The News: Adobe-announced innovations have been incorporated into its flagship products, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. These products leverage generative AI and other process improvements to accelerate creative workflows and jumpstart asset creation.
Adobe Incorporates New Innovations in Illustrator and Photoshop
Analyst Take: Adobe announced the introduction of several new tools and enhancements to its flagship Illustrator and Photoshop products to support creators with more speed, power, and precision to accelerate creative workflows and streamline repetitive tasks. The enhancements incorporate the underlying generative AI technology used across the Adobe family of products. They are ultimately seen as a way to drastically improve the level of creativity and productivity of content creators, designers, marketers, and other workers who are involved in the creation and use of digital assets.
Illustrator is introducing new tools, including an all-new Generative Shape Fill (currently in beta), to empower designers to quickly add detailed vectors to shapes by entering text prompts directly in the Contextual Taskbar. Generative Shape Fill is powered by the latest Firefly Vector Model (currently in beta), designed to support creators with additional speed, power, and precision. Additional innovations in Illustrator include the Dimension Tool, Mockup (currently in beta), Contextual Taskbar, Retype, enhanced selection tools, Text to Pattern (currently in beta), and Style Reference. These tools and additional workflow enhancements are designed to speed up tedious tasks and save designers time so they can spend more time focused on creative tasks.
Photoshop is also introducing new features to accelerate core creative workflows and streamline repetitive tasks with the Selection Brush Tool, Adjustment Brush Tool, and enhancements to the Type Tool and Contextual Taskbar. These tools are designed to drive additional productivity, precision, and control when selecting, compositing, adjusting images, and working with type. Photoshop is also introducing new ways to ideate and create with Generate Image, powered by Adobe Firefly Image 3 Model.
Driving Efficiency and Productivity through New Product and Workflow Enhancements
Adobe’s new product enhancements are aimed at helping creators reduce the number of steps it takes to go from an idea to a finished asset. By incorporating tools that enable contextual completion of ideas or steps, creators can try out new ideas more quickly to ascertain which ones meet their creative and commercial goals.
From an organizational perspective, equipping creators with tools to enhance creativity and efficiency also drives overall productivity, which is quickly emerging as an end goal for marketers. As the need to create more personalized content at scale increases, designers and creators require tools to help them ideate more quickly and then scale production by enabling the creation of dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of variations without a significant amount of extra manual work. These tools, along with others announced by Adobe, are key catalysts in helping creators and organizations meet that challenge.
For its part, Adobe needs to continuously introduce new features to keep creators happy, particularly as competitor Canva continues to make noise in the market as an Adobe alternative, albeit one that features lower-cost license options. Canva recently announced the acquisition of the generative AI platform Leonardo.AI, which it believes will complement Canva’s offerings and help the company build its visual AI tools and capabilities.
For now, Adobe still has the advantage of being viewed as a responsible AI vendor. The company recently refined its terms and conditions to unequivocally restate its commitment to safeguarding its users’ data and vowing to refrain from training its AI models on any images not held within its Adobe Stock repository. This stance is likely to help the company retain the trust of large enterprises, which are rightfully concerned about issues that go beyond creativity, including data privacy, security, intellectual property, and copyright infringement.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Adobe Announces Firefly Image 3 Model and Photoshop Enhancements
Incorporating Generated Images into Adobe’s Firefly Model
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
