A conference focused on creative and artistic authenticity adds in a dollop of AI
After making big ticket acquisitions last year in marketing automation (Marketo, $4.75 billion) and e-commerce (Magento, $1.68 billion) to strengthen an expanding digital marketing portfolio, Adobe turned back to its core mission at Adobe Max 2019, an annual creative conference that attracted nearly 15,000 artists, designers, and storytellers to Los Angeles, California, last week, Nov 2-6. Here are four big themes from this year’s conference:
AI as Your Creative Assistant
Many of the new creative programs that Adobe is best known for now utilize Adobe Sensei, the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. While already being used in Campaign, Target, and Analytics, Sensei is now being presented as a pan-Adobe technology touching all of its products. For example, Photoshop will be able to separate a subject from a background without any design skill needed. Sensei will also be able to recognize similar images
and faces to make the creative process faster, as well as take a sketch and use algorithms to convert it into a high-fidelity composition, as shown in its #ImageTango demo.
Learn more about AR at the Adobe blog
Creativity Anywhere, On Any Device
Most designers gleefully tether themselves to a desk and Wacom drawing tablet at work. But some want to be free. Adobe obliged with Photoshop and Illustrator apps for iPad, as well as a new drawing app called Fresco that takes advantage of Adobe AI to recreate lifelike brush strokes on iPad and Surface tablets. For iOS and Android smartphones, Adobe launched Photoshop Camera, with a layer feature that allows someone to build collages with the precision of Photoshop on their phone. In addition to freeing designers from their desks, Adobe is working on accessibility advancements, including voice commands across the Creative Suite, and a new plug-in for Adobe XD (a prototyping tool) that includes a built-in color contrast checker and color-blind simulator.
Learn about Fresco for Windows
Find out about Photoshop’s bumpy ride on iPad
AR for All
Just as Adobe is making creativity portable and progressive, it’s also trying to democratize bleeding-edge technology by making augmented reality tools less complicated and more accessible for the code-challenged among us. Adobe’s AR entry is called Aero, and through tight integration with its Creative Cloud service and access to Photoshop’s layers, assembling the building blocks to construct an AR experience will become less technically demanding to rapidly stand up AR experiences.
Content Authenticity
Finally, in the post-truth era where technology can turn art into deception and distort truth beyond recognition, Adobe has introduced #ProjectAboutFace to use technology to track when photographs have been digitally altered.
Special thanks to Paul Grachan, Tyler Kennedy, and Elliott Beazley for contributing to this post live from the conference.
