Adobe has released a host of new features and performance enhancements for its Creative Cloud users. Of greatest interest to stock photographers is the addition of an all-new
Premium Collection of over 100,000 high quality stock images. Images will be available for single download purchase and priced between $100 and $500. In addition, there are other key enhancements to Adobe Stock that provide a deeper integration with Creative Cloud apps.
This collection was developed to serve customers who need authentic and high-quality commercial content with straightforward licensing plans. At launch there are ten thematic categories that span across lifestyle, wildlife, food and industrial photography, as well as galleries that showcase the work of individual contributors. Currently, the Premium collection includes only photos, but later on Adobe plans to add vector graphics and videos.
The main Adobe Stock collection has more than 55 million high-res photos, vectors and illustrations. These images are available for $9.99 each, or about $3.00 if a customer purchases 10-image packs for $29.99 a month.
However, trying to find just the right image in a collection of this size can often be a very laborious task. Customers who can justify paying higher prices often prefer reviewing smaller collections, curated by experts, that contain only images judged to be of the highest commercial, technical and artistic quality. Adobe’s curators look for images that are visually striking, emotionally impactful, and have a strong narrative element. Such collections tend to make it easier for customers to quickly find the right image for their project.
Some of the images in the Adobe Stock Premium Collection may also be in Fotolia’s Infinite Collection, but the Adobe Stock Premium collection is being curated as an independent set of images.
At launch, the Premium collection represents a relatively small group of artists and agencies who have been hand-selected for their personal style and the quality of their work. Over time, Adobe expects to expand to a broader community of contributors. Check out Adobe’s
FAQ post for more information.
The big advantage that Adobe Stock has over other stock photo collections is that once a graphic designer finds a potentially useful image that image can, with one click, be downloaded to the desktop, a specific library, or opened in any Adobe app of the designer’s choice. The designer can then manipulate, make adjustments and corrections to the image before ever having to make a purchase. If the image turns out not to be right for the project the designer can go get something else. Or, the image can be licensed with one click and all the changes made up to that point are automatically updated to the project. No need to redo, no need to break workflow; just a seamless integration that saves time.
“We have two key goals with this release: saving our customers time and helping them jumpstart their creative engines,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Every creative project starts with a blank page and ends with a vision coming to life. Today’s release of Creative Cloud will help make that journey as fast and productive as possible. From deeper integration of Adobe Stock into the CC experience, to amazing new features like Content-Aware Crop in Adobe Photoshop, this release will expedite the creative process for millions of our customers.”
Coming Soon
In a future release, stock contributors will be able to contribute stock directly from the Adobe Lightroom CC, Bridge CC apps, Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix, giving them an easy on-ramp to showcase and sell their creative work. Also, a new Contributor Portal (beta) will launch, which will feature intelligent auto-tagging capabilities to make contributions even faster and easier and saving hours of keywording.
Photoshop Users
For Photoshop users, there are several exciting new features and performance improvements with this release. They include:
1- Content-Aware Crop – When rotating or expanding an image beyond its original size using the Crop tool, sometimes you end up with image gaps around the edges. Content-Aware Crop addresses this by intelligently filling in the resulting gaps in an instant.
2- Face-Aware Liquify automatically detects faces and their components in an image, and then makes it simple to quickly adjust eyes, nose, mouth and other facial features, allowing users to create artistic facial effects easily.
3- Match Font, is an innovative new font recognition technology we previewed at Adobe MAX 2015 and is included in this release. Match Font scans an image, recognizes text within the image, and then identifies matching or similar fonts based on fonts you have access to, either locally on your machine or through Creative Cloud.
4- We’ve also introduced some new Performance Enhancements in Photoshop, including a 4x performance improvement when working with font menus and the Content-Aware Fill feature.
For more information check out the Photoshop Blog:
http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshop/2016/06/adobe-releases-major-photoshop-cc-update-today-and-announces-more-digital-imaging-product-features-coming-soon.html
Additional Links.