As a photographer myself, in both personal and professional capacity, I use Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. In my portfolio suite of services along with my photography services, as a content creator, visual storyteller, travel writer and digital marketer journey, I have also added vlogging, producing zines and photo books, as well as some design stuff with my photography works, I am beginning to explore other Adobe Creative Suite software: Premiere Rush and Adobe Express, maybe Adobe InDesign down the road, if I embark on bigger visual storytelling book projects.

Adobe MAX 2022 – Breakthrough Innovations and Upgrades 

During Adobe MAX 2022, Adobe made several announcements and updates, delivering breakthrough innovations and upgrades across its creative and digital solutions. Here are a summary of updates from Adobe Max 2022:

• Adobe Advances 3D, Immersive and Metaverse Experiences with New Products
• Adobe AI Innovation Maximises Creative Power and Precision for Creative Cloud and Adobe Express Users
• Adobe Introduces New Collaboration Capabilities in Creative Cloud and Document Cloud
• Adobe Unveils Powerful New Collaboration and AI Capabilities in Photoshop 
• New Adobe Express Innovations Make Content Creation Easy, Fun and More Productive 

The topics that I would be sharing more about from Adobe MAX 2022 would be on Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and Adobe Express. 

Powerful New Collaboration and AI Capabilities in Photoshop

New innovations in Photoshop are going to make the world’s most advanced image editing software even smarter, more collaborative and easier to use across surfaces. The Share for Review (beta) enables users to conveniently collaborate on projects without leaving Photoshop, and new features make editing images in a browser more powerful. 

On your flagship desktop Photoshop app, breakthrough features powered by Adobe Sensei AI are added including selection improvements that enhance the accuracy and quality of selections, and a one-click Delete and Fill tool to remove and replace objects in images with a single action.

A quick summary of new AI features launched in Adobe’s suite of Creative software and digital solutions:

Adobe Photoshop

• Selection improvements 
• One-Click Delete and Fill
• Photo Restoration Neural Filter (beta)
• Remove Background
• Masking and Brushing

Adobe Lightroom

• Masking Selection
• Select Objects
• Adaptive Presets
• Content-Aware Remove

Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects

• Premier Pro Auto Colour
• After Effects Scene Edit Detection

Adobe Substance

• Adobe Substance 3D AI-Enhanced Materials

The new version of Photoshop introduces Share for Review, supporting collaborative work from anywhere, critical for creative workflows in today’s increasingly digital economy. This enables convenient collaboration between creators and stakeholders. 

Adobe Express – Innovations Make Content Creation Easy, Fun and More Productive

The template-based web and mobile tool for creators to easily make, edit and share standout content from anywhere and anytime, the Adobe Express has also received the latest innovations and updates.

Everyone from students to small business owners to marketers, and creative professionals, can create a logo, build a social media campaign, design a flyer or banner and make a standout school project. 

Many Adobe Express customers can also use Creative Cloud applications or work with designers who do. The workflows can now streamline with Adobe Creative Cloud applications through Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries. 

New features are frequently being rolled out, Adobe Express creators will soon enjoy expanded video editing powers with a new mixed-media editor, Generative AI capabilities to help generate unique fonts, images and new backgrounds, and new opportunities to collaborate with other creators across other Adobe Creative Cloud apps, delivering greater productivity. 

A quick summary of recently added innovations in Adobe Express include:

• Quick Actions
• AI-Driven Template Recommendations
• Content Scheduler 
• Multi-Page Capabilities 
• Advanced Search Discovery and Recommendations

Adobe Express has new partnerships, they are teaming up with Wix, a global leader in helping creators and businesses create, manage and grow their business, to explore opportunities to bring the best of Adobe Express and the Wix platform to both user bases. 

Adobe has also teamed up with Meta on Express Your Brand, enabling small businesses to grow their online presence using Adobe Express. Adobe Express is also partnering with leading platforms, to accelerate creative and digital literacy skills for students of all ages.

Adobe Express for Education for students and teachers in the classroom, with its new AI-powered features are going to make it easy to design stunning presentations, create attention-grabbing web pages, make captivating video presentations, flyers, flashcards and more. 

Adobe is also harnessing its creative and technological strengths with a new global offering, Adobe Express for Nonprofits. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – A New Future in Creativity and Content Creation, Helpful or Fearful? 

Whether you are a creative in photographer, filmmaker, artist, designer, the Adobe Creative Suite of software and digital solutions, will definitely play many crucial roles. The rise of AI innovation in Adobe’s suite of software and digital solutions, can be helpful in our creative’s digital and creative workflow, doing the smaller tasks and allowing us creatives to concentrate on what we do best, unleashing our creativity and bringing it to life.

I am looking forward to utilising Adobe Express further in time to come, I didn’t get to know more about this relatively new application or even use it, the new additional features are great for content creators to explore, create and showcase with their photographs, videos and design work. 

