Adobe Announces Major Update to Creative Cloud

Adobe’s subscription-based Creative Cloud service has just received a major update that purportedly adds a number of new products to individual products (with Photoshop purportedly getting over a dozen new features) and to the service as a whole.The new features for Photoshop include support for HiDPI displays such as Apple’s Retina displays, support for exporting CSS code for text and objects, importing colour swatches, refinements to 3D support the crop tool and a new conditional actions feature. This update brings Photoshop up to version 13.1 and you can read more about it hereMuse, Adobe new tool that allows designers to create websites without knowing HTML has also been updated, and now includes a number of mobile / tablet specific features. New features include support for mobile layouts and styles, support for touch-based interactivity, and new gesture-enabled widgets.The Creative Cloud service has also expanded to a new edition for companies, called Creative Cloud for Teams. This includes the features of the standard Creative Cloud, but expands the per-user online storage to 100GB from 20GB, and has a number of other benefits. For example, in a team subscription, the licences can be reassigned from one user to another rather than being tied to a single person. It also simplifies collaboration within the team, and includes two one-on-one sessions with Adobe experts per seat. Each seat costs $70 per month, rather than the $50 per month for individual members.

Another new feature of Creative Cloud is Creative Cloud Connection, a file synchronization service by Adobe that is similar to Dropbox, and works with the online storage given by each Creative Cloud account—which is 2GB for free members, 20GB for paid members and 100GB for teams. The advantage of this above something like Dropbox is that it has better support for Adobe formats, which can be manipulated to an extent using the online interface.

Adobe also revealed some statistics about how their new Creative Cloud service is doing. The service has around 326,000 paid members; and a total of over a million members as of November 2012.

“It’s been remarkable to see over 1 million users join Creative Cloud in just seven months. Our goal is to make Creative Cloud the ultimate hub for creatives, where they can access the world’s best creative tools, store and collaborate around their work and ultimately showcase their creations. Now with the availability of the new Creative Cloud offering for teams, we’re making it easier for workgroups to create and collaborate.”

David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media, Adobe

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