Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 Updates (Photography Edition)

The Creative Cloud 2015 Updates: A Closer Look

As an avid photographer and user of Adobe Creative Cloud, I recently had the opportunity to dive into the latest updates for the suite. With a slew of new features and improvements, it's essential to take a closer look at what's new and what's changed. In this article, we'll explore the various updates that have been released, including some interesting tidbits about Adobe's approach to releasing these updates.

One thing I'd like to mention is that if you're interested in trying out the latest features of Creative Cloud, Linda.com is offering a free 10-day trial. This is an excellent opportunity to get a feel for what's new and exciting in the suite. Simply head to linda.com/aop and use the promo code AOP sent by me to access your free trial. With this trial, you'll be able to explore all of Creative Cloud's features, including Photoshop, Lightroom, and more.

As an Adobe user, I've noticed that one common criticism is that they release all of the updates at once, rather than spreading them out over time. This can be overwhelming for those in the middle of a project or who are simply not ready to tackle new features just yet. While I agree that this approach can be frustrating, I believe that it's ultimately driven by Adobe's desire to keep up with the rapidly evolving nature of technology and creative workflows.

In terms of specific updates, one feature that caught my attention is the introduction of "Content-Aware Fill". This tool allows for more precise control over the removal of objects or backgrounds from images, making it an essential addition for photographers. Another update is the improved support for panoramas in Photoshop, which now makes it easier to merge and edit panoramic images.

Another area where Adobe has made significant improvements is in their marketing efforts around these updates. In my opinion, some of the language used by Adobe can be a bit sensationalized or exaggerated, particularly when it comes to highlighting the importance of addressing issues that may not have been as pressing as they're made out to be. However, I believe that this approach reflects the company's commitment to staying ahead of the curve and keeping up with the evolving needs of creative professionals.

Despite some minor gripes about Adobe's approach to releasing updates, it's undeniable that the Creative Cloud suite remains one of the most powerful and versatile tools available for photographers and graphic designers. With its comprehensive set of features, including Advanced color profile work and seamless integration with other Adobe applications, the Creative Cloud is truly a leader in the industry.

In conclusion, while there are certainly some drawbacks to Adobe's approach to releasing updates, I firmly believe that the benefits far outweigh the costs. As an avid user of the Creative Cloud suite, I can attest to its capabilities and power, and I'm excited to see what the future holds for this ever-evolving toolset.

The Creative Software Mafia: A Lighthearted Take

As we explore the latest updates for Adobe Creative Cloud, it's worth taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. One thing that often comes up in discussions about Adobe is their reputation for being "difficult" or "pricey". While I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're part of some sort of creative software Mafia, there is certainly an air of exclusivity and prestige surrounding the Creative Cloud suite.

In my opinion, this can be partly due to the fact that Adobe has become synonymous with excellence in the field of graphic design and photography. With its comprehensive set of features and seamless integration with other applications, the Creative Cloud is truly a standard-bearer for creative professionals around the world. However, I believe that this also contributes to some of the criticisms levied against Adobe – namely their tendency to release updates all at once and make it seem like every photographer on the planet is struggling with the same issues.

That being said, I do think that Adobe has done a remarkable job of listening to user feedback and incorporating changes into their suite. Whether it's addressing specific pain points or simply providing more transparency around their development process, Adobe is clearly committed to staying ahead of the curve and meeting the evolving needs of creative professionals.

A Special Shout-Out to Linda.com

I'd also like to take a moment to express my gratitude to Linda.com for sponsoring this episode of The Art of Photography. Their commitment to providing high-quality tutorials and resources for photographers is truly admirable, and I'm excited to continue working with them in the future.

For those who may not be familiar, Linda.com offers a range of free tutorials and resources for photographers, including a focus on Photoshop and other Creative Cloud applications. With their extensive library of content, it's an excellent resource for anyone looking to improve their skills or learn more about the latest trends in photography.

The Future of Adobe: A Look Ahead

As we look to the future, one thing is clear: Adobe continues to be at the forefront of innovation and creativity in the world of graphic design and photography. With its commitment to staying ahead of the curve and incorporating user feedback into their suite, I have no doubt that the Creative Cloud will remain a leader in the industry for years to come.