As a photographer and visual storyteller, my main creative tools/software are Adobe Lightroom, followed by Adobe Photoshop. From a holistic digital experience and services provision perspective, I have started to work on videos/vlogs a few years back, I am also expanding on publishing zines and books in the near future. 

My next creative tools/software that I would look more closely into, would be Premiere Rush (before I decide to go Premiere Pro) and InDesign.  

Adobe Creativity + Adobe Digital Experience

For business organisations, your creative and beautiful photographs, videos, design, artworks are ready for your business sales, marketing, branding, publicity and promotion workflow. Do you know that you are able to combine your Adobe Creativity with Adobe Digital Experience for your businesses? 

Have a read about this article “Adobe Research Reveals: Time to Get Personal” during my recent attendance at Adobe Experience Makers event.

For more information on Adobe MAX 2022

If you like to know more in-depth about the breakthrough innovations and upgrades that were announced during Adobe MAX 2022, visit Adobe MAX website and Adobe Creative Cloud YouTube channel to check them out.

* Information and pictures courtesy of Adobe and WE Communications *

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First and foremost

Before you are able to use the Xencelabs Pen Tablet, you need to install drivers software onto your computer. On the software installation, you can download drivers from Xencelabs website,  install the drivers first. Next up, you need to plug in the bluetooth dongle into usb port, followed by connecting the Xencelabs devices, finally connect the Xencelabs application to the Pen Tablet. 

Once the software and drivers are installed, you are good to go with your creativity adventures with Xencelabs Tablet Medium. Just launch the application on laptop/desktop, followed by switching on the pen tablet and quick keys.

Pen Tablet Medium

This Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium is a well thought out ergonomic design tablet, it has good built quality, minimalist and sleek. It’s also compact in size, portable and lightweight.

Upon launching your preferred creative software application, you can start working on your creative workflow and processes. The dimensions of the Pen Tablet Medium are 320.5 (W) x 232.5 (H) x 8mm (D), I feel that this suits my workflow, not too big on your work desk and you have sufficient space (active area size is 262.4mm x 147.4mm) on the tablet to do your creative work. 

Pens

There are two pens, the Xencelabs 3 Button Pen and Xencelabs Thin Pen. For the 3 Button Pen, it features three programmable buttons with eraser, it feels slighter thicker in width. Some of you might prefer this pen for its feel, grip and 3 programmable buttons configuration.

For the Thin Pen, it’s more of a classic/traditional tool for those who prefer something natural and familiar in the hand. It’s slightly thinner, it has two well buttons that are programmable with eraser. 

You have choices, you can switch around the two pens, best of both worlds when you are into your creative workflow. Each pen has its own feel and characteristics, it’s not fair to say the 3 Button Pen is better than the Thin Pen, I reckon you might end up taking turns to use both Pens at different stages of your workflow. 

Quick Keys

The Quick Keys is an interesting device accompanying the Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium setup. It’s really compact in size, portable, lightweight, with a OLED display and physical dial with a button on top of the dial. 

Personally, I feel that most creatives would really like the dial and button function in your creative workflow. It just feels so much easier and better to control edits/changes via a dial than using a mouse.

Creatives can create shortcuts per application and group sets of related functions together. How you would like to configure the shortcuts would be based on your workflow settings and processes that you prefer and are comfortable with.

Thoughts and Views

Here are some key thoughts and views from my Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium review experiences

1. Pen Tablet is the gadget that photographers/creators would be more familiar with in editing their works.
2. Option of 3-Button Pen and Thin Pen, whichever pen and workflow that suits your liking 
3. Easy to use and fits into the editing workflow much easier 
4. For the Quick Keys, I really like the dial and button function. However, the OLED display is a bit of a mixed feelings for me, I would prefer physical button sliders over OLED display or a hybrid combination of physical sliders with OLED display
5. One key factor in my opinion is to first customise and tweak the Pen Tablet Medium, the pens and quick keys setup to your workflow settings and processes that you prefer and are comfortable with

Overall, the Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium is handy, portable and lightweight for you to carry around. This would allow you to work remotely, in a cafe, in your office or at your home office. 

For creatives, whether you are a photographer, designer, artist, illustrator, draughtsman or architect, having a tablet and a pen setup comes in very handy and useful when you are doing creative work in your respective field. For fellow photographers, it gives you a more accurate and precise editing in your photography editing workflow. 

There are different options to choose from, if you prefer the Xencelabs Pen Tablet setup only, they have two sizes Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium and Pen Tablet Small. For those who prefer the full package, the Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium Bundle with Quick Keys is the setup that you would be looking for.

For more information, please visit Xencelabs website. 

* I would like to thank XenceLabs for the opportunity to review the XenceLabs Pen Tablet Medium. *

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