Adobe’s Creative Cloud launched a year ago as a subscription-based alternative to the traditional licensing model that went with the Creative Suites, offering access to the full Adobe Creative Suite 6 suite of software, services such as Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, Adobe Touch Apps for mobile devices, and online syncing and storage for a membership fee. Today during Adobe’s MAX, The Creativity Conference keynote in Los Angeles, California, Adobe announced that they would be phasing out the licensing model altogether, launching updated CS6 applications through Creative Cloud. This means that instead of purchasing an expensive Creative Suite, you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to use apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Creative Cloud

Adobe’s Creative Cloud can be thought of as the company’s own version of Microsoft’s Office 365. Next to Adobe’s library of applications, Creative Cloud gives customers a way to connect with others, share files, and build their creative portfolios through Behance to showcase projects and get feedback. Plus Adobe offers 20 GB of cloud storage (100 GB for teams) for storing files and syncing assets between desktops, laptops, and mobile devices like the iPad. In addition to having access to services such as those listed above, customers can take advantage of the entire catalogue of Typekit fonts for use on websites or in desktop applications.

Many of Adobe’s desktop applications will be updated and branded with CC to designate their integration with Creative Cloud. Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and Premier Pro CC are the big highlights amongst HTML5 oriented Edge apps or video tools like After Effects. Lightroom is an exception as it will be both available with a Creative Cloud membership and with an individual license. Unfortunately, Adobe has said they are discontinuing development of Fireworks due to product overlap. For those who wish to continue using Fireworks, Fireworks CS6 will continue to be supported through the next major updates for OS X and Windows. CS6 itself will also remain available for purchase (and volume licensing) outside of the Creative Cloud, although you won’t have the latest features that are being introduced with Creative Cloud.

Photoshop CC

Photoshop in particular is receiving some wonderful new features with the upcoming Creative Cloud update. Photoshop CC includes an all-new Smart Sharpen tool for bringing out more detail while reducing noise and halo effects, intelligent up-sampling for scaling images with reduced artifacts, and camera shake reduction for restoring sharpness to blurry photos. The latter technology is the most impressive, as it lets anyone restore clarity to lost photos with a simple wave of the wand tool.

Mighty and Napoleon

Projects Mighty and Napoleon are announced hardware offerings from Adobe XD, which consist of a Wacom-like pen stylus and a digital ruler. The devices are cloud connected, interfacing with your Creative Cloud account. For example and as shown in the video above, the pen allows artists to copy and paste snippets between Adobe’s suite of touch apps for mobile devices. The digital ruler is also interesting as it projects shapes to trace on the screen, acting as pocket-able replacement for a large variety of traditional pen and paper tools.

Creative Cloud Pricing

Creative Cloud costs $19.99 a month for a single application, and $49.99 a month for access to every application and service Adobe provides. For the first year, previous Creative Suite customers will only have to pay $19.99 a month if they have Creative Suite 6, and only $29.99 if they have a license for a previous Creative Suite. Students can also get promotional pricing for their first year, paying only $19.99 a month after proving their institutional affiliation. Students should apply by June 25th.

Teams, or small businesses, will have to pay $69.99 per month per user, or $39.99 per month for the first year for previous Creative Suite owners. Teams should sign-up and add users by August 31st. Educational pricing for teams is also set at $39.99 per month per user.

Moving forward, Adobe will only be offering their latest desktop applications through the Creative Cloud. The CC updates for Adobe’s desktop applications will go live on June 17th, but you can join Creative Cloud at any time to take advantage of previously-mentioned services.

[Source: Adobe]

This morning, Adobe officially launched Creative Cloud, the company’s new subscription-based service that gives users access to CS6 applications, Touch apps, and other tools for a monthly fee. Described as a “digital hub” to download apps, access online services, and share files, Creative Cloud comes with various online storage options to store files directly on Adobe’s servers and access them at any time from connected apps, such as the Touch ones released or updated today.