In the coming months and years, we can expect to see even more exciting developments from Adobe – including new features, tools, and integrations that will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in creative workflows. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out on your creative journey, I encourage you to stay tuned for updates and announcements from Adobe, and to keep exploring the many resources available at Linda.com.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the Art of Photography as most of you probably saw this week Adobe released all of their updates to the 2015 Creative Cloud and I thought it might be interesting to go through and look at what updates affect us as photographers so we're going to make basically be looking at Lightroom in Photoshop it's interesting because I always get excited about this they do this every year and as I was going through um you know you're going through the marketing materials and it's kind of funny sometimes what particularly Photoshop chooses to Market to photographers or is a Doby says now anyone with an interest in photography this is the perfect software for so you know there's like the haze adjustment tool and things like that and I will let me preface this now by saying that I'm a little bit old school in my approach to Photography in that I am a photographer and I like to get things as right as I can in camera I do post-production editing but they tend to be things like levels adjustments um uh color refinements and just really getting that image tight uh for the final copy and so I will warn you now that I I get a little silly in here I mean because it's really hard for me to take a tool that will cut and paste things and move them around an image supposedly very seriously particularly when it it does it if you know how to use the tool so anyway so we're going to look at some of these things today so bear with me I get a little snarky in here uh but anyway let's go ahead and look at some updates and we'll come back in a little bit and I want to talk about Creative Cloud a little bit and some of that stuff so come on over the computer and let's have a look okay so I want to talk about the Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 updates as they apply to us is photographers so that means mainly we're going to be looking at Lightroom and Photoshop to see what's new and I will not go through everything on here there are two web pages I'm going to direct you too I will link these in the show notes and if you want a complete listing of everything that's new these are great resources they're both on adobe's website I have one page here for Lightroom and another page here for Photoshop so if you interested in seeing everything this is where you're going to find it so go check out the show notes so let's start with Lightroom um I want to preface this by saying that you know when there's new software features some of these are more marketable I guess than others and so you know the big marketable feature here that adobe is talking about is this Haze adjustment filter because as you all know Haze is a problem that's that's plagued photography for years and we now are have been graced with a remedy from Adobe and I'm I'm kidding and being kind of snarky about this but anyway we have a haze adjustment filter that's the big marketable thing uh as far as what else is new and I think this is less marketable but more important is now you have more finite control because they have added white and black levels adjustments to things like the graduated filter radio filter and adjustment brush so if you do a lot of adjustments and you want more control on a real macro level you now have that ability to do that and I think that actually is pretty important also if you are one of the people who use Photoshop Elements that is now compatible with Lightroom most of the other upgrades on here deal with mobile and so Lightroom will now sync with a mobile database and you can pick up images and edit them on your mobile device which actually sounds kind of interesting I haven't tried it yet um the reason being I don't really do a lot of mobile editing mainly cuz in the past it's lacked the power so um I'll dig into those so we can talk specifically to those in the future if you guys are interested but know that those are a lot of the upgrades uh around Lightroom which are pretty cool and you know these applications are becoming faster and more powerful all the time and you know it's harder to Market that but the haze adjustment slider now now we're talking so let's go over to Lightroom let's check out that Haze adjustment slider I made this image on the roof just a few minutes ago we have hurricane Bill blowing through today and boy is definitely hazy outside now this is a an extreme example I realize there's more than just Haze going on here there is rain and fog going on here but I thought well if we're going to test the filter let's let's put it to the test you're going to find the dehaze dehaze adjustment slider it's over on the adjustments palet if you go down to the effects category you might have to scroll it's on the right hand side of the screen you're going to see it's under vignetting and Grain and we now have a dehaze slider if I move this to the right it's going to remove haze if I remove it to the left it will add Haze so I'm going to just grab this and slowly move it to the right and you can see that it actually does a pretty interesting job of cleaning this image up now right about here I'm at 74 I'm starting to push it because I can now see some grain creeping into the clouds but I got to say even considering this is not in Focus back here this didn't do a real bad job at this um when you're consider that you're asking the application to bring out details and information that are simply really not there it's doing a pretty good job and it does this with a mix of you know adjusting levels and adjusting uh probably Clarity and vibrancy a little bit too cuz you do start to see the color shift but the fact that it's in a slider now it's optimized for that you know if you really need some detail there you probably could bring that in if I crank it all the way up it gets pretty messy and in all fairness this is a really tough image anyway of course we're really putting it to the test here but you can see there's a bunch of color garbage and digital noise and things that you wouldn't want in an image but if you really did need to for whatever reason bring out those details maybe you're into forensic photography or something hey it's there um if you move the slider um to the left of zero it will start adding Haze until everything goes completely white um I thought this was a little cheesy at first but actually even with this image you can kind of tell it's kind of nice to be able to add a little of that in there to kind of play with the silhouette levels of the way the skyline Works back there so I suppose this could be useful on