Adobe Creative Cloud Update Offers More Features, Performance Enhancements

7 PaaS Startups To Watch

As part of a major Creative Cloud (CC) update, Adobe released a host of new features for its flagship applications, as well as performance enhancements across the suite and updates to Adobe Stock.

Adobe announced its 2016 Creative Cloud update on June 20.

Updates to Creative Cloud for enterprise offer users additional capabilities, including simplified workflows for creative teams collaborating and exchanging assets. CC now offers read-only libraries and folders, archiving support for folders and files, and versioning capabilities.

With the updated CC release, Adobe Stock for enterprise now includes the Premium collection, advanced search, flexible payment plans, and the ability to track stock images and videos through one unified enterprise dashboard.

This week's updates include deeper integration within CC, and the addition of an all-new Premium collection of high-quality stock content that contains more than 55 million royalty-free, high-quality photos, videos, illustrations, and graphics.

Updates to CC desktop apps are now available for download by Creative Cloud members as part of their membership at no additional cost. Adobe also offers membership plans for individuals, students, teams, educational institutions, government agencies, and enterprises.

Better Adobe Stock integration now means users can select an image or video on the Adobe Stock website and place it into their work with a single click. There's also a one-click buy option.

The company's premium content offering sourced for Stock includes nearly 100,000 curated images designed to meet the standards of advertising agencies and digital and print publications.

In addition, updates to CreativeSync and Assets allow for greater discoverability, productivity, and integrated mobile to desktop workflows that ensure a user's files, fonts, design assets, and settings instantly appear wherever they're needed.

The Creative Cloud library serves as a virtual digital style guide for teams, and so allows creative leaders the ability to delegate permission levels to help manage libraries and files. In addition, an updated CC Libraries panel with search filters lets users search and select video, photo, vector, and illustration assets.

[Read about Adobe and Dropbox making it easier to create e-signatures.]

Among the new capabilities for the CC Desktop application are a content-aware crop in Photoshop, which automatically fills in the gaps when the user rotates or expands a canvas beyond the original image size, and fast export of assets and art boards in Adobe Illustrator CC, allowing users to export assets to multiple formats and resolutions with a single click.

Adobe also rolled out Match Font in Photoshop, a font recognition technology that has the ability to recognize and identify licensed fonts and automatically suggest fonts available on the user's computer system or available to license through Adobe Typekit.

In March, Adobe upgraded its Marketing Cloud with numerous product releases and enhancements that sharpen the ability of the enterprise to gather, analyze, and utilize data to improve digital marketing.

The company also updated Adobe Exchange, which offers apps and integrations for developers to use to extend the reach of Marketing Cloud. A new developer portal -- Adobe.io -- will offer the Marketing Cloud software developer kit to developers for them to access APIs and protocols.