Adobe is Striking the Right Creative Chord With AI

Adobe is best known for its line of products for visual creators. But with the latest portfolio of 11 features and tools announced at the company’s Adobe Max event, it appears the design giant is confidently tapping the zeitgeist collectively by catering to its creative fans for software and even hardware. 

Adobe’s visual tools like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat are familiar to nearly everyone. But Adobe is also making its way into another business — AI-powered wearable.

The company introduced Project Primrose, an interactive dress that demonstrates the potential use of “flexible textile displays,” allowing the wearer to display patterns and images on their body like a programmable screen.

While Adobe has technically already teased this “smart display fabric” technology before, we’ve only previously seen it applied to a flat canvas and a small handbag. As a dress, the numerous scale-like displays look cool but nowhere near practical.

“In an unpredictable economic climate, where consumers now re-evaluate the products and services they buy each day, a brand’s key growth driver is the ability to show people you accurately understand their current needs,” Anjul Bhambhri, senior vice president of Adobe Experience Cloud platform engineering, said.

On the text side of the equation Adobe introduced three new services based on LLMs. The recently introduced Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Customer Journey Analytics and Marketo Engage users will be the first to be able to take advantage of Generative AI Services, thanks to latest native workflow integrations.

Firefly Upgraded

The IT juggernaut also released the second generation of its image generator, Firefly Image 2 model that powers popular features like Photoshop’s Generative Fill — alongside two fresh Firefly models — creators of vector images and design templates.

Adobe says the model’s latest version stands out as a virtuoso in image generation. It delivers higher-quality images and understands the nuances of high-frequency details better than its predecessor. The model can photorealistic images perfecting vivid colours and near-to-perfect photorealistic images. 

Changing the face of design the service provider is banging the AI drum really hard. At the core of its approach is Firefly, its inhouse bundle of generative AI models. Since its release the company has injected the model(s) trained on Adobe Stock images, along with public domain and copyright-free images in most of its offerings. 

Just like the original text-to-image model, Adobe says its Firefly Vector model is designed to be safe for commercial use. The Image 2 is available to try via the web-based beta and will come soon to Creative Cloud apps as well.

(Water)marking its Territory

Adobe has also vowed to add metadata to AI-generated images, a digital signature of authenticity. In the near future, AI-generated images will include cryptographically signed data, allowing a quick distinction between AI and human-made images. 

Adobe said it has the Content Credentials cloud, a vault for your image files’ metadata. If an image is shared without its unique metadata, Adobe’s cloud will show the missing signature.

“Once digital content is signed with Content Credentials (in a platform that has leverages the C2PA open-standards and Content Credentials), tamper-evident metadata is attached, so it travels with the content wherever it goes,” a spokesperson for Adobe told The Register.

As Adobe continues to power its tools with more AI possibilities, it’s leaving behind a slow period. While many tech companies have big, unclear ideas about AI, Adobe is focusing on practical uses that its existing user base of millions really like. They’ve been working on Firefly to make images, and now it’s even better in its second version. They’ve also added new features for making sound, video, and 3-D pictures. It’s like Adobe is an artist, painting a clear picture while others are still dreaming in fuzzy colors.