Adobe unveiled a new generation of Creative Cloud at Adobe MAX, the company’s annual creativity conference.

The suite includes four new applications: Adobe XD CC for experience design, Adobe Dimension CC for 2D to 3D compositing, Character Animator CC for 2D animation, and an all-new cloud-based photography service, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC. Adobe also announced feature updates to its flagship applications including Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC and Premiere Pro CC, and ongoing expansion of its Adobe Stock service.

All updates comes with capabilities powered by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning platform.

Next Generation Creative Applications

• Adobe XD CC : Developed in open partnership with the design community through a public beta, Adobe XD is the all-in-one cross-platform solution for designing and prototyping mobile apps and websites. 
• Adobe Dimension CC : Previously Project Felix, Dimension gives graphic designers the power and flexibility of 3D with the ease and simplicity of working with 2D. Dimension enables graphic designers to quickly create and iterate on photorealistic 3D images.
• Adobe Character Animator CC : Previously in beta, this 2D animation tool helps bring still image artwork from Photoshop or Illustrator to life. New features include pose-to-pose blending, new physics behaviours and visual puppet controls. Adobe Sensei also helps improve lip-sync capability by accurately matching mouth shapes with spoken sounds. Character Animator has been showcased on shows including “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, “The Simpsons” and Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money.”

New in Lightroom CC Photography Service

Lightroom CC is Adobe’s all-new cloud-centric photo service for editing, organising, storing and sharing photos. The new Lightroom CC features a more intuitive user interface, enables editing in full resolution, and automatically synchronises changes across mobile, desktop and the web. New features include searchable keywords that are automatically applied without tagging. 

Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC, previously known as Photoshop Lightroom CC, continues to focus on a more traditional desktop-first workflow. New on the desktop workflow includes performance and editing improvements; an enhanced Embedded Preview workflow is added, which enables users to scroll through large sets of photos to select a subset of images significantly faster.

New Features on Other Flagship Applications

• Adobe Photoshop CC now offers significantly expanded photography support, major improvements in learning and getting started, and enhanced overall performance.
• Adobe Illustrator CC delivers multiple workflow, user experience and performance improvements.
• Adobe InDesign CC expands efficiency, so you can create multi-page layouts easily.
• Adobe Premiere Pro CC introduces deep collaboration features, immersive 360/VR workflows and Responsive motion graphics controls.
• Adobe After Effects CC improves the efficiency of motion graphics creation by streamlining your ability to create data-driven graphics and deliver high-quality VR and 3D results. And it does it all faster with GPU performance enhancements.

Assets and Inspiration

New integrated assets, expanded services and education resources includes:

• Adobe Stock expands its asset collection with the introduction of hundreds of professionally-created motion graphics templates for video users in Premiere CC and After Effects CC. The creative marketplace now hosts over 100 million assets including photos, illustrations, videos and vectors.
• Adobe Typekit now with Adobe Sensei for a new way to search for fonts. Users can submit their own photos of type and find similar fonts available on Typekit. The new Typekit visual search is also the first Adobe Sensei-powered service that will be available to third-party developers.
• Inspiration and Education: Adobe announces additional investment and expanded resources to help customers get started in the creative field. This includes the launch of AdobeLIVE on Behance, a livestreaming channel where 10 million Behance community members can learn from and inspire each other. The channel now features 24 hours of weekly programming, and will expand to 24/7 programming starting in 2018.

Pricing and Availability

Updates to Creative Cloud desktop software are now available, including membership plans for individuals, students, teams, educational institutions, government agencies and enterprises. Adobe’s mobile apps are available for download from Apple App Store and Google Play now.

As part of the MAX release, Adobe is also offering a new series of photography plans.

• Creative Cloud Photography plan with 1 TB: photographers that want an all-in-one plan. Includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom for mobile and web, Photoshop CC, Adobe Spark with premium features, Adobe Portfolio, and 1 TB of cloud storage. [$19.99/month, but available at $14.99/month for the first year for existing Creative Cloud Photography customers]
• Lightroom CC plan: photographers who want a cloud-based photography service for editing, organising, storing and sharing their photos. Includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom for mobile and web, Adobe Spark with premium features, Adobe Portfolio, and 1 TB of cloud storage. [$9.99/month]
• Creative Cloud Photography plan with 20 GB of storage: includes Lightroom CC, Lightroom for mobile and web, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop CC, Adobe Spark with premium features, Adobe Portfolio, and 20 GB of cloud storage. [this plan remains at $9.99/month]
• Creative Cloud All Apps plans with 100 GB: Lightroom CC has also been added as part of the annual subscription price.