14 PCWorld JANUARY 2022NEWS ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD EXPRESS
opens on a collection of premade formats
and templates, just in case you were afraid
you’d need to start from scratch. On top of
that it includes “20,000 premium Adobe
fonts and 175 million royalty-free licensed
Adobe Stock images.”
Express also includes at least some basic
video editing capability, plus sharing tools
across Creative Suite accounts (because
Adobe really wants Creative Cloud to be a
cloud platform more than anything else).
Quick Actions can leverage some of
Adobe’s cloud processing oomph for
simplified versions of some advanced tools
from Photoshop and Premiere, like
removing items from the background or
merging videos.
Perhaps more interesting is that this is an
Adobe program that’s designed from the
ground up to be cross-platform: The web
version works on any browser in Windows,MacOS, and Chrome OS, and naturally
Android and iOS get their own dedicated
apps. But aside from the obvious acclimations
to screen shape and size on mobile, all
versions of Express get access to the same
tools, templates, and assets. Clearly Adobe
wants people to be comfortable using
Express anywhere and everywhere.
Speaking of which: Who can use it?
Technically, everyone. Unlike most of Adobe’s
programs, Express is free...in the same sense
that Candy Crush is free to play. You can open
and use the program with no more than a free
Adobe account, but in order to get access to
those oh-so-handy templates, fonts, and
stock images, you’ll need to pay in one way
or another. The full version of Creative Cloud
Express is available to users who are already
on a Creative Cloud subscription at $20 a
month or more. If not, they’ll have to shell out
$10 a month to get the full version. But K-
users can access it for
free—gotta hook ’em while
they’re young.
$10 a month is a lot for a
series of fancy templates
and assets, and it’s hard to
recommend to the
apparent target market of
novice social media users.
But it’s hardly out of
character for Adobe to
overvalue its own
properties and services.The program has a huge focus on premade templates and other
existing assets.