Creative Cloud starts at $29.99 per month with a one year contract for qualified customers (all registered users with CS3 or later); standard pricing, as detailed in the image below, starts at $49.99 per month with a one year contract, or $74.99 per month with no contract required. Unsurprisingly, Adobe maintained the same pricing scheme for European customers, with subscriptions starting at €29.99, €49.99 and €74.99. The Adobe Touch Apps, available on the App Store, will give users with an Adobe ID one free month of Creative Cloud with “2GB of cloud storage plus the ability to sync between tablet and desktop, access files from the web, and easily share with others.”

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Adobe has officially announced an exciting upcoming service they are calling Creative Cloud, which is designed to tie together their droves of design oriented applications. Creative Cloud is a self-proclaimed “digital hub” that not only allows users to sync multiple computers, but it will also keep mobile devices in sync with the help of Adobe’s already available suite of Touch Apps and the upcoming web service powered by Creative Cloud.

Creative Cloud is a large endeavor for Adobe and they are not satisfied with only providing a cloud based file management solution. In addition to the aforementioned sync feature, subscribers will also have access to an “App Store” of sorts that will host the entire set of CS6 desktop apps available for download at no additional charge. This “App Store” will also provide Adobe with a fast and convenient way to push out new features in between major software releases. Furthermore, there will be several new apps available for download related to HTML5 design, e.g., Adobe Muse for webpage creation and Adobe Edge for web animation design. These tools harness the power of web standards to create beautiful and compliant HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript-based content. Along with the web creation tools are the new digital publishing options as well as online web hosting and even access to Adobe’s Typekit collection.

Creative Cloud is currently only available for pre-order, with an estimated availability of May 7th, 2012. The price point is perhaps the best part of this announcement as an entire year of this subscription service is only $49.99 a month. It is also available as a month-to-month option for $74.99. The compatible platforms include both Windows and Mac and will come in multiple languages. Be sure to check Adobe’s tech specs page to ensure the tools you intend to use are available in your language. Moreover, Adobe is providing a special introductory price for current Creative Suite users – allowing them an entire year of service for only $29 a month.

This is a great option for both personal users and businesses, as the price savings alone is a considerable value. The lower up-front cost to gain access to the CS6 desktop apps might even entice new customers to give professional tools a chance. Regardless, this will likely be a great success for design teams already using Adobe products but are looking for an easier way to handle shared files and online content publishing.

Check out the Adobe promotional video for more details below.
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Initially released as public beta in January, the final version of Adobe’s desktop photo editing and management tool, Lightroom 4, has been made available today starting at $149 on Adobe’s website. Focusing on image quality with new shadow and highlight processing and different output options, Lightroom 4 is largely meant at enhancing the performance architecture and image quality improvements of Lightroom 4. In January, we wrote:

Alongside image refinements and extended, robust video support for organizing, editing and sharing videos on Flickr and Facebook (again, make sure to check out Adobe’s blog for the full details on video adjustments), Lightroom 4.0 beta features photo book creation with over 180 page design layouts, drag & drop support with layout guides, background graphics and integration with the Blurb book printing service. Adobe says photo books have grown in the popularity in the last couple of years, and I have no doubt this is a good move on Adobe’s side (assuming the service is impeccable) at the light of Apple’s moderate success with iPhoto photo books. Lightroom photo books can also be exported to PDF; in this beta, Blurb books are limited to 160 pages.

Similarly to iPhoto, Lightroom 4.0 now allows users to organize and browse photos by location. Thanks to a new Google Maps module (which obviously requires an Internet connection), Lightroom 4.0 will determine a a photo’s location if the camera that created the file supports GPS coordinates; otherwise, users can manually drop photos onto a location and create saved locations for future usage.