some level to someone so anyway that's the haze adjust dehaze adjustment slider this has been added to both Lightroom and then also into the effects and the um in the the the section of Photoshop that brings in a raw image so you can adjust it there as well so anyway that's what's new there and what's kind of cool now let's talk about Photoshop real quick and let's talk about some of the new things here the big deal here again not so marketable but the big thing that I think is really powerful here is the incorporation of the Mercury Graphics engine now Mercury Graphics engine is an adobe thing that they've been using in premiere for a while now so if you've ever edited video using Premiere um it is an engine that essentially speeds up Graphics rendering so that you can preview video effects and things that you might do to your footage U and get it closer to real time and so it works pretty well they have now Incorporated this into Photoshop um which is actually really cool so if you're doing heavy editing applications doing things like uh cloning or you know the healing brush if you're doing that on a big scale with a really large image it's going to speed things up for you and it actually works pretty well and so I think that actually is useful I use the healing brush quite a bit when I shoot on film and bring it in because I inevit will have some dust on the image that I need to go remove and it is very useful for doing that so anything that speeds up all that stuff is great with me and uh anyway so they've added some of that there's been obviously the Adobe camera raw 9.1 enhancements you know basically adding the black and white levels um when making local adjustments and also that dehaze filter is now added in there um if you work in 3D on here there have been some enhancements I don't so I can't really speak to those or how they work um let's see what else is new in here that's worth mentioning um if if you are a fan of phony tilt shift blurs bringing those in into post and you know they look phony um inside the blur tools or the blur filters they've added grain now so you can actually make those look like they're more part of the photograph if that is your thing the other thing that they're talking about now and this is actually kind of interesting is this content aware move tool and let's take a look at that and okay I am going to get a little silly with you guys here because you know when you get into heavy image editing I just you know as a photographer I'm old school I like to get it right in camera first first I know that there are applications where you might want to do this but we'll take a look at what happens here so um theoretically now I can take this content aware tool and just move this girl around now I chose this stock photograph of a woman in a field because if you look at all of adobe's marketing materials they always use you know relatively young attractive woman in a field so that must be the secret sauce so I should be able to move her anywhere right so let's go ahead and do that I'm going to move her into the background we're going to make her smaller we'll get rid of her all that stuff so if I go in here you're going to find this tool if yours isn't selected you go here under the healing brush click and hold you'll see the fly out window you can go down and select the content aware move tool you can grab that and it works in two steps what you're going to do is you're going to draw a line around what it is that you want to move and Adobe tells you don't be too specific just keep it wide in general and uh once she's selected I see my marching ants I use the same tool and I start moving her around and so once I move that out there you can see that she's duplicated and I can manipulate her however I want let's see let's make her small we're going to put her way back in the field back there and uh you know we'll match up the Horizon here and so when I go ahead and select enter uh Adobe is going to think for a minute work it's magic and you can see that it looks absolutely incredible it's deselect and we moved her into the back of the field there um okay I'm I'm being factious here just because as a photographer like the ability to do this is just goofy and weird but anyway whatever um maybe that's too extreme an example so let's let's step back and uh you know you would have to do some additional steps there like actually blurring her out and doing some cleanup but I have had the the the pleasure of heavy manipulation in images before I did a book project several years ago and there were a handful of images that needed small adjustments basically to fit in the book format either somebody needed be moved over because some type needed to be fit or somebody needed a color changed in their shirt to match something and so this is where it really gets fun but anyway if you want to do something like that let's just draw our wide box around her and then what I'm going to do now is let's just say we're moving her over to fit some typography in let's move her over to the right a little bit so something small like that and let's just say okay hit return and you can see that it came close and not to be too critical of adobe but I can go in now and let's grab the stamp clone tool and get rid of some of these strange blurry looking things in here and get it to match the image a little better up in here too probably grab some over here and bring out some of this a little bit anyway I went a little too far hold on let's UND do that let's bring it back and you can tell like the tools even are a little bit snappier to use need to get in here and work around her head a little bit cuz it doesn't look so hot but the fact that I was talking while I did this and did this in a matter of seconds and got it at least close enough to go in and work with a little bit more I tell you a couple years ago to do something like that I would have worked on it half the day and I wouldn't have it even to this point yet so the point is is that you know in the marketing stuff they show you how you can throw stuff around and they make it look really easy when you get in here it actually is kind of ridiculous and goof and why wouldn't you try to get that right in camera and I understand all that but the fact that you can do it at all at least get it close if you were in a jam and needed to actually do that you could make it happen and Photoshop really is a powerful tool for doing that so you know I am ke as I mentioned being snarky in these demos here because I just don't do this kind of work very much and I think it's a little bit absurd but it is impressive I have to say so anyway so making small adjustments and being able to at least get it close to where you could work on it some more are fairly key uh one of the thing I want to show you is content aware I'm going to do this in two sections CU I'm going to bring in a panorama so this is another one of the Big Marketing things they're hyping right now is bringing