Boris FX Black Friday Discount For Creators

Boris FX offers some pretty amazing special effects tools for photography and video. Even some FREE tools. From now until midnight PST November 27th Boris FX is offering a 25% discount on its tools.

Image: Boris FX

I’ve not used all of their tools (yet). I’ve only used the Particle Illusion. The free standalone plugin you can use with Adobe Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro. It has a fairly intuitive interface and creates beautiful particles for your videos. It took very little time to create the particles I applied to the end of this video I created.

I’d like to try out the Continuum + Sapphire package one of these days. Could be fun to play with.

Photoshop on the Web? Yes Please: Adobe Max 2021 Announcements

Happy Adobe Max Day, everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I come off as a huge fanboy. So be it. I like what I like and the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription* works for me for most things I do in my day-to-day professional life. With that said, Adobe began its annual conference aimed to educate and inspire the content creators of the world. The keynote presentation is always noteworthy with some big updates to its software offerings. Let’s take a look at those new updates.

Photoshop Is Pretty Much Everywhere

The Adobe Sensei AI engine continues to improve as it will offer more tools to help speed up the photo post-processing workflow with just a few clicks. Creating selections in Photoshop gets easier as you can now hover over objects and preview what a selection would be in your artwork. There’s also more neural filters in place to help with enhancing landscape images beyond sky replacements. Lightroom also gets some new AI love. What excites me the most is a forth-coming (beta) Photoshop web interface with the help of a more collaborative Creative Cloud. This is all about speeding up the collaboration process as well as aid in helping train up someone you’re mentoring. Collaborators can use the browser to do some basic editing or provide feedback to the artist. No Creative Cloud account required for the collaborator. More on this beta and other photography app updates is available here on the Adobe blog.

Image: Adobe

Slick Update for Vloggers in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro has had a few updates earlier in the year pointing towards performance and useful tools for your final video composition. Let’s face it, video is becoming more and more prominent the world of communication and branding. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok will favor your videos if you have certain behind-the-scenes elements in place with your workflow in addition to creating captivating stories to keep your viewers on their platform. Vloggers and film makers will love the updates. As a vlogger wanting to have music bed in their video, but the music track doesn’t quite match the length of the video. It’s a horrible experience to try to tastefully trim music to a video with cuts and trimming of the audio track. Now audio remix, which is found in Adobe Audition, is available in Premiere Pro. This is a great tool in Audition. Good news is this is coming to Premiere Pro. Bad news is this is a beta release.

Image: Adobe

Another useful update is the “simplified timeline” AI that’s available in Premiere Pro. This is yet another tool aimed at making collaboration more efficient. For some, a video sequence timeline can become quite messy when piecing together tracks, effects and markers. If the project is a team project, it may be helpful to minimize all the extraneous markers and layers when a collaborator is reviewing the sequence. Simplified Timeline does just that without destroying the project. This feature is available in the new update. More on the video updates from Adobe can be found here.

There are other updates available to the Creative Cloud suite this week. In Design, Illustrator, Character Animator and more received updates. I didn’t get into them all because, I don’t use those apps as often. But if you’re interested, more news on the all the Adobe updates can be found here on the Adobe blog.

Did you sign up for Adobe Max? I hope so. It’s FREE and full of information to help you better understand some creative concepts and fundamentals, as well as get a better grip on the Creative Cloud suite of apps.

(*) Affiliate link used. When you use my affiliate links, I receive a small commission from your purchase at no additional cost to you as the consumer. Thank you for your support

Adobe "Modernizes" Premiere Pro With New Beta UI

Most content creators are familiar with Adobe’s video creation tool, Premiere Pro*. Yes, there’s a bit of a love hate relationship with this software, but it really does do a good job making high quality video creation accessible to many. The UI has been fine for me, but apparently, Adobe and the community thought the user interface could be improved. So, the Adobe video team is doing just that via a public beta.

