MacDirectory Magazine

Jason Seiler

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/758586

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Smart. Really smart. Adobe Stock has a wonderful new feature, visual search. We all have gone through this drill: a client emails you an image in the form of a crunchy little JPEG and says that he or she wants a full page spread with an image “just like this.” You can spend hours paging through images or scanning through a thesaurus to refine your search terms. With visual search, just drag an image into the search box and Adobe Stock will display a collection of similar images. Adobe is now branding this kind of intelligence, suite-wide, as Adobe Sensei. This includes all the applications’ “smart” features from Smart Fill to Adobe Character Animator’s many tricks, making extensive use of the rapid advances machine learning and, we assume, occasionally harnessing Adobe’s cloud computing power in some cases. Like Adobe’s performance technology, Mercury, Sensei is already ubiquitous in the product line. Making 3D Easy: Project Felix Can 3D ever be easy enough for designers? They’re the one with the vision but it’s not easy to translate that into a form that can easily be expressed to the artists and photographers charged with executing them. Project Felix is a totally new approach to 2D and 3D design, intended to make it simple for anyone with experience with the Adobe product line to render images as 3D comps. They look good, though may not be quite production quality. This is much the same philosophy behind Adobe Experience Designer (XD), released earlier this year. You start off with a collection of models, textures and backgrounds, bringing them into your project with drag and drop ease. A small preview window will let you see your results in real time—no need to wait for lengthy rendering. When you have a scene you like, you can then render it out in a Photoshop-friendly format for further polishing. Initially, it will include a reasonably large library of objects, backgrounds and surfaces and there will be more available online created both by Adobe and its user community. Graphics, Design and Web Experience Designer remains in beta, but now can work in layers, adding an important degree of flexibility for designers. XD also adds reusable objects called “symbols” that can be stored in a library and used throughout a project. Any change made to one copy of a symbol will be reflected in all of them. And since late September, a companion app for iOS and Android will let you preview designs in real time on a device tethered to your Mac via USB. Illustrator CC, Adobe’s venerable vector graphics program is now far friendlier to a pixel-centric world. Shapes can be created to fall exactly on pixel boundaries to provide paper-sharp images on screens. They’ll snap to where they need to be no matter how they’re moved around. InDesign’s enhancements are modest but include the ability to import animations from Animate CC. Dreamweaver CC is a major update with improvements

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