Adobe Max 2016 Highlights

Adobe’s annual creativity conference, titled Adobe Max was held at the beginning of November in San Diego and was full of exciting and innovative technology, from the latest in graphic design software to virtual reality simulators.  We’ve listed some of the main highlights below:

• CloverVR 

With CloverVR, designers can get rid of clumsy desktop plug-ins and edit 360-degree video directly while in virtual reality, giving users a fully immersive experience in what can simply be termed ‘VR Video Editing’. Users can put on an Oculus VR headset and start editing their piece directly in Premiere Pro CC.  This is currently a test project and Adobe has not said if it will ever hit the market but it’s clearly an interesting development and provides glimpses of Adobe’s strategy in relation to VR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFkJXwH1VTE

• Project Felix

There was also a huge buzz at Adobe MAX 2016 around Project Felix, which is a new design tool that is coming shortly that will allow specific applications such as Photoshop to combine 2D and 3D objects into a photo realistic scene.  An example is the overlaying of an image of a logo or label over a 3D file of a bottle, adding a three dimensional splash and placing these objects in a matching 2D environment which can then be used for portfolio work, advertising pitches and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMUyrGFVDks

• Adobe XD

Adobe Experience Design, also known as Adobe XD, was introduced at Adobe MAX in 2015 and has been in “public development” ever since, allowing the creative community to freely refine the program into the final product. This all-in-one User Experience optimizer offers a variety of convenient tools like Visual Versioning, which allows designers to copy content from older versions of artwork and carry it into new pieces. Another new feature in Adobe XD is Symbols, a tool used to make the same edit to a group of objects in a draft.

• Adobe Sensei

Adobe Sensei is a framework and set of intelligent services built into the Adobe Cloud Platform that leverages Adobe’s massive volume of content and data assets to enable customers to work faster and smarter. For creatives, Adobe Sensei automates mundane tasks, allowing them to spend more time on inspiration and design. Adobe has leveraged machine learning and AI for many years within its creative applications enabling capabilities like Facial Recognition, Content-Aware technologies and Camera Shake Reduction. New Creative Cloud features that leverage Adobe Sensei include Adobe Stock Visual Search, and Match Font and Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop. 

• Project Nimbus

Project Nimbus is a new piece of software set to unroll next year that combines all of the innovative features of Lightroom with the convenience of a cross-platform, cloud-native photography service. The term “cloud-native” means that not only artwork, but also edits and drafts, can be saved and accessed in real time via a cloud network, so you never have to worry about losing an edit.

• Project Voco

Project Voco is a new speech creation tool designed to work with its new ‘Photoshop for audio’ software.  Designed as a state-of-the-art audio editing application, VoCo also promises to generate new words using a speaker’s recorded voice.  An Adobe developer demonstrating the software at the conference simply typed new text into an edit box to ‘redub’ what the speaker had actually said.

“When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative.  We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words” reads an official Adobe statement.

It’s not clear at this time if Project VoCo will be launched as a commercial product.