Search for Adobe in the App Store, and you will find a slew of snappy-sounding apps. It can seem a bit disjointed, so starting today Adobe is updating and re-organising its mobile app lineup under the monikers of the desktop Adobe fare you know and love. There are also a few new ones to try out.
The three main categories of apps that Adobe now has fall under Illustrator, Photoshop and Premiere. That makes it easy for people to identify the kinds of tasks you may want to perform with each specific one. Before it was hard to imagine just what Draw, Line, Mix and Sketch were actually for.
Illustrator’s apps include Line and Draw, both of which are for rapidly recording hand-drawn ideas and drawings that can be exported directly to Illustrator by way of your Creative Cloud account. Under the Photoshop heading are Sketch, Mix and Lightroom Mobile which excel at manipulating — duh — photos on your mobile device. Lastly is Premiere, which only has one app to its name, but it’s a brand-new one. It’s called Premiere Clip, and it provides basic video editing features on iPhone or iPad. The cool thing about Clip is that you can export your project to Premiere and do more sophisticated work on it. The video files are uploaded to Creative Cloud along with an XML file that can be opened in Premiere on your desktop.
Adobe is also releasing a group of three additional apps under the name Creative Cloud Capture. These ones use your phone’s camera to gather material from the real world that can be incorporated into your normal Adobe workflow. Brush is is for creating custom brush-strokes by simply pointing your camera at a shape or line in front of you and capturing it as a repeatable brush for use in Illustrator or Photoshop. Shape lets you capture drawings or illustrations and converts them to vectors. Colour is a re-branding of the Kuler app, which lets you capture colour palettes from real-world scenes.
All of these apps are, of course, aided by their integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud service, though they are free and useable in some form even without being a paid subscriber. The material you make will all be consolidated and accessible right inside your Adobe desktop apps in a new feature called Creative Cloud Libraries. Your Library will travel with your CC account and show up in each of your Adobe workspaces.
To round out this week’s announcements, there will be some updates to many of the core desktop apps including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere. These aren’t major releases, but Adobe wants you to know that they are hard at work at stuff other than iPhone apps.