Photoshop’s cloudy future: Adobe announces new Dropbox-like features

Adobe has escalated its efforts to outlast the print era with a string of announcements about new Photoshop features and Creative Cloud, its decentralized reincarnation of Creative Suite.

While other recent product launches from Adobe — think Edge and Muse — have been focused on bringing old-school designers into the digital fold, today’s announcements are equally about allowing modern designers and developers to work together in a cloud-based environment.

But on to the reason you clicked this post: Photoshop updates.

In a phone conference with Creative Cloud marketing director Scott Morris, we learned that Adobe is giving Photoshop a bunch of new bells and whistles: the HiDPI/Retina support it announced last night, new time-saving workflows, CSS support, support for larger JPEG image files, conditional Actions, default type styles, and Smart Object support for Blur adjustments and the much-loved lose-10-pounds-in-30-seconds Liquify filter.

Photoshop is also getting spiffy new 3D graphics tools: better image-based lighting, improvement for texture details, and an overall 3D effects tune-up.

And that’s just the beginning of the company’s announcements today; the real meat of the news is the cloud-based stuff.

The new Creative Cloud Connection brings us desktop syncing of files, drag-and-drop sharing, and automatic saving of files to the cloud as well as to your folders. You can also share collaboratively, whether with one person or your entire team, whether a single file or a whole folder.

It’s Adobe’s answer to all the Dropbox-like cloud-based storage and collaboration services, the biggest difference being that Adobe’s version is designed from the ground up to work with the tools creatives use every day — not just Photoshop, mind you — and contains tools specifically tailored for working within creative teams or with external clients. Also, Creative Cloud team users will have access to enterprise-grade support from Adobe.

Another cool note for mobile-shy designers: Muse, the InDesign/Dreamweaver hybrid that makes designing websites easy for print people, is now going to support mobile and tablet development. Since Adobe is very much in the mobile web/responsive design camp, Muse for mobile will focus on the mobile web rather than native applications.

“Any print designer who’s comfortable with InDesign is going to be comfortable with Muse out of the gate,” said Morris.

Finally Adobe has put together a library of video courses (again going back to that original point: Adobe wants to make print oldsters good at digital media) for Creative Cloud. Created by a range of experts, including non-Adobe partners, the tutorials are designed to work with Creative Cloud and to teach everything from prototyping to publishing.

“We want to make customers successful as they’re trying new things,” said Morris. “It’s not focused on things like an introduction to Photoshop.”

Top image courtesy of AISPIX by Image Source, Shutterstock