Adobe Creative Cloud boosted: iOS workflow supercharged

Adobe has given its Creative Cloud a polish today, rolling out new mobile "capture" apps for iPhone and iPad, as well as updating popular iPad app Photoshop Sketch and other titles. The refresh, announced at Adobe's MAX 2014 conference today, also boosts interconnectivity between the mobile software and their desktop counterparts, in addition to improving support for Adobe Ink & Slide, the digital pen and ruler set for the iPad which was released earlier this year and which allows mobile artists to create early sketches and jot down ideas for their upcoming desktop projects.

Photoshop Sketch now gets new brushes, and improves connectivity with Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC. Meanwhile, the degree to which complex compositing in Photoshop Mix is supported has been improved, and there's now a phone version too, both better integrated with Photoshop CC as well.

Finally in the Photoshop family, a new Lightroom Mobile app makes sharing and managing comments for online galleries more streamlined, and feeds geotagging from iPhone photos into Lightroom on the desktop.

Elsewhere, Adobe Ideas has been renamed Illustrator Draw, with a new UI to make its vector drawing tools easier to access. It gets new integration with Illustrator CC, as well as improvements in how it interacts with Ink & Slide, while Illustrator Line has polished how shapes are laid out and – more importantly – can now share raw vector path information in saved images to Illustrator CC on the desktop.

A new Adobe Premiere Clip app for iPhone and iPad can be used for simple video editing and sharing, or feed projects into Adobe Premiere Pro CC on the desktop for further tweaking.

As for the "capture" apps, Adobe Kuler has been renamed Adobe Color CC and adds the ability to capture and save colors as themes to import into Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC, and other apps. Brush CC can turn photos on an iPhone or iPad into new brushes for Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, or Adobe Illustrator Sketch.

Finally, Adobe Shape CC can take a high-contrast photo of an object or even a hand-drawn font, and then convert it into vector art. That can then be imported into Illustrator CC or Illustrator Line.

The new software comes alongside updates to the desktop tools, including touch support for Windows 8, GPU-optimized playback for Ultra HD footage in Premiere Pro CC, and a boosted graphics engine for Photoshop CC. Updates to Creative Cloud add a Creative Profile – an umbrella covering not only shared media, but the tools and assets used to create it – so that they're synchronized over devices and platforms.

The new Creative Cloud apps are expected to be available for download for subscribers by the end of the day. As for the new mobile apps, Adobe is releasing them for everyone.

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