In the past, people had to manually install software through installers. With the cloud, things started to change.
And with the advancements of web browsers and mobile, things again change. Because the advancements in the technology allow web-based apps and mobile apps to flourish. And this time, Adobe is among those that are benefited.
After bringing its flagship products Photoshop and Illustrator to the web, this time, the company announced Adobe Creative Cloud Express.
Competing with other template-based image editors, the 'CC Express' is "a unified task-based, web and mobile product that makes it easy to create and share beautiful rich multimedia content — from social media posts and stories to invitations to marketing materials like logos, flyers, and banners."
CC Express is more or less, like a simplified version of its more complicated products, like Photoshop and Premiere Pro.
With CC Express, Adobe targets people who don’t want to spend hours on their computers to do deal with complicated interfaces and tools.
It serves as a replacement for Adobe Spark, but with more functionality.
According to David Wadhwani, Adobe's Chief Business Officer and Executive Vice President:
"Creative Cloud Express is the start of a brand-new journey to introduce first-time creators to Adobe creative tools while adding significant value to our current Creative Cloud subscribers."
Adobe acknowledges the popularity of its tools.
The thing is, not everyone needs the complex and the sophisticated Adobe products.
Many times, non-professional designers, content creators and others just need a simple way to edit images and videos.
With CC Express, Adobe is delivering that.
Users of the web versions of the Adobe software, users can easily create, edit, and share images and videos in various forms.
The app provides access to thousands of templates, over 20,000 Adobe fonts, 175+ million stock images, and more. The platform also supports a simple drag and drop functionality for easy content creation.
Beyond that, the app also has advanced search and discovery capabilities, thanks to Adobe Marketplace.
And much like many of Adobe’s premium tools, the CC Express tool also has support for Adobe Sensei for AI-based capabilities, such as Quick Actions and even the ability to remove the background features from photos.
It also enables features like trimming and merging videos, turning videos into GIFs, and converting/exporting PDF files in a few clicks.
According to Adobe's Product Director Scott Belsky:
"Many people want something simpler and easier to learn than our professional products. These users are content-driven and focused more on results than on process. Creative Cloud Express is designed so that users don’t have to spend a lot of time learning tools like Photoshop and get great results quickly and effortlessly."
This is why CC Express is specifically aimed at social media managers, small business owners and all users who are not professionals in graphic design, but wish to promote something on the web, using the web.
CC Express is introduced as a freemium product for users on the web, as well as on Android and iOS.
The free version allow basic tasks, while the paid version adds adds additional features that include more templates, photos, all the fonts, and other benefits.
But for those who who want a more serious editing, they still have to use the classic versions of Adobe products.
Regardless, Belsky considers the launch of CC Express as the first step towards making affordable versions of all of Adobe’s most powerful tools.