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There was a lot of AI in Adobe Max's keynote address on Tuesday, but it was a Photoshop AI feature that inspired the loudest cheers.
Anyone who uses Photoshop regularly knows it's such a pain to scroll through layer after layer, struggling to hunt down the exact one you need. But with an upcoming tool, you can have AI automatically name all of your layers with a single prompt. It's a great example of how AI can bring quality-of-life improvements when done well.
Renaming layers is just one of many things Adobe's new AI assistants will be able to do. These chatbot-like tools will be added to Photoshop and Express. They have an emphasis on "conversational, agentic" experiences -- meaning you can ask the chatbot to make edits, and it can independently handle them.
The AI assistant in Express is available in a public beta for individual Adobe accounts now (Enterprise and team plans don't have access yet). Photoshop's AI is currently restricted to a private beta, but you can sign up for the waitlist now.
Express's AI assistant is similar to using a chatbot. Once you toggle on the tool in the upper left corner, a conversation window pops up. You can ask the AI to change the color of an object or remove an obtrusive element. While pro users might be comfortable making those edits manually, the AI assistant might be more appealing to its less experienced users and folks working under a time crunch.
Adobe Express is also getting an AI assistant.
AdobeAlso announced on Tuesday is Project Moonlight, a new platform in beta on Adobe's AI hub, Firefly. It's a new tool that hopes to act as a creative partner. With your permission, it uses your data from Adobe platforms and social media accounts to help you create content. For example, you can ask it to come up with 20 ideas for what to do with your newest Lightroom photos based on your most successful Instagram posts in the past.
These AI efforts represent a range of what conversational editing can look like, Mike Polner, Adobe Firefly's vice president of product marketing for creators said in an interview.
"One end of the spectrum is [to] type in a prompt and say, 'Make my hat blue.' That's very simplistic," said Polner. "With Project Moonlight, it can understand your context, explore and help you come up with new ideas and then help you analyze the content that you already have," Polner said.
This is what Project Moonlight's chat interface could look like.
AdobeWhile these AI assistants won't be the "everything machines" that ChatGPT or Gemini claim to be, it's a stark sign that Adobe's AI revolution is marching onward. Its focus on agentic AI, like much of the AI industry, aims to persuade people to delegate tasks to AI.
In a recent Adobe survey of 16,000 global creators, 86% said they use creative generative AI. Over three-fourths (80%) said Gen AI helped them create content they otherwise couldn't have made. The new stats align with a growing popularity of generative media tools, like AI image and video generators, with newer models like OpenAI's Sora and Google's nano banana going viral this year.
Adobe's been all in on AI for a while. This year, Adobe introduced AI-first mobile apps for Photoshop, Firefly and a new video editor called Premiere. The professional photographers, designers and illustrators who are Adobe's primary customers haven't all been sold on Adobe's AI ambitions, raising concerns about AI's legality, energy use and ethics.
Agentic AI assistants are just the tip of the iceberg of all the news Adobe dropped this week. For more, check out Firefly's new generative audio and music tools and Adobe's cutting edge photography AI research projects.