in a panorama and I'll give you an example here if we look at Lightroom if you look at the way panoramas are done if you are handholding the camera and here's one that I did on the roof one day and so you go in here and you kind of start moving the camera and taking another picture and you're going to stitch all this together in Photoshop when it's done you weren't using a tripod and it looks like this well Photoshop has now got the ability to bring in these white areas here and make what they call content aware out of this and this only works in Photoshop when you're using Photoshop merge or photo merge but uh it does work now and so let's put that to the test what I'm going to do here let's actually quit Lightroom free up some memory here because I am doing a screen recording I'm going to go under file we're going to go down to import sorry automate we're going to go down and select photo merge and it's going to say what do you want to merge and I'm going to say browse and we're going to pick a bunch of images now these are here's a panorama I did handheld at a Dallas Mavericks basketball game a few months ago when I say open those images it's going to give me some options here so I want to select spherical and I'm going to let's go for the max I'm going to say blend the images together let's go for vignette removal geometric Distortion correction and here's the new one you can take this content aware fill transparent areas so let's see how well it does so I'm going to go ahead and say okay now this is I think there's six images that I just picked I can't remember they're a lot and it's going to take a little bit of time to render this uh Photoshop does a lot of things it's it's going to go in actually remove vignette it's going to line the images up at the best points it sees fit it's going to try to correct some geometric Distortion and finally it's going to fill in magically those areas where it needs to be content aware so I'm going to go ahead pause the video we'll come back in a second when all this is done okay so Photoshop just finished up and once it's done what it does this is really kind of cool is it gives you a little marching ant selection and it's around the area that it did the content aware fill so I'll leave that lit up for a second and let's see how it did so this is the new feature here so if I zoom way in and let's actually move down here to the bottom corner here and you can see that it did an awesome job at giving this guy two ears on the right side of his head and put a beer between this either a big mouth or a double chin or a double head I can't figure it out so it looks pretty amazing as you can see um okay I'm being a little hard on it but uh this is what it's supposed to do right so anyway if I go up here and look at the other areas you can actually see in some cases it did pretty well and you could tell that it's obviously using a mathematical algorithm to fill in these areas so what it's looking for are patterns like these big walkways up here or the the retired jerseys over here or even on the side here where you have this big wall that Jets out and it actually did pretty well there's a little garbage up here that you might have to go in and play with a little bit to get it cleaned up so if you really needed the edges of an image it did pretty well I think um considering some of these are fine um a lot of these areas up in here and of course you know you're asking Photoshop to create parts of the image that aren't even there so considering it did that it did a pretty amazing job I mean you can go in here with the Clone tool and fix that uh but this is a huge timesaver so if you're ever in a jam particularly people who do image editing for magazines or Publications this is very useful um a lot of times you're given something that you need to do this with and now you have that ability to do it and really I mean this is a pretty massive image it did a great job and as always Photoshop does a wonderful job I love photo merge for stitching you can do that in Lightroom as well and it works just fine the one little glitch that I found and this is probably cuz this is version one of the software is that when I kicked it over to photoshop to do a Content aware fill not using that tool to bring it in it left a line where my selector was and so so you really need to do it in Photoshop at least right now with this but anyway you can go in here and if I turn off these layers individually you can see what Photoshop does with the stitching it actually goes through the image and finds all the points to make that Stitch as clean as possible and you end up with a pretty interesting image when all is said and done so if you're into panoramas this could be a very cool thing to do anyway these are the updates I wanted to talk about today and I want to give you one more resource here and if we go back over to the browser uh linda.com are one of our sponsors for the show they make all this happen and they make it possible for me to make three videos a week for you guys nowadays anyway um linda.com is an excellent resource and I say this not because they're a sponsor I say this because I was a customer of theirs for a good 10 years before they ever sponsored the show I was a customer of theirs before they I even had a show to sponsor and this is what Linda does so well is software training this is this is where it's at and you know I've done this with Adobe way before it was you know the Creative Suite even and it was actually versions of Photoshop specifically new versions come out Linda is an excellent resource for training you can go in here and here's Premiere Pro 2015 Creative Cloud updates After Effects updates I can go look at Photoshop updates and they've got they stay up to date with all this stuff and they all actually had all these videos ready to go uh before um the launch which was very impressive and very cool so if I go in here Photoshop for photographers 2015 Creative Cloud updates you can go watch in-depth videos on how to use all the tools all the new changes even the little minuscule obscure interface things that we don't have time to go through in this video uh if you want to try Linda for free it is a subscription based service but if you go to linda.com aop go to that link that's going to let Linda know that I sent you and they're going to give you 10 days of unlimited access absolutely free 10 days is enough to go in there and check out your Photoshop stuff and see if you know learn the new stuff that's in there and you can go to this for all the Creative Suite programs and any of the software they have so to take advantage of the free 10-day trial what you want to do is you want to go to linda.com aop that is Linda with ay.com aop that'll get you your free 10-day unlimited access trial and I want to give a special shout out once again and thanks to the folks at Linda for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography anyway that is the Creative Cloud 2015 