Creatives are getting a lot of love from Adobe with the latest updates to its Creative Cloud suite of applications and a new stock content service that comes fully integrated with all of Adobe's software.
The latest updates to Creative Cloud include performance boosts and the addition of new features to its popular photography, videography and design desktop applications.
Photoshop, for instance, receives Artboards, a new way to design images for various devices, and Dehaze, a feature that eliminates fog to make clearer images and is also available in Lightroom. Adobe says Illustrator and InDesign are now 10 times faster thanks to "dramatic" improvements in the Mercury Performance Engine.
Premiere Pro gets a new Lumetri Color panel that allows users to apply color corrections using sliders, while Dreamweaver now gets the ability to design responsive websites. Muse, meanwhile, now makes available premium fonts from TypeKit.
Tying up all these applications together is the new CreativeSync, Adobe's rebranded cloud syncing feature that lets users sync all the changes they made in one application with all other applications. It is a particularly useful feature, especially for different teams collaborating on one project. For example, if one user makes changes to a file in Photoshop, another user will see those changes saved when he opens the same file in Dreamweaver.
But perhaps the biggest change Adobe introduced is the launch of Adobe Stock, a new stock content marketplace similar to iStockphoto and Shutterstock. Adobe hopes to one-up its new competition by integrating Adobe Stock with all existing Creative Cloud applications, so users can instantly access stock content straight from InDesign, for instance, whose many users rely on stock photos.
For Adobe, launching its own stock content service makes sense, since 90 percent of all stock images are created using Adobe's applications and around 85 percent of stock content users already use Adobe tools.
"Our customers are by and far away the largest consumers and contributors to stock content," Chris Morris, senior marketing director for Creative Cloud, tells TechCrunch. "So it makes perfect sense that Adobe would get into stock imagery content because our users are already there."
Adobe will charge users $9.99 to license a single image, and users who want a 10-photo subscription per month can pay $49.99 if they are not already subscribed to Creative Cloud and $29.99 if they are subscribers. People who need hundreds of images every month can also pay $199.99 for a monthly subscription to download up to 750 images every month.
Those prices are a little on the expensive side, but Adobe Stock has a remarkable advantage over its competitors, chiefly the ability to let users download watermarked images straight from an Adobe tool and experiment with the image without buying it first. If the image works well for them, the user can then purchase the licensed image and all edits on the watermarked version will be applied right away.
