Adobe on Tuesday released a new Firefly tool for Photoshop and Illustrator, giving graphic designers more ways to tap into the company's in-house AI models. Adobe's new feature lets creative workers describe what they want in a short prompt and receive AI-generated textures and images that would normally take hours to create.
Adobe is walking a delicate balance between its focus on AI and some loyal users who feel threatened by it. The company trains Firefly with the work of many creative workers and pays Adobe Stock photographers and illustrators an annual bonus for the privilege. In light of this, Adobe says it has a “creator-friendly approach,” offering Creative Cloud customers a limited number of generation credits each month at no extra cost.
“This is all value built into Adobe's Creative Cloud plans,” Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe's vice president of product marketing, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We just want to get this technology in the hands of our users, so the credit limits are very generous.”
Illustrator is releasing a new tool in beta called “Generative Shape Fill,” which lets you add detail and texture to shapes through a text prompt or a selection of style references. The feature is made possible by an updated beta version of Adobe's Firefly Vector model, which also launches on Tuesday. In a demo, Adobe Creative Cloud evangelist Paul Trani showed that the new feature comes with a slider that lets creators choose how much detail they want to add. After Firefly generates these details, Illustrator lets users edit them, which is what sets it apart from most AI image generators.
For Photoshop, Adobe has made Firefly's text-to-image generator widely available, allowing users to create AI images within the application by simply pressing “Generate Image” and describing the image they want. This leverages Adobe Firefly's Image 3 Foundation model, and was previously only available in beta.
Adobe doesn't charge a premium subscription for its generative AI like some of its competitors do, but it's still profitable. The company said in its latest earnings call that customers are switching to more expensive plans as a way to get more Firefly generation credits. (One generation credit is the equivalent of one generation of other AI tools.) Adobe said that since its launch in March 2023, Firefly has generated more than 9 billion images.
Illustrator also got a set of new features that don't use generative AI. Adobe's new Dimensions tool lets Illustrator calculate the lengths and angles of your images. Mockup, a beta tool in Illustrator, lets you realistically place your logo on any product by simply uploading an image. Previously, Mockup only let you place your logo on a pre-determined set of images. With Retype, Illustrator can recognize and match fonts so they can be used elsewhere.
As for Photoshop, the pixel-based workspace brings to the public the new Selection Brush tool and Adjustment Brush tool, both of which are aimed at streamlining repetitive tasks.