Adobe Premiere 26 and After Effects 26 both release today with some powerful new features aimed at editing and post-production workflows.
Briefly, these new Adobe Premiere 26 and After Effects 26 upgrades include AI-enhanced masking features in Premiere and a broad set of new capabilities in After Effects — including new typography, materials, and 3D features — that look to meaningfully expand motion design and visual storytelling.
New in Premiere 26
Some of the features that launch with Premiere 26 today are genuinely new, others are refinements and further iterations of features that have already appeared in beta in one way or another.
Here's the list of what's debuting today.
- Object Selection and Mask: Object Mask uses a new assistive AI model from Adobe and takes place entirely on-device. Adobe says this completely transforms the selection and masking process, making tracking complex subjects drastically faster, simpler and more intuitive for video editors. From the toolbar, you can quickly create an Object Mask, allowing you to mask and track any person or object moving through your clip with ease. And as you hover across your frame, visual overlays snap into place, identifying the person or object you want to mask. You can choose from six different colored overlays or a black-and-white alpha view to preview your Object Mask. Additionally, you can add or subtract areas from the Object Mask using fast lasso and rectangular editing tools and easily adjust the mask with feathering and resizing controls.
- Shape Masks: These have been given a serious glow-up according to Adobe. The redesigned Ellipse, Rectangle, and Pen masks offer more creative control, allowing you to work with effects such as blurring faces, relighting sections of your frame, and more. Featuring tracking that’s up to 20x faster than previous versions, creating Shape Masks is now easier and faster with the ability to generate them directly from the toolbar, just like Object Mask. You can resize, move, rotate, and feather masks with improved creative controls in your program monitor, giving you greater precision and flexibility. The redesigned Bezier curves ensure smoother mask customization, while the option to choose colored overlays allows you to preview your mask effectively. You can add, subtract, and mix multiple masks together using different blend modes, enhancing your creative possibilities. Live tracking previews identify areas that may need additional refinement once tracking completes.
Firefly Boards Integration: Firefly Boards is an AI-first space which Adobe says has been designed to let you explore, iterate, and collaborate in real time. In pre-production, Board’s ideation tools help to find and communicate the right visual style and composition. You can generate assets for pitches, treatments and storyboards without leaving the board. In post-production, you can lay out scenes and ideas to get a better understanding of what you’ve shot. And, if it turns out a specific shot is missing, or to try out effects, you can generate media right within your project’s context. With this update, one or multiple assets can get sent directly into a current Premiere project with a single click.
- Stock Panel: New Adobe Stock integration within Premiere keeps video editors in the flow, enabling them to browse, preview, license, and import over 52 million clips (including 92K free ones) without leaving the app.
- Updated Frame.io v4 Panel: This is still in beta, but should allow you to stay in the edit while bringing in comments, media, and versioning. When exporting a sequence versions automatically stack in Frame.io. Feedback shows up right on your timeline and Notes stay live as you keep editing.
- Effects panel upgrades: The Effects panel has been reorganized into more logical, task-based categories for both effects and transitions. Categories such as Blur C Sharpen, Color Correction, Distort, Generate, Stylize, and Transform should make it easier to browse and discover effects. There is also new support for Nikon R3D NE files so you can edit and color with RAW video from new cameras such as the Nikon ZR.
New in After Effects 26
As is usual, a new version of After Effects moves forward in lock-step with Premiere.After Effects 26 adds:
- Native 3D Parametric Meshes: New capabilities for designing and customizing 3D shapes using parametric meshes and combinable shapes, with new spot and parallel shadows to enhance assets like stylized graphics and photorealistic set pieces.
- 1,300+ Free Substance 3D Materials: Access to thousands of new assets and animatable properties to apply materials to native and imported meshes and create stunning motion graphics with enhanced realism and creative control.
- Variable Font Animation: Additions to the Text Animator system providing full support for keyframes, expressions, and flexible controls for titles and templates that add exciting and eye-catching dynamics to videos.
- Enhanced Vector Workflows: Tool for importing SVGs as native shape layers, preserving editable gradients and transparency from Illustrator to enable designers to start animating with full vector fidelity and more precise control over fills and strokes.
Pricing and Availability
Adobe Premiere 26 and After Effects 26 are available to download today. Both are part of Adobe Creative Cloud which starts at $22.99 a month for a single app, and is currently available for $41.99 for the full 20+ app portfolio and more. See here for details.