Thanks for the update on Adobe MAX 2023 and the new features in Photoshop! Looking forward to exploring Generative Fill and other enhancements 👍

I've been having a wonderful time following MAX online, but I soon got out of sync with live presentations and had resort to viewing what became available 'On Demand'.  Call me greedy, but I have high expectations, and despite all of the features coming to the full release Photoshop pre-MAX, I was still hoping for another major Photoshop update during MAX.

We usually look to the Sneak Peeks, for the most salivating news about the most interesting features we can be looking forward to, but this year it was the opening keynote that blew me away, and all the more so as the incredible functions we were hearing about were already available in beta versions if not in full release apps.  I am so going to be getting into Illustrator now — 'Can you identify this font?' questions on the Photoshop forum are never going to be the same again.

I found such a thread at random   and copied this image of some text from the thread.  

I cleaned it up in photoshop leaving just the upper bold text, and pasted it into Illustrator beta.

Remembering that I never use Illustrator, and all I knew was from listening to the keynote, I selected the rectangle containing the text, and selected Type > Retype (which is greyed out in my screen shot because the panel is already open.

It took less than a second to identify the font!

That was impressive, but is nothing compared to what comes next.  Illustrator (beta) took a few moments to download the font, after which I could double click the object which had become LIVE TEXT, and EDIT it!!  What the actual heck?!

I'm obviously impressed by the above, but what really grabbed my attention was the Adobe Express demonstrations.  I have not tried this yet, but they dragged a layered Photoshop document into Adobe Express where they were able to attach different animation styles to individual Photoshop layers.  It was fast, looked easy to do, and the end result beautifully fluid animations with sound.  I predict a lot of SFTW uploads will involve the use of Adobe Express going forward.

Just before MAX I spent some time responding to an Adobe survey which asked a lot of questions about Adobe Express.  I had to say that I knew nothing about it, including that it used to be called Spark, (that I also didn't use).  Now, just a few days later, I am chomping at the bit to get into it! 

I'll leave you with this quote from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen:

‘ While there’s apprehension about the impact of Ai, I firmly believe that Ai will never replace human ingenuity.’