Adobe has updated its Fresco drawing app with a bunch more features. There’s a clipping masks tool that will allow you to capture certain parts of your drawing and move them to another layer or layer group. That way, you can continue to work on your piece without worrying about messing up the work you’ve already done.

There’s a new brush management tool as well. You’ll be able to pick which Pixel brushes to display or hide and make a custom set of brushes with the ones you use the most often. Fresco now has a preview tool for Photoshop, Pixel and Eraser brushes, which shows you the size and shape of the brush when you touch the screen. You can activate that though the Brushes menu, which is under the Input options in App Settings.

Like most conferences, Adobe Max will be virtual this year. It will also be completely free. The three-day event kicks off on October 20th, and registration is now open.

The full lineup includes content demos, feature previews, musical performances and celebrity appearances. Attendees will hear from Ava DuVerney, Keanu Reeves, Anne Leibovitz and Tyler, the Creator. By signing up early, you’ll get a chance to win a t-shirt, be able to build your schedule early, gain access to instructor files and more. 

If you’re creative who depends on your iPad, you have some potential savings to look forward to. Starting today, iPad owners who subscribe to Photoshop on iPad will also get access to Adobe Fresco Premium as part of a new app bundle. Similarly, if you already pay for Adobe Fresco Premium, you’ll get access to Photoshop on your tablet. Previously, you had to subscribe to the apps separately, with each costing $10 a month.   

Creative Cloud customers can also take advantage; Adobe now includes Fresco Premium in its Photoshop Single App and All Apps subscriptions — priced at $20 and $60 per month, respectively. Adobe is no stranger to bundling together its many different apps. The company offers a similar package on PC and Mac where photographers can get access to Photoshop and Lightroom for one price. 

Transcoding media — especially big files like those that use RAW codecs — can take a lot of time and resources. When a videographer shoots in one format, but the editor has to convert the footage to another, the workflow screeches to a halt. Apple’s new software will hopefully provide a fast track for teams that use both Macs and PCs. That said, pros — who work on short deadlines and are thus rather cautious about changing their workflows — may shy away from using it until it’s proven to be reliable.

Cinema cameras typically provide several RAW codec options, including first-party options. For example, Canon cameras like the C-300 Mark II work with both Apple ProRes RAW and Canon’s own RAW formats. Many external recorders — which grab a signal via the host camera’s HDMI output — are also capable of capturing ProRes RAW footage. These files are then sent to a color corrector or editor for refinements and assembly.

ProRes RAW was off to a rough start when it launched a few years ago. It wasn’t supported by many cameras, capture devices or editing suites. However, that seems to be changing slowly. Canon, Blackmagic, Arri, Red and many other manufacturers now provide the ability to shoot in Apple’s format. By bringing Creative Cloud editors who use PCs into the fold, adoption could increase — though more and more pro editors are moving from Premiere Pro to Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve.

Adobe hopes that allowing for easier access to its apps will help keep K-12 and college students on track despite the lack of access to on-campus computer labs. IT admins have to fill out a form, which Adobe will evaluate. The admins can then grant access by uploading spreadsheets of approved users to their Creative Cloud management app.

This is probably a good move on Adobe’s part, especially in light of its strange decision to revoke licenses to old versions of its applications last year. Students can continue to practice their creative skills while cooped up at home, and messing around in Photoshop and Illustrator outside of academic pursuits could help kill some boredom, too.

When you plug an SD card or drive into your Apple device (via dongle, of course), Lightroom will auto-detect the media. You can choose to import files individually or just dump the whole lot of them into your library. Once they’ve been transferred to Lightroom’s library, the app will ask if you want to delete the source files on your external media. The correct answer is “no,” but as an additional safeguard, the photos will also be automatically backed up to Creative Cloud, if you have that feature enabled.

This is just the latest feature Adobe has previewed — there were several others revealed earlier this month that creatives can look forward to. At Adobe MAX, the company teased integrated streaming, automatically inserting people into photos, animating still images and more. While those updates won’t be available for some time, directly importing images to Lightroom will be available by the end of the year.

