An Introduction to Creative Cloud app engine APIs

Transcript

Hello, welcome to our session today around our Creative Cloud APIs. My name is Landon Giss. I’m a senior manager of product management for Creative Cloud APIs. I will give a quick intro about our Creative Cloud APIs, a little bit of background on why we’re doing what we’re doing. And then I’ll play a quick video as well as showcase a demo. And then I’ll end with a slide showcasing the capabilities that we have today. And lastly, a slide to show how you can get access to these APIs and who to reach out with if you have any questions. So we know our customers have content production needs across several mediums, whether that be through images, needing to do things around featured products, whether that’s 3D and doing things from 2D to 3D, or whether that’s video in motion. And we also know that as you start talking about these content needs, with the example here of images, maybe you have 100 products. And maybe for each of those products, you have to create 10 different sizes. And maybe you’re a worldwide company. And so because you’re a worldwide company, you not only need to create those 10 different sizes, but you need to create versions for each of the locations and languages that you’re in. And so you can see really quickly those 100 products that you had soon become 10,000 plus. Additionally, you can see the same example with 3D, depending on a 2D design, the backgrounds you might need, the looks that you might need, and the different product models. And then with video, it becomes infinite. And so with Adobe, we want to help customers create this content at scale through the use of our APIs. We also know a lot of our customers face many pain points in creating this content that can actually impact their business outcomes. A lot of these processes happen manually today on the desktop, either in Photoshop. Maybe you’re using Actions or Script to automate some of that. But again, it’s still happening on your desktop. And so we know that creatives are spending more and more time on these manual, repetitive tasks that take them away from doing their core job competency or creating that core content to help the brand stand out. We also know that this can lead to employee churn and movement. There’s also some inefficiencies in the current process and how this design works today. They require hopping between multiple applications. And this can slow down the production time and really slow your time to market. And so we really want to help you, again, create that content at scale and get that content to market quicker. And finally, we want to help you to scale exponentially to create any number of content, designs, or pieces that you may need. And with the growing demands to deliver content faster, as well as create more content at a faster rate, creative teams struggle to create content at scale, leading to lost revenue. This is another way to show that, as the years have progressed through time, the number and pieces of content that have expanded exponentially, we know people continue to try to achieve one-to-one personalization. And this is outpacing human capacity. Large businesses have been asking for companies, specifically Adobe, to help them automate a lot of this creative, manual, and repetitive processes to help with the things that we touched on earlier. And lastly, as we mentioned, a lot of this is solved through brute force today. And so we want to help with that content quality and design in a new and efficient way. So I’ll touch on what our solution is to this problem today, and that is our Creative Cloud APIs. These are APIs built on top of the applications designers and creators know today, such as Photoshop, Lightroom, and InDesign. Right now, those are the APIs that we’re working with. We expect to include further applications in the near future. As we look at Photoshop, some of the sample apps and services that we support via Cloud APIs and services today are the ability to maybe replace smart objects. Maybe you have an e-commerce website where you have objects that you need to replace. And you can do that today through the use of our Smart Object API. We also have the ability to modify the layers and text within the Photoshop PSD itself. And we can also help you render or convert that PSD to a JPEG PNG. So a sample here would be being able to create personalized artwork using, again, that Smart Object replacement so that users can come in and they can replace that object that’s already in there or been created by the designer really seamlessly and easily. And because it is Cloud APIs, you can do this at scale very easily. With Lightroom, really the full totality of Lightroom is available via the APIs today. So things like presets, Auto Tone, you can create your own customized presets and load those as well. And so you can streamline image quality settings across thousands of images very seamlessly with this new solution. And as we look to InDesign, things about data merge, being able to create renditions, or being able to batch export. And we also support variable data publishing or printing services as well. I’ll dive a little bit deeper into Photoshop before I’ll play a quick YouTube video that anyone can access to showcase some of the things we can do. And then I’ll hop into a quick demo showcasing some of the individual APIs and an application that Adobe has built itself to showcase some of these APIs. So with Photoshop, some of the APIs that we support today are image cutout or being able to easily remove the subject from a background of any photo using our Adobe Sensei technology. Adobe Sensei is our artificial intelligence models, and that is helping in a lot of these cases with some of these APIs. As I mentioned on earlier with Lightroom, the ability to create custom filters or use stock presets to enhance thousands of images at once with this presets API. With Auto Tone, maybe you don’t want a preset, you can use Auto Tone to automatically enhance photos to perfection, again, using our Adobe Sensei technology. We touched on smart object replacement or the ability to manipulate smart objects and create stunning visuals using this API. Within text, we have the ability to edit and manipulate text with using without limits when utilizing