It happens to the best of them, from Apple and Sony, to the Government of Canada. Let’s not forget that missing hard drive debacle involving over 300,000 student loan credentials in September 2012 (CBC News). Although, Adobe’s 2.9 million hacked accounts equals the population of Lithuania (Mashable).
For Adobe, however, this can’t be very shocking since they face a legacy of people trying to hack their programs. Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe DreamWeaver are all in the top 10 most pirated software products on the internet (Tech-Blorge).
In the end, utility rules, and Adobe does creative the best. If you’re a designer, developer, artist or marketer like me, it’s likely your tool of choice.
With Adobe’s latest offering, Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 and Adobe Premiere Elements 12, they’re providing new features and a brand new way for people to seamlessly interact with their work, on the road, in the office, on the bus and at home on the couch. They had me at couch.
Photoshop Elements 12 features at a glance
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Mobile Access – With Elements Mobile Albums, user’s can now view, edit and share their photos and videos seamlessly on their smartphones, tablets and desktop devices whether at home or on-the-go.
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Content-Aware Move – Easily move objects within a photo and automatically fills in resulting empty spaces.
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Pet Eye Correction – Provides an easy solution to the problem of flash reflection in animals’ eyes, which is not addressed by Red Eye correction technology.
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Auto Smart Tone – Learns a your editing preferences, resulting in one-click adjustments based on your choices, which gets better the more you use it.
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Guided Edits – Step-by-step instructions to create Zoom Burst and Photo Puzzle effects, as well as Restore Old Photo, which enable users to restore damaged or old photos.
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Share to Twitter – Share a photo with a tweet on Twitter.
Premiere Elements 12 features at a glance
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Guided Edits – Step-by-step navigation on how to get started, trim frames, add scores, transitions, titles and narrations, as well as animating graphics and creating pictures within pictures.
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Scores – More than 50 soundtracks that automatically regenerate to fit the duration of a clip, making it easy to create home movies with perfectly timed intros, outros and background music.
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Sound Effects – More than 250 effects that add excitement and dimension to audio tracks.
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Film Looks – Four new filters to add stylized Hollywood flare to home movies including Comic, Trinity, Yesteryear and Cross Process.
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Motion tracking – Spotlight your subject by adding graphics, text and effects that move with the object.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 and Adobe Premiere Elements 12 (Mac and Windows) are available for purchase at www.adobe.com for US$99.99. They also offer per month pricing, which is something new as part of their Creative Cloud suite.
From my own experience in the world of marketing, it’s pretty much impossible to live without Photoshop and video tools like Premiere Elements. I have never encountered a situation where a product shot didn’t need retouching and a swanky video didn’t need trimming. So when it comes to Adobe’s new features, I can see myself utilizing all of them for one project or another. It’s only until you’re in a situation where pet red eye is a problem that you truly understand that Adobe is the Ferrari of creative software. And in this case, bigger (options) is better.
When it comes to the new mobile connectivity, it’s a little bit a lot like Instagram, Snapseed and Pixlr-o-matic. However, since it’s an official product of Adobe, it means you can easily access your work via the cloud, make quick edits and share it. For people who share their work as a way to market their business, this is a seamless touch that I think will make their life a lot easier.
My only concern with this type of all encompassing cloud storage system, beyond the vulnerability of your personal information, is a financial loom of your cloud parking space filling up and inevitably the investment of paid cloud parking.
Final thoughts
To touch upon the privacy leak, it’s all really about Adobe’s next move. What will the marketing spin be to maintain their fan base and enchant customers? Considering their global reach and Fortune 500 partnerships, I imagine we should all take out a pen and paper to take notes. If anything, they could always copy Yahoo’s latest efforts in paying hackers (Hacker News). But that’s another story.