The streaming function seems simple enough; users just hit a button to start broadcasting and receive a link they can share with anyone who wants to watch them work. Viewers can also comment and ask questions. The ability to watch a Creative Cloud expert at work could be helpful for a variety of use cases. Currently, many digital artists use services like Skillshare and Patreon to teach skills and earn some extra income, something they could do right in Adobe’s apps going forward. Being able to stream a workflow and take real-time questions will be a big draw for both instructors and learners. Professional designers, editors and animators can stream to clients and get instant feedback. Freelancers could also collaborate more smoothly with partners, reducing back-and-forth file swapping and revisions.

Adobe is currently beta testing its streaming technology with select users of Adobe Fresco, an iPad app that mimics real-life media like oil paints and charcoals. This new feature and Adobe’s other “sneaks” cap a busy week of news from the company, headlined by the long-awaited iPad version of Photoshop hitting the app store. The company is also releasing a mobile version of Illustrator, which will arrive in 2020; both those apps will presumably work with these new livestreaming features when they become more widely available. We’ve reached out for more details and will update the post if we hear back from Adobe.

Developers can enable these typefaces in third-party apps by using Adobe’s custom API called Fonts. In other words, not all apps on your device will be able to use the typefaces; compatibility has to be specifically added as a feature. Of course, any Adobe app is going to work with the API. Users can open the Creative Cloud app, navigate to the Fonts tab and pick any typefaces to sync across their devices.

All fonts are cleared for personal and commercial use, which means professionals don’t have to go through the time consuming process of licensing each file. Those who don’t subscribe to Creative Cloud can still access 1,300 of the fonts by logging in with a free Adobe ID.

This update is a small but significant step toward helping graphics and video professionals to leverage iPads as creative tools; while Adobe has solid tablet apps, the desktop versions of its software are more powerful and efficient. The company seems to be following Apple’s lead. The latest iPad Pros are powerful enough to handle heavy workloads, while improved Pencil functionality and the new Sidecar feature in macOS Catalina can negate the need for tools like Wacom tablets.

We’re still a ways off from having full-fledged versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign on iPads. But in the meantime, having a large selection of fonts on mobile will at least let you get some typesetting work in while on the go.

A spokeswoman for Adobe wouldn’t confirm or deny the rumor, telling Bloomberg that the company had “nothing new to share at this time.”

As with Photoshop, both Adobe and Apple have mutual interests in bringing Illustrator to the iPad. For Adobe, this is another way to spur Creative Cloud subscriptions. You might be more likely to sign up if you know you can finish a project on your tablet using an app similar to the one on your computer. Apple, meanwhile, has fought to position the iPad (especially the iPad Pro) as a laptop replacement that can handle demanding tasks. Even if an iPad-native Illustrator has significant compromises, Apple could benefit by reeling in customers who were previously convinced that mobile tablets couldn’t handle heavy-duty creative work.

If you were around during the VHS era, you may already be familiar with the process of changing aspect ratios. “Pan and scan” editing was used to convert 16:9 theatrical movie prints into 4:3 home videos. Editors had to move the footage frame by frame to make sure all relevant visuals stayed on-screen. Today, editors have to do the same when creating multiple versions of the same video. For example, an editor’s main task may be to create a 16:9 video to be published on YouTube, but he may have to create a square version of the video for Instagram as well.

“With Auto Reframe, users can simply drag the effect onto the individual clip or clips they wish to reframe and it does the work for them, saving countless hours,” says Adobe. The effect is powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning engine that automates tasks throughout the Creative Cloud software suite. Sensei analyzes each frame of the footage and creates keyframes (basically time-based coordinates) that follow the action and adjust the framing accordingly. This will cut the time it takes to create a new version of a video from hours to minutes. And for editors, who are often freelancers or contractors, time is money.

Auto Reframe will launch on Premiere Pro later this year. Motion graphics templates will also be coming to After Effects, making animated graphics, text and lower third visuals a faster, easier process.