4 Coolest Announcements from Adobe Max London

Unless you’re in Greenwich Mean Time, you might have missed the news coming from Adobe Max London. Where to start? If you want to go all-in, you can re-watch the livestream here or follow along with demos and the like on Adobe Live YouTube channel. For the TL;DR: The integration of AI into the world’s most influential suite of creative products is moving apace and the capabilities being added are headspinning. More than anything, shortcuts are everywhere in the form of AI Agents, generative advances, and a fair share of visual tricks that look to get rid of the more grueling Photoshop tasks.

In other words, Adobe is showing the world of generative AI apps how it’s done — with “commercially safe” outputs and a suite of tools that are properly set up to aid designers, rather than replace them. As Paul Trani, the Principal Director Evangelist at Adobe, showed in a dizzying and rather spectacular demo at a press briefing yesterday, so much of Adobe remains a powerful tool for creative professionals, as promised. Here are four pieces of news that jumped out at us from the announcements today.

AI Takes Over the Moodboard

Possibly the tool with the broadest use case, Adobe’s new Firefly Boards are an exciting prospect for so many professionals. In short, what amounts to a blank canvas can be quickly and easily populated with text-generated images, snap-to-grid layouts, and color palettes. The resulting collages, reference images, and visual ideas can all be combined and changed in real time to generate visual ideas for any given project.

Visual brainstorms are the kind of creative shortcut that make so much sense with Gen AI, when you aren’t looking for a final product, but a quick and dirty circling of visual ideas (though in the two-minute demo, “dirty” isn’t right; the idea was much cleaner and finished than you might expect from a moodboard).

Photoshop Gets More Shortcuts

Photoshop got a number of AI tools added to it. There’s “Select Details”, a kind of circle-to-replace tool that allows you to select a detail — hair, eyebrows, articles of clothing — and Voila! change them with a text or image prompt. “Adjust Colors” streamlines the oft-arduous color editing process by identifying the most prominent colors in an image and providing on-canvas controls to change them — no masks or adjustment layers needed.

Most impressive (to this non-designer) is the Remove Background tool which is like the familiar “Magic Eraser”, but on steroids. The tool can detect subjects and impressively make selections around complex edges and fine details. The demo of a watery backdrop being removed from a hi-res fish net was frankly jaw-dropping. I shudder to think how long that now-instant task would take to do manually.

AI Models Galore

First of all, Adobe announced new Firefly Image models — Firefly Image Model 4 and Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra have been added to Firefly Image 3, Image 2 and Image 1. All of these “commercially safe” models are now available throughout Adobe, expanding the look and feel of the generative output.

But if that’s not an expansive enough AI palette for you, Adobe added a laundry list of outside generative options that you can choose just about anywhere they offer AI functionalities. This includes ChatGPT, Google Imagen 3, and Veo 2, and Flux. While these are likely less commercially safe, they are clearly labeled in the image to remind you to, maybe, not go to press with the image made here.

Adobe Brings In The Agents

AI Agents are all the rage right now — even if they’re not quite at the level of Executive Assistant to our lives. Adobe is smartly bringing in the agents to act more like Microsoft’s Clippy — if it could get to know how you work and give you suggestions based on that. Photoshop’s Action Panel is a stand-in for an AI Agent that will “learn” from designers and make edit suggestions based on how they work. It give the suggestions and lets them skip the line — outlining the multi-step edits to undertake the suggestion, then giving letting them make it all happen with a single click.

In Premier Pro, its “Media Intelligence” can recognize objects and content that you can then manipulate or edit by typing commands, an ability that can bring its own agent-based workflows. Adobe also teased agent-like tools coming to Adobe Express, which makes excellent sense for this more mainstream product.