Image by Adobe

Phase 1 of the beta update: removing the techno mumbo jumbo

When launching Premiere Pro, the existing opening dialog to create a new project is fairly extensive. You have the open to name the file, but then you also have scratch disk, ingest and processing options to address. Most of the items on that opening dialog really isn’t needed just to “create” a new project. Adobe and the community has realized that and is getting rid of this information. Adobe is streamlining this opening dialog for a more visual interface allowing you to see your media and set necessary project parameters on one screen instead of multiple tabs. It ALMOST looks like the opening screen of Premiere Rush. Almost.

Image by Adobe

Once you’re into your project, the timeline interface and workspace looks fairly similar with a few tweaks to the menus and panel headings. For example, the main header bar is not as big as it used to be. This now gives you a few more pixels of screen space for your source and program monitors. Adobe states that this is an effort to not only give a few more pixels of screen real estate, but also an effort to unify the user experience (UX) across other Adobe products such as Photoshop, Lightroom and After Effects.

Exporting the content you create is very similar to the Premiere Rush interface. You get a couple presets to handle the export based on the platform where the content will be viewed. Video formatting varies from platform to platform. Having presets allows your content to be viewed in its best format on the platform without a bunch of compression and artifacts.

As a Premiere Pro* user, I will have to ease into the new redesign. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to using my creative apps. Heck my current layout of Premiere Pro has a custom workspace that I set up to better fit my needs. Fortunately, this will still be an option for us old dogs struggling to learn new tricks.

This is only the first phase of the new interface redesign. Adobe didn’t specify a timeline for subsequent phases, but wanted to reiterate that phase one is all about getting started with a project as well as the export process. Adobe did mention that more updates are coming to the Lumetri color panel as well as background video rendering beyond using Adobe Media Encoder software. Find out more about the beta here on the Adobe blog.

(*) Affiliate link used. When you use my affiliate links, I receive a small commission from your purchase at no additional cost to you as the consumer. Thank you for your support

Adobe Continues Performance Boost for M1 Macs

Coming off the heels of WWDC, Adobe announces more updates for its Creative Cloud product line. Specifically, those compatible with the Apple M1 silicon. A lot of the products have been supported for a little while with others still being in beta status, but today some performance updates were announced.

Performance Boosted

Adobe teamed up with Pheiffer Report to take a look at performance of the Creative Cloud apps running on M1 Macs from Apple. The test hardware included the M1 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM), Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM) where both were connected to an Apple Pro Display XDR. Lots of benchmarking test were completed looking at Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more focusing on not only the simple use of the user interface (UI), but also some graphic-heavy or CPU-intensive functions of each app. It’s found that on average, the Creative Cloud apps are 80% faster using the M1 systems. Pretty impressive. Adobe and Pheiffer had a bunch of charts and information here showing all the details of the testing.

With that said, the video editor for Adobe, Premiere Pro, is still in beta status. I’ve not heard anything bad about the beta other than a few “quirks,” but it’s believed that the beta runs circles around the Intel version on performance.

Better Collaboration Tools and More Tools for Lightroom

I tend to focus more on the photography side of things when it comes to the Creative Cloud. Yes, I use Premiere, and After Effects, but I open Lightroom and Photoshop more often. Unfortunately, I’m not on an M1 so I don’t see these particular performance boosts. But Adobe has added more ways to collaborate on the photography front with cloud collaboration capability. This allows you to get an extra set of eyes on your photos project and tweak the editing before clicking “post” to Instagram or whatever your platform of choice is.

Image by Adobe

Far as the editing tools, the AI tool found in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which enabled you to convert an image to a much higher resolution image is now available in Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom. This Super Resolution feature touts increasing your photog resolution by up to 4X. In my experience, the previous iteration was “ok.” Wasn’t great, but it did make a difference.

Adobe has a lot more information on its blog regarding the updates for Lightroom, Photoshop with its new custom brushes, Illustrator and more. I guess I better get myself ready to install these updates as well as find a way to get my hands on an M1 Mac. Ha!