Adobe Max is going on right now (their version of WWDC hype and new features, but a lot of what they show is instantly available in new versions of their apps).
Adobe user/lover - pay attention - lots of amazing stuff!
Adobe hater/subscription hater - pay attention - this is the raising the bar so much higher for image AI capabilities plus much more
Two of my favorites:
“Remove distractions” button that removes people, wires, and other stuff from a photo with a single click
Variables for image generation prompts - Now you can experiment with image gen using prompts like “A [woman, man] in a [black, white, green] t-shirt walking in the [street, hall, mall, forest].”
Then it creates multiple variations in a batch mode.
Further, you can stack multiple prompts and have it all generating in batch mode and then just review all the results.
It’s going to take quite a lot more to convince me that AI generated imagery has any utility for me. I still can’t get past the test I did in Photoshop where it completely misinterpreted a landscape shot such that the Ferris wheel I was trying to add was always lying at a low angle.
I can’t speak to completely ai generated imagery. I don’t have enough experience with that yet.
I’m thrilled by the quality of imagegen used to augment, improve, or replace the results of image editing tools.
In the past, I found content-aware-fill to be more trouble than it was worth, but now the ai-powered erase, object removal, and other clean-up tools do an excellent job of not just removing something, but synthesizing the fill-in by using a combination of existing techniques with image generation.
I have also used imagegen type capability in resizing the layout of images to convert portrait to landscape or similar layout changes extending one or more sides of the image.
Much like a lot of Apple’s initial AI tools are incremental productivity not revolutionary, I find a lot of the AI-powered improvements in Adobe tools are enabling and productivity boosts even if they are background improvements that might even go unnoticed if one is not looking for them explicitly.
I’ve been a little surprised at how useful I have found Adobe Firefly.
I have generated a whole range of images based on a prompt describing the weather, season and location (e.g. “distant rain on autumn day with bright sunshine over Dorset landscape of rolling hills” or “starry night in winter over a snow covered Dorset landscape of rolling hills”) and set in art and digital art style. These are perfect as header images for my Dorset weather reports blog and yesterday’s update to Adobe Express means I can generate them to the exact size and aspect ratio needed. If I keep the prompts reasonably consistent the images have clear themes and genuinely reflect what you’d think of as a quintessential Dorset (England) rural landscape without ever showing anything “real”.
It’s not art but then some would argue that everyday illustration (or using stock images) isn’t art either. I do reference the image source.
I agree, Adobe AI is way ahead of other generative image services.
While I still use Unsplash for a lot of my presentations (as I like to use stock rather than AI images when presenting), Adobe’s AI has proven really useful when designing mobile apps. Illustrator is really great at creating SVG art with AI now, and this means I can ask it to design logos, website assets and other things where I’ve previously had to hire an intern or graphic designer.
I also use the Adobe Express website a lot for generating a range of assets, and of course the new Photoshop AI is groundbreaking and saves me so much time. I can now do things in Photoshop that I could have dreamt of being able to do only a year ago. I feel much more confident when I need to edit an image now and am becoming much more ambitious.
As the biggest defender of Adobe here, I will once again reiterate, they give you more for your subscription than ANY service or app in all of the kingdom of computerdom. If one does any type of creative work, there really is no excuse not to subscribe.
I completely agree, it’s the best value subscription out there!
I couldn’t live without Acrobat especially. I need to edit PDFs every day, and need assurance that it will work on Windows. It also has by far the best text recognition, and I use this this all the time. It’s much more accurate than their nearest competitor (Abbyy), and has great batch OCR capabilities.
Even their scanning software is leagues ahead of others in terms of the post-processing. It makes the worst lit camera scans look like it was done on a desktop scanner.
I like how they build their apps - they use C++ so the performance is always optimal compared to the competition.
The generative AI remove tool in Lightroom has proven handy for something I never expected to use it for: forehead shine! I usually rely on the heal brush and/or the clarity and texture sliders to tone it down, but AI remove often does the trick all by itself. Of course sometimes it thinks it should replace the shiny spot with an even shinier shiny spot (or once, a diamond) but it can usually be coaxed into a better result.
I think the AI tools in Photoshop are more powerful than their Lightroom counterparts, but it’s a pain to port something over to Photoshop just to deal with a minor distraction, so I’m glad the tools are in LR, even if they’re a bit limited.
the Adobe photo suite is the one subscription I honestly couldn’t live without.
To paraphrase a popular meme, we have a paradox of choice.
I’m no expert, but I typically use Lightroom when the editing/corrections are well served by first making selections using AI masks for sky, background, objects, or light freehand brushing.
When I wish to do more bespoke editing, I’ll move to Photoshop to use the full suite of selection, masking, and compositing tools.
For photos or photo-like images, I tend to only use the image-oriented tools in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), which, for non-Adobe people reading, is a set of image tools that work on any image, not just raw format, and is part of both Lightroom and Photoshop, just slightly different UI “front-end” depending on which app you start with.
I also use smart objects mode (a simple single click) in Photoshop for fully non-destructive editing and filters. (I’m not sure why Adobe still makes you enable this yourself; I guess it is a holdover from the earlier versions of Photoshop and the days where both ram and disk space were a precious resource one managed constantly and in real-time to avoid ‘overflow’ and performance issues?)
It’s only good value if you value enough of what’s in it.
I could argue that seeing I have no need nor desire to use Photoshop that the Photography Plan is too expensive. The full Creative Cloud plan is ludicrously expensive if all I want is Lightroom.
I’d love it if Adobe would let me just pay for Lightroom as that is exactly what I’d do.
The “it’s only a couple of coffees a month” rationalization never made sense to me. It’s also “only” money you could spend on your child, donate to feed starving refugees, or put in savings.
Either the subscription is worth the cost to you or it isn’t.
Software has become greatly devalued based on the price, or is it simply incredible value?
When I started in this industry, a Word Processor cost $495 (WordStar), a Spreadsheet cost $500 (Lotus 1-2-3), and a database cost $700 (dBase II).
And I bought all of them and thought they were greatest invention on earth because of what I could do with my $4,000 PC.
And all of this pricing is in 1980’s dollars, not inflation adjusted for current times.
Pardon me, if I don’t empathize with anyone upset that the incredible technology in Adobe Creative Cloud and similar level apps is too expensive for only $55/month or “a few cups of coffee” or whatever equivalency to consumables you wish to use.
My point wasn’t that Adobe Creative Cloud or any other subscription or app price isn’t worth the money. It obviously is for you and a lot of people.
My point was that whether or not any subscription or app purchase is worth the money to someone has next to nothing to do with the price of a cup of expensive barista coffee. There are always going to be plenty of frivolous and worthwhile things they could use the money for instead.
The only relevant question is whether, considering the alternatives, the cost of a given subscription or app is worth it to someone. In the case of Adobe Creative Cloud, it is for you, but it isn’t for @zkarj. And that’s okay.
