Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Adobe Stock and Creative Sync, have received major updates, which would affect every app in the Adobe ecosystem.

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There is substantial performance enhancement in this update to the Creative Cloud apps. In the case of the MacOS version, the updates have affected Photoshop's speed in particular, which is a much-needed improvement.

Although Photoshop is still not up to par with the speed of Affinity Photo, it is closing the gap thanks to these updates and Photoshop does feature far more tools than its rival. The Illustrator also appears to have been given a boost in speed performance.

Adobe XD is still in beta and preview, which means it is still free to download and can be utilized even without an active membership to Creative Cloud. Also, it is now available in new languages, namely, German, French and Japanese.

Several new features have been added to Photoshop's already extensive capabilities. For example, the content-aware cropping feature enables users to resize canvases without the checkerboard appearing - this is particularly useful in image rotation.

By simple geometry, rotating a rectangle and then cropping to a square will reduce the overall size of the image. But with the content-aware crop tool, it will fill in the empty space, similar to the clone stamp tool. Hence, the image does not have to be cropped to a smaller size. This feature works extremely well for huge sky images or images with less detail, in general.

There is also a new face-aware, liquifying tool in Photoshop, ideal for slimming a person in images. The main difference between this tool and the basic liquefy tool is that it recognizes facial features and preserves them, avoiding a squished facial image result.

Illustrator, on the other hand, now features fast export of assets, allowing simultaneous output. You can now even export entire sets of artboards to multiple formats, which allows maintaining entire icon sets with single icons per artboard.

For those managing large volumes of assets for multiple organizations and accounts, Creative Cloud Libraries now feature control permissions, allowing you to grant "read only" access selected people and give others full access. Since it is CreativeSync powered, any changes access granted to individuals make will automatically sync to all the specified accessible files.

The updates made to Adobe Stock focuses on integration and a one-click licensing system to allow users to license stock images directly from the artboard. So for photographers and image artists who are looking to contribute to Adobe Stock, submission can be easily done through applications such as Photoshop and Lightroom.