Adobe AI assistants let you edit images in Photoshop and Express via prompts

Adobe is developing new generative AI (genAI) assistants that let users edit images in Adobe Express and Photoshop with written prompts. 

Having embedded AI-based content-generation tools across its apps in recent years, Adobe is rolling out AI assistants and agents. That effort began last year with Acrobat Reader, with Adobe this week outlining further plans to bring AI assistance to its creative. The announcements were pegged to the Adobe MAX conference. 

For Adobe Express, Adobe introduced a conversational assistant that lets casual users create and edit designs by describing what they want via natural language. The assistant can make edits to individual layers of a design, such as fonts, images, and backgrounds on user’s behalf, and provide recommendations for changes.

 “Enterprise capabilities” are also in development for the Express AI assistant, Adobe said in a statement; they will allow a non-design staff to “self-serve on-brand content creation and collaboration,” with “template locking, batch creation and more.”

The Express AI Assistant beta is available on desktop to Adobe Express Premium customers. At full launch, the AI Assistant will be available to all Express customers through the Firefly generative credit system, the company said.

An AI assistant is also in the works for the Photoshop web application (currently in a private beta). Again, it users advice on how to enhance images — detecting and highlighting potential problems with text contrast, for instance — as well make changes such as decreasing brightness and increasing saturation. 

Adobe

“You can tell it to do things for you, and it will understand what tools to use: select subject, create masks, do all of the layer masks for you and keep it completely editable,” Alexandru Costin, vice president for Generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, said in a press briefing. 

It’s also possible to ask the AI assistant, which appears in the right-hand sidebar, to generate names for layers in the Photoshop “layers panel” based on content. Users will be able to make manual edits as usual in the main screen.

The assistants should help users “free up time, add to their creative output and get the design in their mind’s eye onto a blank page,” said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. 

At the moment, the AI assistants are “aligned with the casual user,” said Sheryl Kingstone, research director at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and can reduce complexity of using certain Adobe tools. But she also sees potential to support more advanced creative users “with scale of production capabilities.”

“For the professional, these AI assistants don’t just ramp up their creativity, [but] give spaces and places to collaborate and ideate and create at will.… These are quality-of-life updates,” said Miller. 

While there’s little direct evidence of demand for AI assistance in creative tools such as Photoshop currently, said Andrew Frank, distinguished vice president analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, the new tools could help users as Adobe adds new features at a fast clip across its software suite. 

“…The pace of product innovation at Adobe can often outpace users’ capacity to absorb advanced features, which is where I think AI assistance could really help — accelerating the realization of benefits from the power of AI in content creation,” Frank said.

The announcements at Adobe MAX this week are likely just the start of Adobe’s plans here. The company wants to embed AI assistants more broadly going forward across its creative product suite, said Kingstone, “with a connective tissue on services.” 

One feature under development is Project Moonlight. Adobe describes this as a “personal orchestartion assistant” that can coordinate across multiple apps. By connecting to Creative Cloud libraries and social media accounts, the AI assistant generates personalized ideas and content for users.  This includes images, videos, and social posts, Adobe said.  

“Project Moonlight is very interesting, as it removes the friction across tools with a more workflow-oriented canvas that uses services at scale,” said Kingstone. 

While agent architectures promise easier integration across different vendors’ applications, said Frank, users are “likely to find single-source integrations faster and more reliable than multisource compositions. That’s what makes Project Moonlight strategic — it helps turn Creative Cloud into a control center for social marketing.

“It’s clear that an AI agent strategy is now table stakes for anyone in the software business,” he said. “But for end-to-end marketing platform providers like Adobe, it represents a new way to unify and enhance the foundational value of their offering rather than compete on the application level.”

Project Moonlight is currently in private beta and will be available in the “coming months,” according to Adobe.