Those who downloaded the beta two months ago will find the same functionalities, fine-tuned for the final release (the beta can still be downloaded from Adobe’s website, and used until its expiration date). Among the key improvements of version 4.0, Adobe added native video support, giving photographers the ability to play and quickly edit videos shot on DSLRs, smartphones, and point-and-shoot cameras. The app comes with a series of video presets, and files can be exported to H.264 format or uploaded online to Facebook and Flickr directly within Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom 4 costs $149, or $79 for upgrades from 3.0 — with this version, Adobe lowered the price from $299 of Lightroom 3 (upgrades used to be $99). Furthermore, Lightroom 4 will also be made available through Adobe’s Creative Cloud once it launches later this year with a subscription model (details here). A full list of features is available here and here; Lightroom 4 for OS X requires a Mac with 2 GB of RAM, 64-bit Intel multicore processor, and 10.6.8 or later. Check out a video of the app after the break.
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With the introduction of iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple enhanced the standard photo management experience on iOS devices and Macs with Photo Stream, a new cloud service that makes all your photos available anywhere at any time through iCloud. As I detailed in my iCloud overview, Photo Stream is a new “invisible” part to iCloud that lives inside the iOS’ Photos.app or iPhoto on the Mac, allowing the operating system to instantly push photos — whether they’re actual photos or screenshots taken on iOS — up to the cloud, and back to all your devices configured with Apple’s service. So when you’re taking a new photo on your iPhone, Photo Stream ensures the photo is also pushed to your iPad and Mac, so you won’t have to sync or manually transfer files when you’re home.

Photo Stream is a convenient solution because it’s easy to use and doesn’t require any configuration, but this very lack of options and adjustments has generated quite a debate in the past few weeks among users who would like to be able to control their Photo Stream to exclude certain kinds of images, or at least manually delete the ones that aren’t worth the cloud storage. Because Photo Stream has been built to be invisible and extremely simple, it doesn’t come with any preference to, say, diversify screenshots from regular photos, or delete photos you mistakenly took from your online stream. Photo Stream is simply an on/off switch for all or nothing, and whilst it has turned out to be an indispensable tool in my workflow for photos and iOS screenshots, others would like to have some kind of control over how photos are chosen and pushed to their devices. (more…)

With a series of press releases issued today, Adobe has announced new software initiatives and acquisitions, including PhoneGap and Typekit. In a separate announcement, the company has formally unveiled six new Touch Apps for tablets that will be available for Android devices this November, and on the iPad next year. An iPad announcement about the release date is expected in “early 2012″, but Adobe has already confirmed this new suite of apps will work with Creative Cloud, the company’s new web hub to ” access desktop and tablet applications, find essential creative services” and share works online. Creative Cloud will come with 20 GB of storage and allow users to view, sync and share files created with desktop Creative Suite and mobile Touch Apps.

Inspired by Adobe Creative Suite software, these stunning new apps bring professional-level creativity to millions of tablet users. The apps address multiple areas of the creative process: image editing; ideation; sketching; mood boards; website and mobile app prototyping; and presenting finished work. They are headlined by Adobe Photoshop® Touch, a groundbreaking app that brings the legendary creative and image-editing power of Photoshop to tablet devices for the first time.

Available soon as standalone apps, Adobe Touch Apps are essential components of Adobe Creative Cloud, a major new company initiative also announced today (see separate release). Adobe Creative Cloud will become a worldwide hub for creativity, where millions can access desktop and tablet applications, find essential creative services, and share their best work. Files created via Adobe Touch Apps can be shared, viewed across devices or transferred into Adobe Creative Suite software for further refinement – key features of Adobe’s vision for the Creative Cloud. With stylus capabilities expected to become a key feature on some next generation tablets, Adobe Touch Apps are designed to work with both finger and stylus input.

Adobe Photoshop Touch: Core Photoshop functionalities available in a new app for tablets, with support for gestures, layered images, and Refine Edge technology.

Adobe Collage: Combine inspirational images, drawings, text and Creative Suite files into modern, conceptual mood boards. Files can be shared with Photoshop.

Adobe Debut: Quickly open Creative Suite file formats to preview designs to clients.

Adobe Ideas: Vector-based drawing tool already available on the App Store.

Adobe Kuler: Generate color schemes and browse creations by the Kuler community.

Adobe Proto Create wireframes and prototypes for websites and mobile apps on a tablet.

Links to video demos and previews are available in Adobe’s press release. Adobe says the new Touch Apps have been built on top of Carousel, the upcoming solution for storing and syncing photos across computers and mobile devices.