Adobe is making a major move into the cloud.
The company is on stage announcing the next big upgrade to its flagship digital editing tools, the Creative Suite, and The Next Web has just revealed that the new version will only be available through its online subscription service.
Adobe previously offered standalone editions of each product, which users could choose to keep or upgrade as new editions were released, but now the only way to receive updates to the product series will be to remain subscribed to the $49.99 per month service.
The company is giving its application suite a new, but familiar name to emphasize the change: Adobe Creative Cloud will be replacing Creative Suite 6, the version released last year.
The product series has been on a yearly release cycle since 2011, and this latest upgrade includes new features for nearly every product in the series, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro, all of which now have their name appended with CC, instead of CS.
As the new naming scheme suggests,
Adobe is enhancing the cloud integration between all its services.
The company says that a new desktop companion app will be able to automatically keep every app up to date.
It's also integrating many of the apps with Behance, a site that allows artists to present their work and receive feedback from others.
Adobe purchased the website in December, and it will now use the Creative Cloud companion app as a way to notify users of any comments made on their work.
Though Adobe is drawing a focus to its cloud services, it isn't actually changing much about them.
Instead, this series of updates is tailored toward streamlining the interactions between apps and websites, rather than adding cloud-centric features.
But for Adobe, the subscription requirement could help to stem the continual threat of piracy, while also making its products both more accessible to new users and more expensive in the long run.
"Photoshop is getting a series of big upgrades"
As usual, the best known app of the suite — Photoshop — is receiving a number of major features to help repair photos that didn't turn out quite right.
The most impressive feature of the bunch is a tool that the company says will be able to remove blur from photographs that was caused by camera shake.
"Easier than ever to keep photos sharp"
Adobe is also including two other additions to help keep photos sharp. The company says that an improved version of Photoshop's automatic sharpening algorithm will better detect what you're trying to sharpen. In a demonstration, Adobe presented how the tool determined that it should focus primarily on certain foreground objects, rather than adding unneeded grain and detail to softer objects in the background as the tool did in CS6. The app's upscaling tool is also said to create more detailed images than before. When enlarging an image, small features that might normally become softened should better retain definition after the update.
The rest of the suite is seeing a number of improvements as well. In Illustrator, users can now apply basic alterations to individual characters of text and then change each letter later on while the changes remain applied. The company has also built an iPhone app for Kuler, an Adobe web service used to build and share color swatches. The new app detects a set of colors using the iPhone's camera, and then sends that color sequence into Illustrator itself. Other video-focused applications in the suite are receiving updates that allow settings to be synced across workstations.
The Next Web reports that Adobe will continue to sell standalone copies of Creative Suite 6 applications for now, but that the company will not continue to update them with new features. Going forward, users looking for updates will have to subscribe to Creative Cloud, which includes access to the entire Creative Suite along with various other Adobe programs and services. All of those apps will be replaced with the newly upgraded ones once Adobe releases them.
