Today we dive into the game-changing updates across the Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s not just a refresh—it's a creative revolution. We explore massive new features across After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop, with a focus on how these updates can transform your workflow, speed up production, and elevate your visuals. From native 3D capabilities to AI-powered masking and advanced upscaling, this video covers practical usage, tips, and real-time demonstrations so you can start integrating these tools into your projects today.

In-depth look:

After Effects: native 3D love returns with Parametric Meshes and Substance Materials. These are the 3D equivalents to Shape Layers, offering spheres, cubes, cones, and more. They’re fully customizable and can be created via Layer - New or the new Mesh Drawing Tool right in the Composition window. Material properties live in the Properties panel, with physically based rendering controls for Roughness, Metallic, and Emission Color, allowing you to craft looks from plastic to metal and everything in between. These meshes cast and receive shadows for more realistic scenes. Substance Materials (.sbsar) bring dynamic, adjustable textures—think photo-real wood, stylized shading, and more. Importing is simple: choose your .sbsar file, and Adobe ships with over 1000 free textures via the Creative Cloud Stock & Marketplace (3D Free assets). Apply textures to your 3D layer, customize Offset, Rotation, Repeat, and material-specific properties. The result is shader-driven detail with presets tailored to different textures, including moon craters that can be adjusted for depth and texture variety. If you have a multi-shader 3D object, you can import multiple shaders and customize each material differently. The workflow opens up a world of new possibilities for texture-first 3D in your comps.

Premiere Pro: AI-powered Object Mask is the new superpower. The long-standing pain of masking—misalignment, tracking issues—has been dramatically improved. Creating complex masks of moving subjects is now as simple as Hover and Click. The Object Mask tool provides real-time feedback with a visual overlay that snaps into place on your subject. Tracking is fast, with real-time preview and acceleration up to 20x faster than before. You can copy, paste, or drag masks onto effects, opacity, or even create alpha channels. The updated tools include fast Lasso and Rectangular masks to add or subtract areas, and classic shape masks are upgraded with 3D perspective tracking that speeds up to 20x. Premiere Pro now also offers a professional-grade editing experience on iPhone for free, without a subscription—making high-quality editing accessible on the go. Naming updates (Premiere Pro vs. Premier) align with the rest of the Adobe suite for consistency.

Photoshop: two powerful AI features to tackle common compositing and image quality headaches. Harmonize drastically reduces the manual work required to match colors, lighting, shadows, and contextual details when compositing objects into backgrounds. Insert your object, remove the background, scale, and place it, then click Harmonize in the Contextual Task Bar. Photoshop’s AI analyzes the background and adjusts the inserted element’s lighting, colors, shadows, and reflections to create a seamless, realistic composite. It’s a multi-step process condensed into a single click for speed and realism.

Generative Upscale in Photoshop takes image quality to the next level, especially for low-resolution or pixelated assets. Using partner models like Topaz, you can boost resolution, sharpen details, and improve overall quality directly within Photoshop. Accessed via the Options bar - Image - Generative Upscale, you can choose between Gigapixel for precise detail-preserving upscaling or Bloom for creative, detail-enhancing upscaling. This makes it possible to salvage assets that would normally require retakes or expensive reshoots, helping you maintain a high standard across your project.

Workflow tips:

Substance Materials: Start with a simple scene, import a few textures, and experiment with tiling, offset, and rotation to see how materials interact with lighting. Tweak roughness and metallic values to move from matte to reflective.
3D in After Effects: Use the Mesh Drawing Tool for quick blocking of 3D shapes before diving into more complex modeling. Leverage the material presets to get a baseline look, then fine-tune in the Properties panel.
Object Mask in Premiere Pro: Use the real-time mask overlays to guide your edits. Pair masks with effects like Gaussian Blur, Color Correction, or Lumetri for precise compositing without lengthy masking passes.
Harmonize in Photoshop: Try different lighting directions when compositing to see how Harmonize responds and improves realism. Use multiple layers and iteratively test the impact on color and light balance.

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