updates and there are quite a few of them and uh you know the only complaint that I have really about Adobe and all this stuff is when they do this once a year is they release the entire Suite in one time so within one day whatever apps you have in the Creative Cloud all need to be updated and if you're in the middle of a project I don't recommend updating I haven't found a whole lot major stuff so far um but I'm talking about in terms of going through and maybe a little bug somewhere like I was talking about in panoramas when you bring those over to Photoshop you know and those can be fixed but more importantly if you have a production team and you're relying on something like third priority plugins or something like that and all of a sudden they break I haven't tested all that adobe technically hasn't tested all that so it's always good to do your research before you upgrade and that is one thing that drives me nuts about Adobe is they like to hit you with everything version one at one time uh but anyway other than that I do think the updates are actually pretty interesting they're mostly minor but I wanted to talk about a few of those today I hope you guys have found this somewhat interesting enlightening and probably a little bit humorous but uh you know as always Adobe I like to refer to is the creative software Mafia uh they're they're very difficult because they have a very good product and it is very expensive and of course they do a lot of marketing as well and some of the markting that they've done around these updates I think has just been a little bit on the silly side content aware fills and panoramas and stuff like that that really were not real huge problems but they make it look like it's something that every photographer deals with and now they have a solution and I understand where they're coming from and you know there are alternatives and other graphic software applications um I've used a bunch of them unfortunately when it all comes down to it Adobe still are one of the best products out there particularly with Photoshop and definitely with Lightroom now um when you consider the depth of those both those pieces of software what they will do um and the fact that like you know if you have to go in and do Advanced color profile work or something if you're going to print or you know there could be situations where Adobe really is one of the only tools out there that will help you also if you you want to um mix and match what you're doing in with a whole Suite of other applications that allow you to do everything from create motion graphics and video to print pieces the Adobe Creative Cloud has no competition and it just kind of is what it is doesn't mean that it's bad but it's just a very expensive payment that I have to make once a year to use their software um and of course everything is subscription based and download only on the web right now and anyway I don't sponsor Adobe or anything but uh you know they are kind of the standard and I thought it was worth at least saying uh because I did kind of make fun of them a little bit today but anyway hope you guys have found this useful and as always if you enjoyed this video remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always hit that subscribe button so you'll be up to date on all the latest greatest videos as they come out we're doing many now we're doing I think we're doing like three a week now which is pretty pretty wild I'm trying to get my production schedule settled in a little bit but three a week seems to be working pretty well I know it's a lot of stuff but if you subscribe you'll stay up to date on what we're doing so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video laterwhat's up everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the Art of Photography as most of you probably saw this week Adobe released all of their updates to the 2015 Creative Cloud and I thought it might be interesting to go through and look at what updates affect us as photographers so we're going to make basically be looking at Lightroom in Photoshop it's interesting because I always get excited about this they do this every year and as I was going through um you know you're going through the marketing materials and it's kind of funny sometimes what particularly Photoshop chooses to Market to photographers or is a Doby says now anyone with an interest in photography this is the perfect software for so you know there's like the haze adjustment tool and things like that and I will let me preface this now by saying that I'm a little bit old school in my approach to Photography in that I am a photographer and I like to get things as right as I can in camera I do post-production editing but they tend to be things like levels adjustments um uh color refinements and just really getting that image tight uh for the final copy and so I will warn you now that I I get a little silly in here I mean because it's really hard for me to take a tool that will cut and paste things and move them around an image supposedly very seriously particularly when it it does it if you know how to use the tool so anyway so we're going to look at some of these things today so bear with me I get a little snarky in here uh but anyway let's go ahead and look at some updates and we'll come back in a little bit and I want to talk about Creative Cloud a little bit and some of that stuff so come on over the computer and let's have a look okay so I want to talk about the Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 updates as they apply to us is photographers so that means mainly we're going to be looking at Lightroom and Photoshop to see what's new and I will not go through everything on here there are two web pages I'm going to direct you too I will link these in the show notes and if you want a complete listing of everything that's new these are great resources they're both on adobe's website I have one page here for Lightroom and another page here for Photoshop so if you interested in seeing everything this is where you're going to find it so go check out the show notes so let's start with Lightroom um I want to preface this by saying that you know when there's new software features some of these are more marketable I guess than others and so you know the big marketable feature here that adobe is talking about is this Haze adjustment filter because as you all know Haze is a problem that's that's plagued photography for years and we now are have been graced with a remedy from Adobe and I'm I'm kidding and being kind of snarky about this but anyway we have a haze adjustment filter that's the big marketable thing uh as far as what else is new and I think this is less marketable but more important is now you have more finite control because they have added white and black levels adjustments to things like the graduated filter radio filter and adjustment brush so if you do a lot of adjustments and you want more control on a real macro level you now have that