Learn about Cool New Photoshop Features

Last Updated on October 8, 2024

Adobe Photoshop and its Creative Cloud are invaluable tools for graphic designers and photographers everywhere in the world. To meet the needs of its users, Adobe has rolled out new versions of its Creative Cloud every year since the product launched in 2012, and 2015 was no different. Other than the inclusion of two groundbreaking services, Adobe Stock and Adobe CreativeSync, there are many cool new Photoshop features to explore.

Adobe Stock

Integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud, the Adobe Stock service gives designers access to over 40 million curated images. With a few clicks, Adobe users can search, manage, and buy stock imagery (photos and graphics) to enhance their designs.

“What makes Adobe Stock unique is the extent of the integration,” wrote ExtremeTech author David Cardinal in June. “First, if you download and edit a watermarked preview image, when you purchase a license your edits are transferred to the full version. That’s an amazing time-saver for anyone who needs to do comps or proofs to submit for approval before licensing images or graphics for their final product. Second, as part of Adobe’s CreativeSync capability, you’ll have access to your licensed images from all your devices.”

Adobe CreativeSync

Exclusive technology developed by Adobe, CreativeSync stores all of your files, photos, fonts, vector graphics, brushes, colors, settings, metadata and stock images from Adobe Stock. This empowers users to edit work on their smartphones, desktops, and tablets without losing any asset in their workflow.

Macworld contributor J.R. Bookwalter shared in a June 2015 article, “CreativeSync marks the first time Adobe has branded the service, which now covers all files, design assets, fonts, settings, and other content used in a particular workflow. Creative Cloud has been moving gradually toward this type of universal sync for several years now, and the introduction of CC Libraries last fall provided a way for designers to access commonly used elements from key desktop applications.”

Artboards

Artboards were previously only available in Adobe Illustrator. Today, graphic designers are tasked with creating websites that not only function across devices, but also look good wherever the site is viewed. With Artboards, designers are given preset layouts to help streamline branding and design across devices in Photoshop. View sites side-by-side for easy comparison and editing. As Harrison Weber from VentureBeat surmised, “Adobe is clearly catering to app designers (and maybe even lingering Fireworks fans) with this feature, and this says a lot about Photoshop’s evolution from general photo editor to a multifaceted design tool.”

Design Space (Preview)

A new project from Adobe, Design Space is a new layer of HTML5/CSS/JS built on top of Photoshop. This tool makes designing for websites and mobile apps easier. This Adobe feature is an early look at what a final Design Space tool will look like in this design suite in the coming years.

Device Preview

Instantaneously see how your work appears across iOS devices with Adobe’s Device Preview feature, new in the 2015 release of Creative Cloud. Using a USB cord or WiFi, connect multiple iOS devices to Adobe for real-time previews of designs.

Glyphs Panel

Currency symbols, Greek characters, grammatical marks, and more are all readily available for designers with the Glyphs Panel, new in Adobe Creative Cloud 2015. Adding those pesky symbols is now a breeze with this easy-to-use panel.