Happy New Year from Tejs and the product team! 

Our development team has been working really hard the last 14 days on building some amazing features for all of you. We really hope you enjoy them as much as we do. It's a truly amazing update, if we may say so our selves.

You haven’t seen a lot of updates on Hue the last couple of sprints but we hope to compensate for that in this major update of HUE.

With file tracking, we have solved one of the major pain points in Hue. Users would some times save the files with incorrect naming as the Hue panel could show content for a file other than the active document in Photoshop.
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To fix this we have introduced two-way file tracking so that the panel is always showing the content for the active Photoshop document. The user can navigate using the file list at the top of Hue or just shift to another document in Photoshop the regular way. It makes no difference, Hue will keep track of things and follow along.

The file tracking becomes even more important when working with multiple preset variants. It can be almost impossible to keep track of the files on your own. The Hue panel will help you fan-out the files and keep track of them as you navigate using the larger variant buttons.

In order to make a solid file tracking, we had to introduce another concept called Work files.

Hue will immediately after opening an input file, save it as a PSD within the Hue workspace.

This work file is the one Hue keeps track of and the user can hit save at any time without being annoyed with saving options if they made layers and the input file was a JPG.

Another smart thing about having work files is that we can reuse these files in case of rejection. So as a retoucher, you will be able to continue your work in your layered PSD work files, even if you exported flat JPGs. 

When opening a task we have always opened all the input files up. This could be a bit overwhelming, so now you can define this action yourself. The options are:

In addition to this, you can decide if HUE should also open up the variants in case an external vendor has created these.

You can also set up Hue to perform certain actions when a task is done. These actions are:

The retouching work is often representing a significant amount of work that is nice to keep handy in case you want to fix something later on. We have added a back-up functionality that will allow you to back-up your work files when you complete your task. Back-up can be done to either a local hard drive (built-in or attached) or a network drive. You can set up a naming convention so the files are saved in a nice logical way.

We know that a lot of you like to work on several tasks simultaneously. This has become much easier with our task switching in combination with file tracking. Just switch to a different task and the panel and active document will switch automatically.

This will be a favorit amongst many a retoucher this Christmas. Hue now includes an exporting feature that simplifies the (quite complicated) flow of exporting files in the previous versions of Hue. No more copying files names, simply click “Export”, choose your settings and then “Export” one more time. It’s that simple.

We’ve made it so that Hue will remember how you defined the export settings the last time you exported an image for this style guide position, so you don’t have to switch these settings back and forth if you are working on various tasks.

Working with presets on your style guides will enable Auto QA in Hue. Basically, it’s a mechanism that checks the exported files generated by the retoucher against the requirements of the preset. The retoucher will be warned before exporting if a setting is going against the preset definition and also again when uploading the task. You can define in the workflow if the retoucher is allowed to override a QA issue or not. If the retoucher overrides a QA issue, it will be highlighted in the internal Post QC view. 

The Hue Auto QA will be checking the following hard specs of the files:

Over the coming months, we will be introducing a series of security features. In this sprint, we will release the first three.

Your account administrator will be able to set a password rule set and enforce this on all users. This is one of the best ways to heighten the security level in your Creative Force instance.

IP Whitelist will enable you to limit which IPs can access your Creative Force instance. This is a very strong way to avoid any form of outside access even if login credentials are correct.

We have implemented 4 different proxy methods in both Kelvin and Hue, so you can direct the traffic from the apps through your proxy. The methods are:

Questions, ideas or feedback?

We're striving to create the best product for you and your team! Feel free to drop us a line via email/chat or submit your ideas and feedback directly to our product team via product@creativeforce.io.