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This Ultimate Guide to Lightroom’s Smart Previews helps you edit on the road without external storage

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If you edit on a laptop, particularly if you’re regularly travelling and using an external hard drive to store your images, you’ll know what a pain it can sometimes be to carry those external drives around with you, let alone hook them up on a whim – like, when you’re travelling on a plane or a train, for example. But without connecting them, you can’t edit your images. Lightroom simply won’t let you. Or will it?

In this video, Anthony Morganti gives us the solution with his “Ultimate Guide” to using Smart Previews within Lightroom. Smart Previews essentially allow you to keep editing your images even when the device on which the original image files are contained is not connected to your computer. Very handy if you’re often travelling and don’t always have the ability to plug in your external storage.

Here’s how to download thousands of free photos without Adobe Stock subscription

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Did you know that you don’t need an Adobe Stock subscription in order to access a bunch of high-quality stock photos? I had no idea, but I just learned it from Anthony Morganti and thought it would be worth sharing. If you’re an Adobe CC subscriber, that’s all you need to download photos from its stock library, and Anthony will show you how in his latest video.

Adobe releases new AI features to Photoshop CC: improved masking, depth blur, and more

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In addition to making Photoshop and Illustrator available on the web, Adobe has introduced a bunch of other new features to its apps. The trend of relying on artificial intelligence continues, so Photoshop is now getting even more advanced Object Selection, new neural filters, artificial depth blur, and plenty more. So without further ado, let’s right into it.

Photoshop sees big new updates to Sky Replacement, Healing Brush and Magic Wand for iPad and desktop

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Adobe has today announced new updates for Adobe Photoshop on both the desktop and the iPad. For the iPad the Healing Brush and Magic Wand tools you know and love from Photoshop for Desktop have finally arrived. Photoshop for iPad also receives a new Canvas Projection feature, which allows you to send your image to an external monitor or TV while you’re working on it.

Photoshop for Desktop sees a big upgrade with the Sky Replacement tool, with a bunch of new skies to choose from and the ability to import up to 5,000 skies at once. Finally, one that’s long overdue, the Transform Warp tool now has bezier handles to let you warp things over whatever shape you want.

Adobe After Effects’ new Composition Profiler helps you to speed up your renders

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There’s a small bit significant new feature coming to Adobe After Effects. It’s currently available in the latest After Effects Beta and I expect it’ll be coming to the final release once it’s all ready. Essentially, it lets you see exactly how much each layer in your composition affects your render time.

This is a pretty massive feature, as it’s often difficult to figure out exactly which part of your composition might be slowing everything down without manually checking each layer on and off in turn. Now, the new feature shows your entire render frame time with each layer broken down individually, allowing you to easily pinpoint layers you can optimise.

Adobe Premiere Pro beta shows a major UX facelift for creating and exporting projects

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Adobe has announced a new import and exposure interface for Adobe Premiere Pro. And while I described it as a “facelift” in the title, it’s more like major reconstructive surgery. Like John Travolta & Nick Cage levels of different. It’s currently in public beta, so you can all go and have a play with it, but it comes with a whole new streamlined way of importing your media and exporting your final results.

One thing that should be made clear is that this change doesn’t take away anything you’ve already got. If you prefer to do things the old fashioned way, you can still do that. The new enhancements are simply extra options that add to your overall experience. And, I have to say, they look pretty awesome for speeding up your project workflow – at least the very beginning and end of it.

Adobe Audition now M1 native and Premiere Pro workflow improvements in May CC update

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Adobe has just announced their May 2021 update for Adobe’s Creative Cloud, including new features for both Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere Pro. Audition now sees native Apple M1 support, with improved performance for recording and mixing and a couple of very handy new features for stripping silence and monitoring loudness.

Premiere Pro also sees a new Loudness Meter for audio, refinements to the captions workflow, DirectX 12 support on Windows, and performance enhancements for Canon XF HEVC video file, amongst other new updates.

Adobe changed all its app icons and designers are absolutely raging

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Last month, Adobe started to change the icons for its ever-growing suite of applications. The biggest change was the new colourful Creative Cloud logo, but the applications within the Creative Cloud Suite have been transitioning, too, and not everybody’s happy about it.

Many have noted that the icons are all starting to look the same, with multiple apps sharing the same colour scheme, making it confusing to find the right app. Others are definitely fighting their OCD over differences in font size and inconsistencies in spacing and alignment from one icon to the next, but the overall consensus doesn’t seem to be all that positive.

The June Creative Cloud update brings massively improved AI selection features to Photoshop

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Adobe has released their June update for the Creative Cloud, which they says is the biggest feature update since the Adobe MAX conference in November 2019. It brings some new selection tools to Photoshop, particularly suited to cutting out people and hair, rotatable patterns, font matching, and more for the desktop, as well as a slew of updates for Photoshop for the iPad and Lightroom for all platforms.

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