Today Adobe announced the newest versions of their Creative Cloud video applications. Though there are some great upgrades and new tools, Premiere Pro has benefitted tremendously from the update, so much so that it deserves its own article.

The upgrades in Premiere almost all have to do with color. Back when Adobe acquired Iridas (the original developers of SpeedGrade) a few years back, the hope was that not only would Premiere and SpeedGrade communicate with each other much in the same way that other Adobe programs communicated, but that some of the advanced and high-end color features in SpeedGrade would make their way directly into Premiere so that they could be used natively while editing. Not only has all of that happened in the past few Premiere releases, but today's update takes it to another level entirely.

Here's what you can expect to see with the next version of Premiere in terms of color functionality:

While the entire Lumetri color workspace seems great and very well thought out, I'm particularly excited for the basic "photo style" color tools that seem to be straight out of Adobe Lightroom. This doesn't necessarily seem like a big thing, but I've always found the sliders in most photo programs to be far easier and more intuitive than three-way color wheels and curves. These simple tools should provide an easy way for non-colorists to get great color from their shots without any kind of technical background.

For those more well-versed in color correction, all of the same color tools that we know and love are still there in Premiere, just in updated versions that not only look better (at least in my opinion), but which are more functional as well. I'm particularly stoked about the new hue and saturation adjustment controls, however, which offer another entirely new way to isolate a specific color and then intensify or desaturate that color irrespective of other chrominance values. It's a lot like the HSL controller in Magic Bullet Colorista, but with even more controls for fine-tuning color adjustments.

Here are a few of the other short feature videos that Adobe released today alongside the announcement:

Morph Cut is one of those things that will probably end up saving many of our asses at some point (those of us who shoot lots of interviews anyway), especially when we don't have the appropriate b-roll or cutaway to cover up a jump cut. While I haven't tested this feature for myself yet, it sure seems to work well in the video demonstration above, which makes me excited for a future in which Adobe's magical morph cut technology makes it so that I can easily hide the jump cuts that I've had to find other creative ways to fix in the past.

You can read about all of the new features in the latest version of Premiere over on the Adobe blog. And you'll be hearing about the other exciting updates to Adobe's video lineup (including some entirely new pieces of software), so stay tuned!