ability to do that and I think that actually is pretty important also if you are one of the people who use Photoshop Elements that is now compatible with Lightroom most of the other upgrades on here deal with mobile and so Lightroom will now sync with a mobile database and you can pick up images and edit them on your mobile device which actually sounds kind of interesting I haven't tried it yet um the reason being I don't really do a lot of mobile editing mainly cuz in the past it's lacked the power so um I'll dig into those so we can talk specifically to those in the future if you guys are interested but know that those are a lot of the upgrades uh around Lightroom which are pretty cool and you know these applications are becoming faster and more powerful all the time and you know it's harder to Market that but the haze adjustment slider now now we're talking so let's go over to Lightroom let's check out that Haze adjustment slider I made this image on the roof just a few minutes ago we have hurricane Bill blowing through today and boy is definitely hazy outside now this is a an extreme example I realize there's more than just Haze going on here there is rain and fog going on here but I thought well if we're going to test the filter let's let's put it to the test you're going to find the dehaze dehaze adjustment slider it's over on the adjustments palet if you go down to the effects category you might have to scroll it's on the right hand side of the screen you're going to see it's under vignetting and Grain and we now have a dehaze slider if I move this to the right it's going to remove haze if I remove it to the left it will add Haze so I'm going to just grab this and slowly move it to the right and you can see that it actually does a pretty interesting job of cleaning this image up now right about here I'm at 74 I'm starting to push it because I can now see some grain creeping into the clouds but I got to say even considering this is not in Focus back here this didn't do a real bad job at this um when you're consider that you're asking the application to bring out details and information that are simply really not there it's doing a pretty good job and it does this with a mix of you know adjusting levels and adjusting uh probably Clarity and vibrancy a little bit too cuz you do start to see the color shift but the fact that it's in a slider now it's optimized for that you know if you really need some detail there you probably could bring that in if I crank it all the way up it gets pretty messy and in all fairness this is a really tough image anyway of course we're really putting it to the test here but you can see there's a bunch of color garbage and digital noise and things that you wouldn't want in an image but if you really did need to for whatever reason bring out those details maybe you're into forensic photography or something hey it's there um if you move the slider um to the left of zero it will start adding Haze until everything goes completely white um I thought this was a little cheesy at first but actually even with this image you can kind of tell it's kind of nice to be able to add a little of that in there to kind of play with the silhouette levels of the way the skyline Works back there so I suppose this could be useful on some level to someone so anyway that's the haze adjust dehaze adjustment slider this has been added to both Lightroom and then also into the effects and the um in the the the section of Photoshop that brings in a raw image so you can adjust it there as well so anyway that's what's new there and what's kind of cool now let's talk about Photoshop real quick and let's talk about some of the new things here the big deal here again not so marketable but the big thing that I think is really powerful here is the incorporation of the Mercury Graphics engine now Mercury Graphics engine is an adobe thing that they've been using in premiere for a while now so if you've ever edited video using Premiere um it is an engine that essentially speeds up Graphics rendering so that you can preview video effects and things that you might do to your footage U and get it closer to real time and so it works pretty well they have now Incorporated this into Photoshop um which is actually really cool so if you're doing heavy editing applications doing things like uh cloning or you know the healing brush if you're doing that on a big scale with a really large image it's going to speed things up for you and it actually works pretty well and so I think that actually is useful I use the healing brush quite a bit when I shoot on film and bring it in because I inevit will have some dust on the image that I need to go remove and it is very useful for doing that so anything that speeds up all that stuff is great with me and uh anyway so they've added some of that there's been obviously the Adobe camera raw 9.1 enhancements you know basically adding the black and white levels um when making local adjustments and also that dehaze filter is now added in there um if you work in 3D on here there have been some enhancements I don't so I can't really speak to those or how they work um let's see what else is new in here that's worth mentioning um if if you are a fan of phony tilt shift blurs bringing those in into post and you know they look phony um inside the blur tools or the blur filters they've added grain now so you can actually make those look like they're more part of the photograph if that is your thing the other thing that they're talking about now and this is actually kind of interesting is this content aware move tool and let's take a look at that and okay I am going to get a little silly with you guys here because you know when you get into heavy image editing I just you know as a photographer I'm old school I like to get it right in camera first first I know that there are applications where you might want to do this but we'll take a look at what happens here so um theoretically now I can take this content aware tool and just move this girl around now I chose this stock photograph of a woman in a field because if you look at all of adobe's marketing materials they always use you know relatively young attractive woman in a field so that must be the secret sauce so I should be able to move her anywhere right so let's go ahead and do that I'm going to move her into the background we're going to make her smaller we'll get rid of her all that stuff so if I go in here you're going to find this tool if yours isn't selected you go here under the healing brush click and hold you'll see the fly out window you can go down and select the content aware move tool you can grab that and it works in two steps what you're going to do is you're going to draw a line around what it is that you want to move and Adobe tells you don't be too specific just keep it wide in general and uh once she's selected I see my marching ants I use the same tool and I start moving her around and so once I move that out there you