Creative Cloud
Still haven’t made the jump to Adobe’s digitally delivered software? A new bundle might tempt you…
The 2014 refresh includes a photography bundle. A big incentive to those who’ve yet to sign up…
The biggest change to the 2014 refresh of the Creative Cloud is the introduction of the photography bundle. This is a massive incentive to those who’ve avoided Adobe’s digital editions of its software so far.
For £8.78 a month subscribers gain access to the latest version of Photoshop, as well as Adobe’s photo management and editing program Lightroom. It does require a 12-month commitment, but you’re getting a year’s worth of access to software which costs about £800 as part of CS5, for just over £100.
There are lots of little tweaks and extras to the various pieces of software that make up Creative Cloud, too. Lightroom has iOS and web syncing, and there’s Cloud support throughout, so you can view and tweak Photoshop images on your iPad. Photoshop itself has improved the way it handles fonts, automatically updating typefaces if they’re missing. There are also improvements to Smart Objects and Layer Comps, while a Focus Mask makes it possible to alter the depth of field. This works particularly well on shallow images such as portraits.
In Illustrator, snapping has been altered so handles don’t stick to particular elements, enabling more finite adjustments, and a Pen tool preview lets you know exactly where your next line’s going to go before you draw it. Like Photoshop there’s an improvement to how Typekit works, as well as GPU acceleration for Windows computers with Nvidia graphics cards.
In terms of software updates they’re so minor they’re likely to be unnoticeable until you need to use them. But it’s Adobe’s decision to entice casual and budget-conscious users which is the most important move here. Photoshop is Adobe’s most popular product, and we hope that if the Photography bundle is a success then a similar Illustrator package will be rolled out soon.