these APIs. Maybe you want to take a core creative design and actually create a banner ad from that. We can help with the banner ad reflow API, and this is an example of how we can use this API to create multiple ads from one design. And lastly, maybe you have actions that you’re running on your desktop today. We have the ability to take those actions, upload the Adobe cloud services, and run those actions back and scale creativity from using them in the cloud. So right now, I will go ahead and showcase, well, briefly I’ll touch on, you know, these creative automation technologies can be categorized broadly into three buckets, analysis or being able to tag, find logo detection, look at the quality. There’s the transformation aspect, again, that image cut out, being able to remove the background or the subject of a photo, things like Auto Tone or Auto Crop, also converting. And lastly, that variation generation, being able to take one and create many, such as banner ad, local ads, such as banner ad, localization or regionalization. And again, to meet that one-to-one personalization we touched on earlier, helping you create personalized ads for the market and people that you want. I’ll now play a video from YouTube showcasing a Photoshop action being created on the desktop and then run via our cloud services. Hi, I’m Morgan Gerfinkle, Senior Product Manager on the Adobe Photoshop team. Today, I’m gonna show you the power of using Photoshop actions via our brand new cloud API. Let’s start in Photoshop desktop with an image and a prerecorded action that we’ve called graphic design. Within this action, you’ll notice a laundry list of Photoshop features ranging from content-aware fill to select subject to free transform, to finally merging all the layers and flattening the final image. Once we actually play the action, we’ll see all of these changes result in a finely tuned design that incorporates all of the features that we baked into the action. This same action can be played back on similar images as well to yield consistent results. Let’s take a look at two more images inside of Photoshop. Now that you’ve seen this working in Photoshop desktop, I’ll demonstrate the same action working via our cloud API on our web-based demo page. Let’s start by selecting eight images to apply our action to. Next, let’s select that same graphic design action that we used in Photoshop desktop. Finally, let’s run the graphic design action on all eight image files via our cloud API and check out the results. The action runs perfectly on all eight images, but more importantly, these are running on an automated basis on the cloud using developer code. Our service takes your input files, runs them against a selected action, and will store your output files to a specified URL that you could then use in your workflow. This is true Photoshop magic automated image. Photoshop magic automated at scale. If you’re interested in automating your own use case with the Photoshop actions API via the cloud, sign up for our pre-release at the link below. So as you saw there, what we did is we first started in the desktop application with Photoshop. Then what we did is we created the steps that we wanted to do to each content piece. And then we recorded that action on the desktop. Through the APIs, we were then able to load that up to the Adobe cloud services and run that at scale, in this case, only eight, but you could imagine doing a much greater volume and running back that action. And as you can see, as Morgan showed, you can see the before and the after. So I’ll quickly go ahead and jump into a demo. Anyone can go to the Adobe Photoshop API page through Adobe IO, and you can start to see the featured APIs and start to play around with and get a sense for what we’re able to do and talk about. As we already showcased, we can do one around graphic design so this is the one that Morgan showed you. You can see the before, which is here, and then you can see the after. Also through Adobe IO, you’re able to get an understanding of what this API can do, see some damp sample code to showcase how you would actually implement this on your site, because what we’re talking about right now is just giving you raw access to these APIs through Adobe IO. And then through either developer engineering resources, you can take those APIs and put them into a workflow of your choosing. We can also show, and I’ll show this in a second later, taking this ad and creating a banner ad, again, showing you that code. We also have the abilities you see to do a custom action through that demo. So I would encourage you to be able to go watch the demo, look around, play around. With Lightroom, we’re able to do things such as, again, apply this auto tone, and you’re able to kind of pull back and forth to see what is actually happening to that image with the original on the left, the right, the edited version after having run through our APIs. And what’s really happening here is we are having in this code, you’re pointing to a URL of this asset. We’re picking that asset up. We’re running that API in our cloud against that asset, and then we’re dropping it down into the location of your choosing. And then you can get more detail into what’s actually happening through the sample code here. As I mentioned earlier, we also have the ability to play around with text. And so you can see here a simple image with some text on here. Maybe we want to change the font. Maybe you want to change the color. Maybe you want to change the text weight. Or maybe you want to change the text size. So as you’re seeing again, all through the sample code and these APIs in the demo, showcasing what these APIs are doing and the ability to take these APIs and actually do it at scale in your production system. Also through this page, we have links to our documentation where you can start to read and really understand the background and what’s happening with each of these APIs. And we also have reference that you can go to and start to look at sample code linked. And all of this again, you can just access through the Adobe Photoshop demo page. We also have the ability through this page and we’ll provide this link for you where you can actually get started with the Photoshop APIs yourself. You can sign up for early access, create