Keep Creating: A Guided Tour Through the Latest Photoshop Updates

I love watching new artists emerge, like 19-year-old college student and landscape photographer Taylor Gray and 20-year old commercial and travel photographer Andrew Studer. It’s amazing to see this steady stream of young photographers and artists surface into the creative ecosystem, realizing their incredible talents using Photoshop as one of their key tools.

But I also love hearing stories of inspiration in even younger kids, such as the Spark program that matches volunteer mentors with with at-risk middle-schoolers to help them with academics and skills building. Recently one of my colleagues at Adobe was matched with an 8th grader from Westlake Middle School in Oakland, CA and used his mentorship to teach him Photoshop. It was incredible to watch him grow from a child targeted as a likely dropout, to a confident and proud creative individual with a purpose, empowered by the tools to realize possibilities where he didn’t see any before – and even a potential career, “You can make bank doing this stuff?” – all just by learning Photoshop.

So it is with great excitement that today I announce a major update to the Photoshop product line. To download them all, go here:

Mac and Win:

Android:

iOS:

To learn more, let’s start with one of my favorites:

Photoshop Sketch

Painting on the iPad and iPhone just took a leap forward with the introduction of Photoshop brush support in Photoshop Sketch. Take all of your favorite Photoshop brushes that you’ve created over the years, add them to a Creative Cloud library and they will automatically appear for use in Photoshop Sketch. When combined with the iPad Pro and Pencil, your brushes will take on a new life in Sketch. We’ve built just the right settings directly into Sketch so you can adjust everything you need while painting on your iPad or iPhone.

In celebration, Adobe worked with award-winning Illustrator and brush-creator Kyle T. Webster to create a customized library with seven hand-tuned brushes from his Kyle Brushes collection. The collection includes oil, rake and spatter brushes. These brilliant brushes can be used in Photoshop and Sketch on your iPad and iPhone. If you’re not yet a Kyle devotee, you can see examples of incredible work created using his brushes at his web site.

Download the free brushes here.

For more information about Kyle Webster and specific instructions about how to install and use the brushes go here.

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Photoshop brushes in Sketch are compatible with iPhone 5s, iPhone SE, iPhone 6/6 Plus, iPhone 6s/6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, iPad mini 4 and iPad Pro.

Download Photoshop Sketch for iOS here.

I am also thrilled to announce that we are releasing Photoshop Sketch 1.0 for Android today (along with: Photoshop Fix 1.0, Comp CC 1.0 and Illustrator Draw 3.0 all on Android). Download it here.

Project Felix

Adobe has always been a leader in innovation. We are constantly talking to our customers and looking for ways we can improve your creative process through invention. The work our designer customers must produce is undergoing many revolutionary changes – one of those is the need to create greater realism using synthetic content, while also producing results faster with greater flexibility in the design process.

Today we announce a new member of the Photoshop family, Project Felix. Project Felix gives designers easy-to-use 3D tools to help them create high quality images with photo-realistic effects without time-consuming workflows or 3D expertise.

2D image compositing is the foundation on which Photoshop is built. 17% of all workflows involve compositing. This crosses all customer types, all levels of skill and it is one of the fundamental reasons people use Photoshop – to add and change pixels and combine them together to create completely new things. For years, Photoshop has been the only accessible general purpose pixel compositing tool on the market for designers. Until now, these designers’ needs, and the limits of technology have been met by, and confined to 2D image compositing.

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But now designers need compositing to deliver more, particularly around creating photo-realistic scenes from synthetic content – digital content that doesn’t exist in the physical world. You are experiencing a growth in new content types that support creating synthetic scenes – look at today’s car ads, furniture catalogs and major apparel web sites – many of the objects in those graphics are 3D models, not photographs. But the tools are still inaccessible – requiring years of specialization to master, and causing you to cobble together fragmented workflows across many diverse apps from numerous companies that lack integration. Yet the demand to create synthetic scenes, which brings significantly greater design velocity, content re-use, cost reduction, creative range and flexibility is high.

Project Felix delivers:

Easy access to assets. Project Felix comes with a library of models, materials and lights to help you get started the moment you open it on your desktop. Its integration with Adobe Stock gives you easy access to search, license and grow your arsenal of 3D assets and 2D images.

Photo-realistic results without 3D expertise. Create real-life effects on your composited images quickly and without performing multiple tasks, overcoming high learning curves or enduring cumbersome tools. Easily place an object on a horizon line in a background image just by dragging and dropping. Effortlessly change the lighting in your scene by adding a background image and watch as the reflections and refractions adjust to give your design photo-realistic aesthetics you’d get from a photo shoot.

Breakthrough rendering technology. Built with proven solutions from the 3D modeling industry, Project Felix comes with the most powerful rendering engine to date, allowing you preview your changes without making you wait for a final render to export. You can also enlarge the preview window to see details up close to help you ideate and create in a more agile, uninterrupted creative environment.

“I need to get my hands on Project Felix right now!!” I hear you. But reinventing 26 years of compositing in Photoshop is going to take us awhile and we’re not done yet.

Project Felix is still early in its creation process and not yet robust enough to meet the high demands of a professional, deadline-driven workflow. Before the end of the year, we will release our first beta of the project to paid CC members, so you can see where we’re headed. We are intentionally releasing it early in its creation process so you can give us feedback to help us build the best product to meet your needs. We want you to give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

Principal product manager, Zorana Gee has released her own blog post with more details about the project. Take a look…it’s better to see it in action rather than just read about it from me.

