Adobe’s 2024 event was no doubt the absolute game-changer for creatives everywhere. Adobe is staying ahead of the curve when it comes to digital creativity and adobe announced 17 new features across its product lineup. This year’s innovations in video production, photo editing, graphic design, and 3D modeling are poised to change how we work. Being a design enthusiast myself, I’m beyond hyped about updates. I’m going to take you through what is so great about these features and why you should be excited too.
Generative AI has been reaching further into Adobe’s products, and one of the biggest highlights for me was making it even more integrated across Adobe’s products. For example, Photoshop has gotten even smarter with its more powerful Generative Fill. Adobe is taking the progression with AI tools just a step further. No more paying hours on manual work; with just a few clicks you can create complex textures, replace backgrounds, or fill in blank spaces even more easily. This feels like the next iteration of getting creative with more people and getting it out faster so professionals can be productive.
There’s also Premiere Pro, Adobe’s powerhouse for video editing. But they announced big changes to the Scene Edit Detection tool at this year’s event. Now, this feature is so precise that it can actually cut and transition in videos, even in the clips that look the most complex. Editors who like working with long-form content like documentaries, films, or even YouTube videos will be impressed. With the ability to automate the detection of scene changes, editors can get their job done more quickly and in a less fractious manner, leaving themselves open to hone their art of storytelling instead of technical minutiae.
And while we’re speaking of video, we were also big fans of the After Effects update with the inclusion of more robust 3D modeling tools. Motion designers and animators will no longer have to switch programs for their 3D needs. You now are able to model, animate, and render 3D elements within After Effects itself. This will allow them to save loads of time and make it easy to create unique good-looking effects without having to change the Adobe ecosystem. This is a huge win for anybody working on projects mixing live-action and animation.
And Adobe hasn’t just paid attention to their video tools—design tools have been taken into account as well. As you’d expect from Illustrator, it has introduced Instant Recolor, a feature that is going to make brand and logo design a whole lot easier. With this tool, you can quickly swap out entire color palettes and contrast your design with chosen variations that you’d like to present to clients. Along with the AI-powered suggestions, color scheme inspiration is provided as well — it’s also great to pull from when you’re stuck creatively.
I also love Lightroom’s AI-powered masking. This new tool for photo editing is all about precision and it takes care of the tedious business of selecting a certain part of a photo like selecting the sky a person or the background. We’re saying that the actual big thing about it is that you can apply adjustments to parts of an image, specifically, but not one after another, and there’s not the pain of manual masking. Here’s the potential to save photographers time and have control over their edits.
With Substance Painter, we’ve officially moved into the world of 3D texturing and it’s going to massively help me. With the most photorealistic textures to the forefront, Adobe announced them. That’s good news for 3D artists because it means they can now create hyper-detailed surfaces with even greater ease, which is really big for industries like gaming, film, and product design, where realism is a given.
Meanwhile, Adobe’s digital painting app Fresco is still a playground for artists. Live Brushes make painting digitally feel like painting with traditional media more than ever. Now, the brushes behave in real time like real watercolors and oils, with more fluidity and texture control. These are all things that make it easier for illustrators and painters to create expressive, dynamic artwork.
One of Premiere Pro’s new cloud collaboration tools is particularly useful for remote teams. Video projects can now begin without bottlenecks of back and forth because they can now work in sync on the same project in real time. For big productions where editors, colorists, and sound designers often work in different locations this is especially useful.
Its new Layout Suggestions streamline InDesign, as well. The perfect bit of when you’re creating complex editorial designs like mags, books, or reports, this AI driven tool will take a look at what you’ve put together, and then suggest alternate layout options. It’s a quick and clean way to iterate ideas without losing the core of the design.
Today, Adobe XD now supports 3D prototyping for UX/UI designers. It’s an exciting step change in the way the design can be executed in three dimensions. With the advent of virtual reality and more complicated interfaces, this feels incredibly forward-thinking.
One of my favorite updates of Photoshop is its One-Click Background Removal. It’s this AI-powered feature that makes cutting out subjects from complex backgrounds a breeze. Hair, fur, or other tricky edges are now taken care of perfectly, without fuss.
And there’s so much more. Now with AI-assisted keywording, tagging and organization of your media files are easier and Bridge makes it easy for you to navigate through your media files. So Adobe Stock is adding more exclusive content with which to expand its library of high-quality assets. Adobe’s Spark, a tool for creating social media content, has just released updates that give content creators even more easy ways to create content for platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
On the whole, Adobe’s 2024 event was like a party for the possibilities when bold tech meets bold ambition. Clearly these updates are all to help empower the creator, both the amateur and the professional. And I’m beyond excited to explore these new tools, and I believe they will change the game as we know it, and how we think about creative work in the coming years. Adobe has really told the bar again, and I’m all in!
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