your credentials and API key and start playing around with this in your own environment. Now what I’ll show you is this is an environment that Adobe has built. This is just to showcase these APIs, because again, what we’re giving access to in this scenario is just raw access to the APIs themselves. What you do with those APIs and how you build is really up to yourself. And so this again, is just an environment in our front end, allowing us to be able to show some of the things that we’ve done. And so what I’ll do is I’ll go ahead and I’ll grab a couple assets that I have here. In this case, I’ll grab five. And all I’m doing is just uploading this into this web UI for me to be able to see. And those photos now appear here. Then I’ll go ahead and take an action file that I’ve previously recorded. In this instance, I’ll grab the banner generation as we just showcased on the Adobe IO page. I’ll upload that. And now I can choose whether I want font files for this instance I’m not going to. And I can choose the output options. I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna choose two. In this instance, I’m gonna take a JPEG and a PSD. The beauty of the PSD is everything that we’re talking about with these APIs, when you use the PSD format, all the changes are non-destructive so that you can go back into Photoshop on the desktop and make any changes you might want after the output. Once I have all of those selections made, I will then come down here and I’ll click run. And now what’s happening is all of those files in that action are being run against our cloud servers. And we’ll see in the end that we will then drop the output files right here. And you can see that I both have JPEG and PSD files for each of the outputs or each of the pieces that I pick. As I click on here, you can see what the beginning artwork or the beginning content looked like and what that output or content is. In this case, again, we started with just one file or one image and we took that image and we’ve created a banner ad with text and everything on there. I’ll go ahead and I’ll click on this PSD here, again, showing what the beginning piece looked like and what the export was at the end. I’ll also go ahead and show image cutout. So for this one, I’ll go ahead and I’ll grab three. And all I’m gonna do is I’m gonna take these images that I have here and I’m just gonna remove the, or use image cutout to remove the background. In this instance, I’m not gonna pick any output. I’m just gonna go ahead and click run. And as you can see, I now have PNGs for each of those files that I put in there. I started with a JPEG in each of these instances and now I can see the before and the after, even removing this piece behind it that wasn’t actually part of the picture that I wanted. Again, showcasing here the before of what I actually put into it and then alluding to what the after looks like. And as we mentioned, there are many, many more APIs as you can see here. This is not an exhaustive list, but you can start to play around and create and string together different APIs for your different use cases and workflows that you may have. And again, we create this application, but it’s really up to you how you envision tying our APIs into your system and supporting the use cases that your creatives and others might have. I’ll go ahead and go back to the presentation now and give a quick overview of the exhaustive list of APIs that we have today. I’ll touch a little bit on what’s coming and then we’ll go ahead and we’ll close a little bit early in case there are any questions. I’ll also showcase a slide where you can access that YouTube as well as the trial and who you can reach out to in case you have any questions. So now what you’re seeing here are the list of services or APIs by applications that we currently support. With Photoshop, it is 14 APIs, 13 of which are REST APIs that are dedicated to a specific feature or task that you can perform. An example of that would be this file conversion or smart object. The 14th API is the one that we showed through YouTube as well as that demo around being able to record an action on your desktop and play that action back against Adobe Cloud Services. With Lightroom, it’s again, Auto-Tone, presets, Auto-Upright, Lightroom edits, pretty much the full totality that is available via Lightroom desktop, available on our cloud services. And lastly, within design right now, renditions and data merge. One of the things I wanna call out is I touched on earlier, creatives might be using actions, but they also might be using scripts. Scripts give you a little more leeway in terms of what you do to an object. It doesn’t have to be a repeatable instance for that content. And so we’re working on right now, the ability to be able to allow customers to create their own scripts and run those scripts against Adobe Cloud Services. And we’ll be taking that not just for InDesign and Photoshop but we wanna expand that to the other creative applications and content types that you may have, including 3D and video. And so again, this is really a list of the APIs. You saw some of the use cases that we support as well as the demos and the content and the YouTube of what is available today. Lastly, I wanna leave you with some resources. So again, here’s the link to the Photoshop actions demo. Again, that YouTube video where Morgan showed us how to create an action on the desktop, be able to save that action, and then run that action against Adobe Cloud Services to create content at scale. We also have the trial that I mentioned and I showcased where you can sign up and get access to these APIs to begin testing today. For any other questions that you may have, you can reach out to me, Landon, and it’s argus.adobe.com to learn more not only about the Photoshop and Lightroom APIs but as well as InDesign and our future plans for our Creative Cloud APIs to help our customers create content at scale. That today concludes our session. And I’ll go ahead and quickly stop sharing my screen and see if there are any questions or things in the chat box. And I’ll be happy to answer any questions or things in the chat pod. And feel free again to play around with, use these APIs, go through the demo, as well as reach out to me with any further questions.