Adobe Envoy

Adobe announced on Tuesday that Creative Cloud subscriptions will now include Frame.io, its software made for collaborating on video projects. It’s building the software into the latest versions of Premiere Pro and After Effects, which have some updates of their own — the company gave its video editing software a visual refresh, and its compositing software will finally be Apple Silicon native.

Adobe bought Frame.io last year, so including the service in its video editing subscription makes sense. Frame.io makes collaboration easier for remote editors by letting them quickly download footage or audio captured on set or location and easily share draft edits for comments or approval. The Frame.io subscription included with Creative Cloud will give users 100GB of cloud storage they can use to share media files with a collaborator.

Adobe’s including Frame.io collaboration software in Creative Cloud subscriptions And After Effects is now Apple Silicon-native.

These days, more and more official papers are being turned into PDF documents. (PDF stands for Portable Document Format; it is a standard created by Adobe in the early 1990s that allows paper documents to be turned into exact digital copies.) In fact, hard copy paperwork is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule. However, even digital documents have to be signed. You can do it the long way — print those documents out, sign them, and then scan them back into your computer — or you can create a digital signature and place it directly on the PDF.

Windows doesn’t offer a built-in PDF signing feature the way a Mac does. However, you can use Windows’ built-in browser, Microsoft Edge, to sign a PDF document. There are also third-party apps you can download that will give you the same ability.

In this article, I’ll first go over how to use Edge to add a signature, and then I’ll do the same using Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, which is Adobe’s free PDF reader.

How to create a signature for PDF documents on a PC Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader for Windows PCs can create PDF signatures.

Adobe first released its web version of Photoshop in October, delivering a simplified version of the app that could be used to handle basic edits. Layers and core editing tools made the jump, but the service didn’t come anywhere close to including the app’s full breadth of features. Instead, Adobe framed it primarily as a collaboration tool — a way for an artist to share an image with others and have them jump in, leave some annotations and make a couple small tweaks, and hand it back over.

In the months since, Adobe has made a handful of updates to the service, and it’s also started to open it up beyond collaboration use cases. Before, someone had to share a document to the web from the desktop app, but now, any Photoshop subscriber can log in and start a new document straight from the web.

“I WANT TO SEE PHOTOSHOP MEET USERS WHERE THEY’RE AT NOW.”
Adobe’s goal is to use the web version of Photoshop to make the app more accessible and potentially hook users who’ll want to pay for the full version down the road. The company has taken a similar route with a number of its mobile apps, including Fresco and Express. The web version of Photoshop is a particularly important offering since it opens one of the company’s most powerful tools up to Chromebooks, which are widely used in schools.

Adobe plans to make Photoshop on the web free to everyone The goal is to hook artists who could subscribe down the road.

That all said, Lightroom is not transforming into a video app (and, in fact, it could already import videos, just not edit them). The new tools allow you to color grade footage and trim down the beginning and end of clips. But you can’t arrange clips into a timeline, so if you want to color grade a film scene in here, you’d have to move from shot to shot, copying adjustments along the way. Instead, this seems to be meant more for photographers who happen to capture a few short clips as they’re out on a shoot.

The video editing feature will come to Lightroom on both desktop and mobile. It won’t come to Lightroom Classic, which already supports video editing to a much more limited degree. (You could trim videos and apply basic tone controls from the Library screen, but the full develop panel wasn’t available like it will be in the newer Lightroom.)

Both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are getting a handful of other updates, including an intensity slider to dial effects up or down and new “adaptive presets” filters, which use AI to apply effects to specific parts of an image, like the subject or sky.

Lightroom can now edit video, too But it’s not competing with Premiere.

Puget Systems offers a number of different benchmarks to test out your PC using automated real-world tasks in the Adobe Creative Cloud. Some of them (such as the one for Premiere Pro) are somewhat complicated and can take a while to get up and running. But one of them — PugetBench for Photoshop — is very simple.

PugetBench for Photoshop measures how fast your computer can perform various tasks, including mask refinement and gradients as well as filter tasks like lens correction and noise reduction. Unlike some of Puget’s other benchmarks, the Photoshop benchmark only requires one quick plug-in to set up.

Note: this benchmark is not yet supported for the M1-native version of Photoshop.

In the Creative Cloud Desktop app, go to Stock and Marketplace > Plugins.
Search for PugetBench for Photoshop and click Install. Make sure you close Photoshop before installing the plug-in.
Once the plug-in is installed, open Photoshop.
Go to Window > Extensions > PugetBench for Photoshop. Enter your license code (if you have one) in the window that pops up, and configure any other settings you’d like.
Click Run Benchmark.
PugetBench will take it from here. Make sure you don’t move the mouse while it runs.

How to run PugetBench for Photoshop It’s way easier than other PugetBench tests.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been showing you how you can run some of the benchmarks that we run in our laptop reviews to see how well your PC stacks up to others on the market. Today, we’re looking at PugetBench for After Effects, created by the PC manufacturer Puget Systems, which will measure how well your computer can handle VFX and graphics work.

It’s important to note that this benchmark is still in beta. It is a bit more glitchy than some of the other Puget benchmarks (including the one for Photoshop, which we talked about earlier). If you’re running into problems, Puget Systems has a long list of troubleshooting steps to try. It’s doubly important that you don’t use the system (even bump the mouse) while PugetBench for After Effects is running — this can break the benchmark and force you to start over.

How to run PugetBench for After Effects An easy way to test your PC.