can see that she's duplicated and I can manipulate her however I want let's see let's make her small we're going to put her way back in the field back there and uh you know we'll match up the Horizon here and so when I go ahead and select enter uh Adobe is going to think for a minute work it's magic and you can see that it looks absolutely incredible it's deselect and we moved her into the back of the field there um okay I'm I'm being factious here just because as a photographer like the ability to do this is just goofy and weird but anyway whatever um maybe that's too extreme an example so let's let's step back and uh you know you would have to do some additional steps there like actually blurring her out and doing some cleanup but I have had the the the pleasure of heavy manipulation in images before I did a book project several years ago and there were a handful of images that needed small adjustments basically to fit in the book format either somebody needed be moved over because some type needed to be fit or somebody needed a color changed in their shirt to match something and so this is where it really gets fun but anyway if you want to do something like that let's just draw our wide box around her and then what I'm going to do now is let's just say we're moving her over to fit some typography in let's move her over to the right a little bit so something small like that and let's just say okay hit return and you can see that it came close and not to be too critical of adobe but I can go in now and let's grab the stamp clone tool and get rid of some of these strange blurry looking things in here and get it to match the image a little better up in here too probably grab some over here and bring out some of this a little bit anyway I went a little too far hold on let's UND do that let's bring it back and you can tell like the tools even are a little bit snappier to use need to get in here and work around her head a little bit cuz it doesn't look so hot but the fact that I was talking while I did this and did this in a matter of seconds and got it at least close enough to go in and work with a little bit more I tell you a couple years ago to do something like that I would have worked on it half the day and I wouldn't have it even to this point yet so the point is is that you know in the marketing stuff they show you how you can throw stuff around and they make it look really easy when you get in here it actually is kind of ridiculous and goof and why wouldn't you try to get that right in camera and I understand all that but the fact that you can do it at all at least get it close if you were in a jam and needed to actually do that you could make it happen and Photoshop really is a powerful tool for doing that so you know I am ke as I mentioned being snarky in these demos here because I just don't do this kind of work very much and I think it's a little bit absurd but it is impressive I have to say so anyway so making small adjustments and being able to at least get it close to where you could work on it some more are fairly key uh one of the thing I want to show you is content aware I'm going to do this in two sections CU I'm going to bring in a panorama so this is another one of the Big Marketing things they're hyping right now is bringing in a panorama and I'll give you an example here if we look at Lightroom if you look at the way panoramas are done if you are handholding the camera and here's one that I did on the roof one day and so you go in here and you kind of start moving the camera and taking another picture and you're going to stitch all this together in Photoshop when it's done you weren't using a tripod and it looks like this well Photoshop has now got the ability to bring in these white areas here and make what they call content aware out of this and this only works in Photoshop when you're using Photoshop merge or photo merge but uh it does work now and so let's put that to the test what I'm going to do here let's actually quit Lightroom free up some memory here because I am doing a screen recording I'm going to go under file we're going to go down to import sorry automate we're going to go down and select photo merge and it's going to say what do you want to merge and I'm going to say browse and we're going to pick a bunch of images now these are here's a panorama I did handheld at a Dallas Mavericks basketball game a few months ago when I say open those images it's going to give me some options here so I want to select spherical and I'm going to let's go for the max I'm going to say blend the images together let's go for vignette removal geometric Distortion correction and here's the new one you can take this content aware fill transparent areas so let's see how well it does so I'm going to go ahead and say okay now this is I think there's six images that I just picked I can't remember they're a lot and it's going to take a little bit of time to render this uh Photoshop does a lot of things it's it's going to go in actually remove vignette it's going to line the images up at the best points it sees fit it's going to try to correct some geometric Distortion and finally it's going to fill in magically those areas where it needs to be content aware so I'm going to go ahead pause the video we'll come back in a second when all this is done okay so Photoshop just finished up and once it's done what it does this is really kind of cool is it gives you a little marching ant selection and it's around the area that it did the content aware fill so I'll leave that lit up for a second and let's see how it did so this is the new feature here so if I zoom way in and let's actually move down here to the bottom corner here and you can see that it did an awesome job at giving this guy two ears on the right side of his head and put a beer between this either a big mouth or a double chin or a double head I can't figure it out so it looks pretty amazing as you can see um okay I'm being a little hard on it but uh this is what it's supposed to do right so anyway if I go up here and look at the other areas you can actually see in some cases it did pretty well and you could tell that it's obviously using a mathematical algorithm to fill in these areas so what it's looking for are patterns like these big walkways up here or the the retired jerseys over here or even on the side here where you have this big wall that Jets out and it actually did pretty well there's a little garbage up here that you might have to go in and play with a little bit to get it cleaned up so if you really needed the edges of an image it did pretty well I think um considering some of these are fine um a lot of these areas up in here and of course you know you're asking Photoshop to create parts of the image that aren't even there so considering it did that it did a pretty amazing job I mean you can go in here with the Clone tool and fix that uh but this is a huge timesaver so if you're ever in a jam particularly people who do image