Check out this video to get a first look at Project Felix.

For a high level look at Project Felix go here.

Photoshop

This release of Photoshop delivers great new content – with seven free Kyle Webster brushes hand-tuned for Photoshop, almost 100 new templates to help you get started on any type of Photoshop project (located in the new File>New dialog) and online at Adobe Stock, and two new SVG fonts (pre-loaded in the Type tool font menu). In addition, we:

Continue our investment in enhancements for designers with new font capabilities and interoperability with Adobe XD, and more
Lower the learning curve for new customers with new features that make it easier to begin projects, and find and learn tools; but also speed the work of our more experienced customers with UI efficiencies, click reductions and more
Add enhancements to recently released features like Select and Mask Workspace, Face Aware Liquify, and Match Font

Use the Creative Cloud desktop app to install updates.

Here’s what we’re delivering today:

In-App Search: Quickly search Photoshop tools, panels, menus, Adobe Stock assets, help content and tutorials from within Photoshop using a new search panel that’s right at your fingertips. Hit CMD+F (or Ctrl+F on Windows) to launch it, or click on the new search symbol in the upper right corner of the application frame and give it a try.

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Get started faster: Jump-start design projects with easy access to presets as well as free Adobe Stock templates that you can access right from File > New.

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Tighter integration with Adobe XD: Now you can copy SVG elements to your clipboard to easily paste Photoshop design assets into Adobe XD.

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Stock templates, 3D objects and search: Adobe Stock marketplace now includes templates and 3D objects.

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Enhanced Properties panel: The Properties panel now displays information about common layer types as well as the document, so it’s easier to make precise adjustments.

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Support for SVG color fonts: Access any SVG font installed on your system from the Photoshop Font menu. Great for responsive design, SVG fonts support multiple colors and gradients and they can be raster or vector. To celebrate this major step forward in fonts in Photoshop we are including two new free SVG fonts to get you started: EmojiOne and Trajan Color Pro. They are pre-loaded in today’s release and you will find them in the Type tool’s font drop down menu.

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New Creative Cloud Libraries capabilities:

Libraries in Photoshop now support Adobe Stock templates.
You can now find similar images on Adobe Stock via the updated Libraries panel and you can drag and drop Stock search results from your Library panel right onto your canvas to start using them right away.
Right-click on a stock image to do a visual search for similar images.
Plus, Send Link has been updated so you can share read-only access to a public library. When you follow a library, it appears in your Library panel and updates automatically.

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And more:

Improved Select and Mask Workspace
- The Polygonal Lasso tool has been added to the task-space toolbar
- Ability to view a high-res or low-res preview during selection
- Improved slider behavior when using Smart Radius
Independently adjust the eyes in Face-Aware Liquify
Match Font now searches for any font installed on your system (previously only searched from a subset of fonts)
Click to commit text: Click anywhere outside a text box to commit it (previously you clicked on the check box in upper right of frame)

Photoshop Fix and Mix

And if that’s not enough for you for one day, today we also release a set of updates for Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Fix on Android and iOS.

Android

For our Android friends, we are releasing Photoshop Fix 1.0 and Photoshop Mix 2.3 on Android today (along with Photoshop Sketch 1.0 and Illustrator Draw 3.0 and Comp CC 1.0, all on Android).

Android customers will now have access to key capabilities in Photoshop Fix like Healing and Liquify. In Photoshop Mix 2.3 we are adding support for Android tablets.

Download Photoshop Fix Android

Download Photoshop Mix Android

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iOS

On iOS, we are releasing Photoshop Mix 2.6 and Photoshop Fix 1.6.

Photoshop Mix 2.6, iOS

Download here.

New features include:

Major improvements to Cutout (new: brush, lasso, shapes) that include:
- Manual “finger painting” selection with a brush size toggle and the ability to adjust the softness of the edges.
- Lasso tool that adds familiar Photoshop control to selections so you can circle areas you want to add/subtract. With this tool, you can really take control of the details of your cut-outs.
- Shape selection for those times you want a perfect circle, triangle, straight edge, rectangle or rounded rectangle.
Import from Google Photos
Our first step toward vector support – now you can import SVG as rendition
Display P3 support with a wider color gamut on newer devices that allow for it (released on 9/30/16)

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Photoshop Fix 1.6, iOS

Download here.

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We have rapidly increased the capabilities of Photoshop Fix throughout the Fall, including today’s release. Here is a list of what you’ve gotten since September 1, 2017.

Photoshop Fix, 1.4 and 1.5, (September 1 and September 30)

Low Storage Mode – Low storage mode enables customers with the minimum memory allowed by iOS to use Photoshop Fix. Limits undo/redo and flattens image to save space.
Face Aware Liquify 2 – Added nodes to the face to allow for finer adjustments.
Display P3 Support – Wider gamut range of colors supported on devices that allow for it.
Performance improvements using Apple Metal.

Photoshop Fix, 1.6 (Today)

Auto Skin Smoothing – automatically detects a face within a picture and applies a smoothing mask to reduce appearance of aging
Import from Google Photos
New Warmth Adjustment Slider

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Once again, I am thrilled to support the creative community with so many amazing tools.

Enjoy!

Pam Clark
Senior Director, Product Management
Adobe Photoshop Portfolio