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Adobe Creative Cloud update brings 3D printing to Photoshop, tightens integration

Adobe Creative Cloud update brings 3D printing to Photoshop, tightens integration
Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of apps is getting a bit more powerful as the company tightens integration between several of its apps and introduces new features. Now elements you create in one Creative Cloud app will automatically sync to others. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Muse, and TypeKit are all getting updates today to to make working with images and type much quicker. There are over 500 new and enhanced features in this update, but we’ll go over just a few of the major ones.

Photoshop CC gets 3D printing support

Adobe Photoshop CC 3D modeling

The biggest updates are found in Photoshop Creative Cloud as the program now supports 3D printing. Artists and engineers alike can finalize 3D projects using Photoshop before sending them off to print. Photoshop CC will support printing locally with printers like the Makerbot as well as sending print instructions to online services such as Shapeways. Adobe has actually partnered with a handful of companies to ensure compatibility with 3D printers and services.


While there are dedicated 3D modeling tools, Adobe isn’t positioning Photoshop CC as a competitor to those tools. Instead, Photoshop will be the finishing tool to make sure everything is perfect before sending off designs. This saves the headache of re-printing an object and wasting tons of material. “The features we provide are much more accurate than anything else on the market,” says Andy Lauta, Product Manager of Photoshop.

Also new to Photoshop CC is the “Perspective Warp” tool, which makes manipulating an image’s perspective much easier. Users can activate the feature, draw a grid around an object or layer, and manipulate the perspective of the object by dragging the corners of the grid. Photoshop CC could previously manipulate the perspective of images but not as quickly.

TypeKit offers cross-app sync

Adobe’s TypeKit fonts are getting easier to use across Creative Cloud programs. When you download a new font on one machine, you will be prompted to download it onto others for a uniform experience across computers and apps. This makes collaboration much easier as you’ll be prompted to download any changes as soon as you open up your version of the file.

Adobe TypeKit website

Smart objects you create in one Creative Cloud program will also update across all the other Creative Cloud apps. For example, if you perform some changes a logo within Illustrator CC, the logo will automatically be updated within Photoshop CC as well. Check out the video below to see it in action.

Illustrator gets Live Corners and new Pencil Tool

Illustrator CC is also getting a few new features like “Live Corners” and an all-new Pencil tool. Live Corners allow users to quickly manipulate the corners of an object to round them off. Users can now “quickly and easily adjust corners of an object,” even in bulk.

Adobe Illustrator CC Live Corners

The new Pencil Tool has been designed to give users control over accuracy or smoothness. If someone is using a pen and tablet to draw within Illustrator CC, accuracy will be more important, but users using a mouse will want to opt for smoothness. The Pencil Tool can even make sure your drawn lines are straight.

Adobe Illustrator CC new Pencil Tool

Lines can be quickly manipulated afterward if you’re not satisfied with the “Refine Paths” feature, which lets you work directly on the lines without having to undo your work.

InDesign makes hyperlinking easier

InDesign CC gets better support for hyperlinking text. Users will no longer have to manually update each hyperlink individually as bulk editing is now available. InDesign will also check each link to make sure it’s valid and will warn users if the page is broken. Character styles for hyperlinks can also be manipulated at the same time so changes propagate throughout the document.

Adobe InDesign CC URL options

E-book support has also improved with the updated InDesign CC. EPUB 3 is now supported and lets users create pop-up footnotes, which look similar to the dictionary look up feature in iOS 7 and in Amazon’s Kindle app. Support for Japanese and Hebrew also gets improved with re-flowing text when scaling to different screen resolutions.

Adobe ebooks font scaling

Lastly, Muse CC gets updated with new scroll effects so web designers can create web pages full of rich media. The Adobe demo showed off an animation of a bird flying across a page as a user scrolled down.

Adobe InDesign CC update

Wrap-up

3D printing support within Photoshop CC is very much a 1.0 product which will be improved upon as content creators get their hands on it. Adobe made a wise choice to integrate 3D printing features into Photoshop instead of creating a separate product. By bringing the feature into a mainstream product like Photoshop, it lowers the barrier to entry for creatives who want to start working with 3D models for printing.

Although Adobe’s transition to a subscription based model angered many users, the company is offering consistent updates to make its creativity suite much more enticing. In 2013, Adobe’s Creative Cloud gained 1.1 million subscribers, bringing the total number of subscribers to over 1.4 million members in 2013. By integrating tools for emerging technologies like 3D printing, Adobe shows its anticipating the needs of its users and constantly adapting.

Adobe offers the complete Creative Cloud suite for $50 per month or $20 per month for just one program. The company has reset its 30 day trials so those who tried out Creative Cloud in the past will be able to try out the updated version too.

The update to Adobe Creative Cloud is available to download today.

Download Adobe Creative Cloud: Mac | Windows

Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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