Thursday, October 9th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe releases Photoshop CC 2014.2


An animated character displayed as a 3D Layer within Photoshop. The ability to import rigging and animation data in Collada format is one of the new features Adobe has added in Photoshop CC 2014.2.

Adobe has rolled out Photoshop CC 2014.2, its latest update to the software. The new version was released at the comapany’s Adobe MAX conference earlier this week.

The update adds a couple of new features of interest specifically to 3D artists, including the option to interpret rigging and animation data in Collada format, alongside more general workflow and performance boosts.

Import animation data in Collada format; export as interactive 3D PDFs
Of the 3D-specific features, Photoshop now has the ability to read rigging and animation data imported in Collada format and scrub through animations on the timeline.

Adobe is pitching the functionality as a way of adjusting the pose of a character for 3D printing rather than for doing more conventional 3D work, although Mixamo has a blog post on how to use the output of its online character-creation and rigging tools within the software.

Users can also export 3D data as an interactive 3D PDF “with all of the … controls enabled”.

New Creative Cloud Libraries
Of the other features, the biggest change is probably to Adobe’s Creative Cloud accounts themselves. New Libraries let users store colours, brushes, text styles, graphics and vector images in a central cloud repository.

The assets can be used in any supported application, also including Illustrator, on any connected device.

Performance boosts and design-related features
Performance has been improved – the GPU-accelerated Mercury Graphics Engine now supports Focus Area – and touch control is now officially supported on Windows 8.1 devices instead of being an experimental feature.

Designers get the option to create multiple guide layouts and guides from shapes; and web designers get an Extract Assets feature for pulling web-optimised images from a PSD file in multiple resolutions and formats.

There are the usual set of smaller UI and workflow changes, which you can read about via the links below.

Read more about the new features in Photoshop CC 2012.4 on Adobe’s blog

Read the full change log for Photoshop CC 2014.2