editing for magazines or Publications this is very useful um a lot of times you're given something that you need to do this with and now you have that ability to do it and really I mean this is a pretty massive image it did a great job and as always Photoshop does a wonderful job I love photo merge for stitching you can do that in Lightroom as well and it works just fine the one little glitch that I found and this is probably cuz this is version one of the software is that when I kicked it over to photoshop to do a Content aware fill not using that tool to bring it in it left a line where my selector was and so so you really need to do it in Photoshop at least right now with this but anyway you can go in here and if I turn off these layers individually you can see what Photoshop does with the stitching it actually goes through the image and finds all the points to make that Stitch as clean as possible and you end up with a pretty interesting image when all is said and done so if you're into panoramas this could be a very cool thing to do anyway these are the updates I wanted to talk about today and I want to give you one more resource here and if we go back over to the browser uh linda.com are one of our sponsors for the show they make all this happen and they make it possible for me to make three videos a week for you guys nowadays anyway um linda.com is an excellent resource and I say this not because they're a sponsor I say this because I was a customer of theirs for a good 10 years before they ever sponsored the show I was a customer of theirs before they I even had a show to sponsor and this is what Linda does so well is software training this is this is where it's at and you know I've done this with Adobe way before it was you know the Creative Suite even and it was actually versions of Photoshop specifically new versions come out Linda is an excellent resource for training you can go in here and here's Premiere Pro 2015 Creative Cloud updates After Effects updates I can go look at Photoshop updates and they've got they stay up to date with all this stuff and they all actually had all these videos ready to go uh before um the launch which was very impressive and very cool so if I go in here Photoshop for photographers 2015 Creative Cloud updates you can go watch in-depth videos on how to use all the tools all the new changes even the little minuscule obscure interface things that we don't have time to go through in this video uh if you want to try Linda for free it is a subscription based service but if you go to linda.com aop go to that link that's going to let Linda know that I sent you and they're going to give you 10 days of unlimited access absolutely free 10 days is enough to go in there and check out your Photoshop stuff and see if you know learn the new stuff that's in there and you can go to this for all the Creative Suite programs and any of the software they have so to take advantage of the free 10-day trial what you want to do is you want to go to linda.com aop that is Linda with ay.com aop that'll get you your free 10-day unlimited access trial and I want to give a special shout out once again and thanks to the folks at Linda for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography anyway that is the Creative Cloud 2015 updates and there are quite a few of them and uh you know the only complaint that I have really about Adobe and all this stuff is when they do this once a year is they release the entire Suite in one time so within one day whatever apps you have in the Creative Cloud all need to be updated and if you're in the middle of a project I don't recommend updating I haven't found a whole lot major stuff so far um but I'm talking about in terms of going through and maybe a little bug somewhere like I was talking about in panoramas when you bring those over to Photoshop you know and those can be fixed but more importantly if you have a production team and you're relying on something like third priority plugins or something like that and all of a sudden they break I haven't tested all that adobe technically hasn't tested all that so it's always good to do your research before you upgrade and that is one thing that drives me nuts about Adobe is they like to hit you with everything version one at one time uh but anyway other than that I do think the updates are actually pretty interesting they're mostly minor but I wanted to talk about a few of those today I hope you guys have found this somewhat interesting enlightening and probably a little bit humorous but uh you know as always Adobe I like to refer to is the creative software Mafia uh they're they're very difficult because they have a very good product and it is very expensive and of course they do a lot of marketing as well and some of the markting that they've done around these updates I think has just been a little bit on the silly side content aware fills and panoramas and stuff like that that really were not real huge problems but they make it look like it's something that every photographer deals with and now they have a solution and I understand where they're coming from and you know there are alternatives and other graphic software applications um I've used a bunch of them unfortunately when it all comes down to it Adobe still are one of the best products out there particularly with Photoshop and definitely with Lightroom now um when you consider the depth of those both those pieces of software what they will do um and the fact that like you know if you have to go in and do Advanced color profile work or something if you're going to print or you know there could be situations where Adobe really is one of the only tools out there that will help you also if you you want to um mix and match what you're doing in with a whole Suite of other applications that allow you to do everything from create motion graphics and video to print pieces the Adobe Creative Cloud has no competition and it just kind of is what it is doesn't mean that it's bad but it's just a very expensive payment that I have to make once a year to use their software um and of course everything is subscription based and download only on the web right now and anyway I don't sponsor Adobe or anything but uh you know they are kind of the standard and I thought it was worth at least saying uh because I did kind of make fun of them a little bit today but anyway hope you guys have found this useful and as always if you enjoyed this video remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always hit that subscribe button so you'll be up to date on all the latest greatest videos as they come out we're doing many now we're doing I think we're doing like three a week now which is pretty pretty wild I'm trying to get my production schedule settled in a little bit but three a week seems to be working pretty well I know it's a lot of stuff but if you subscribe you'll stay up to date on what we're doing so anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"