brought to Photoshop and Illustrator: Cloud documents can enable syncing with mobile devices, and multi-user editing and review. Not all of those benefits are realized with InDesign at this time (there’s no mobile or web version of InDesign yet), but if Photoshop and Illustrator cloud documents point the way, we might see those happen. InDesign 2023 adds support for the HEIF, HEIC, WEBP, and JP2K graphics file formats. Text copied from Adobe Illustrator can now be pasted editable and with formatting. And when duplicating a spread, you can now add the duplicate after the current spread, not just at the end of the document. InDesign 2023 also includes a Technology Preview of Auto Style and Style Packs (Figure 5), features under development which work together. Auto Style analyzes text and automatically assigns paragraph styles to them after working out the content structure using the now-familiar theme of machine learning. What styles does it apply? Auto Style draws upon Style Packs, which are predefined sets of styles you can download.

Auto Style is designed to cut the time it takes to apply the correct styles to large amounts of plain text. Experienced designers may not be thrilled with the default Style Packs, but they can design their own Style Packs. Note that if you apply a Style Pack that uses fonts not available on your system, it automatically activates them through Adobe Fonts.

Adobe Illustrator 2023 (version 27)

The marquee feature in this Illustrator release is Intertwine (Figure 6), which finally makes it easy to create a shape that weaves or knots within itself, such as a braided cable. No more chopping up paths and layering the results just to weave some objects!

Text copied from InDesign can now be pasted editable and with formatting. The Quick Actions buttons you may have seen in Photoshop are now also in Illustrator. Quick Actions present useful features relevant to the selected object, and can be a great way to learn about features that may be hidden deep in menus or panels. If you create a 3D object using the 3D and Materials panel, you can now export it to some 3D file formats, and expand it to wireframes for editing as a 2D graphic.

Adobe Lightroom Classic 12, Lightroom 6, and Camera Raw 15

Building on the useful masks introduced to their Camera Raw editing applications last year, at MAX 2022 Adobe added more options, such as object selection and people selection. Machine learning makes both quick and easy. Object selection (Figure 7) doesn’t have to be precise, you can either roughly paint over or drag a selection rectangle around an object, and machine learning will figure out the outline and create a mask for you.

If you create a People mask, and then select one of the people recognized in the image, you can then select which body parts you would like to create a mask for (Figure 8). Are you trying to retouch just the face, excluding eyes and lips? Mask done. The ML-enhanced masks are the basis for new adaptive presets. For example, an adaptive preset for eyes will find the eyes in different images for you. Spot removal also got a major upgrade by reworking the old limited, slow Spot Removal tool into the much faster, higher-quality Content-Aware Remove tool. These enhancements save a lot of time and trips to Photoshop. Some new features are not yet available on all desktop, mobile, and web variants of Lightroom and Camera Raw. For example, Camera Raw 15 now includes Curves in masked adjustments, but that enhancement is not yet available in Lightroom or Lightroom Classic.

Adobe Premiere Pro 2023 (version 23)

Some enhancements to Premiere Pro are relatively minor but useful, such as being able to specify inner and outer strokes for graphics, easier alignment for titles, and being able to edit multiple titles at once in the Timeline panel. What may have more impact on workflows are an assortment of performance improvements. Motion graphics now take advantage of multi-frame rendering, and GPU acceleration now applies to 10-bit AVC Intra formats and Lumetri scopes. (In previous versions, calculating Lumetri scopes could cause video playback to stutter; with GPU acceleration both now play smoothly.) Since MAX 2021, Adobe integrated the recently acquired collaborative online service frame.io (Figure 9) into both Premiere Pro and After Effects, simplifying frame-accurate online review of video projects.

Adobe After Effects 2023 (version 23)

After Effects gets its own low-key but high-impact enhancements. The one getting the most attention is being able to easily choose any layer as a track matte (Figure 10). Using track mattes used to involve a complex layer setup, particularly if you wanted multiple layers to use the same track matte. Now you can have just one track matte layer, and many other layers in the composition can use it.

Some would categorize that feature and several others under modernization, which is welcome, but also tend to get the reaction “they should have done that years ago.” Other new features like that include being able to encode to the popular H.264 format in the Render Queue (instead of having to send a composition to the separate Adobe Media Encoder), reorganizing Composition Presets to better match video formats in use today, and adding the first new Animation Presets in many years. Many will appreciate restricting keyboard navigation among keyframes and markers to selected layers only, when adding the Shift key to the traditional J and K shortcuts. Before the Shift enhancement, J and K could jump to keyframes on many layers other than the ones you want to focus on. You can now also color-code keyframes and select keyframes by color. The After Effects public beta introduces several key features. A Properties panel reduces the need to keep other panels open, as in Photoshop and other Creative Cloud apps. Support for OpenColorIO and ACES color management, to support high-end professional video workflows. And most intriguing of all, being able to import 3D objects and use them with existing 3D features. For example, you could export a 3D object from Illustrator, bring that into an After Effects composition and fly around it in 3D.

Adobe Bridge 2023 (version 13)

If Adobe Bridge is at the center of your workflow, you might notice that Bridge is rarely discussed at MAX. Well, wake up and pay attention, because this time, without any fanfare, Bridge turns out to be one of the more radically updated Creative Cloud apps. Mac users can breathe a sigh of relief that Bridge is now Apple Silicon native — one less reason to keep running the resource-consuming Rosetta translation environment for Intel-based software. But what will affect every Bridge user is the overhauled user experience. There isn’t space to cover it in detail here, but here’s the short version: The way panels and their keyboard shortcuts work is now quite different (Figure 11). If you most frequently use Bridge with Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Lightroom Classic, the changes may seem quite alien, and you may have to relearn how Bridge panels work and retrain your muscle memory. The changes are consistent with long-established workspace conventions in Creative Cloud pro video/audio applications, so for those Adobe users, Bridge might be familiar and intuitive.

For example, for many years you could hide the side panels in a Bridge application window by pressing Tab, which maximized the center panel only. Now you can maximize any panel by hovering over it and pressing ` (accent grave), which is a wonderful feature from the Adobe video apps. But it’s wonderful only after you get used to it. If you are a heavy user of Bridge, I recommend reviewing the help files for Bridge 2023, and it may also help to study videos and articles of panel management in Creative Cloud video/audio apps.

Around for Another Lap

Adobe MAX 2022 sends us around the track for another year, as digital production continues to change from year to year, and from decade to decade. How well will existing Creative Cloud applications be adapted to emerging workflows? How will recent Adobe acquisitions such as frame.io, Figma, and Substance 3D be further integrated into Creative Cloud? We will see when we come around to the upgrade starting line again at MAX 2023. This article from CreativePro Magazine is for members only. To continue reading, please log in above, or sign up for a membership today! Thanks for supporting CreativePro!