Adobe’s AI Assistant Wants to Give Photographers More Time for Actual Creative Tasks

Adobe’s promised creative agent, or agentic AI, has fully arrived in Creative Cloud. Inside Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, users can tell Adobe’s Firefly-powered AI Assistant how to edit photos, videos, and other graphics.

“As a creative, you remain in control, choosing what to hand off, what to refine and how to apply your taste, expertise and judgment to shape every editable outcome. These tools are built for how you’ve told us you actually work,” Adobe explains.

The company hopes that the agentic AI will help reduce friction between ideation and execution in Creative Cloud apps and limit the time people spend on tedious tasks that don’t necessarily require hands-on artistic decision-making.

For example, in Photoshop, users can describe their desired outcome, such as removing the background from a large batch of opened files or resizing a group of photos, both tasks that are quite time-consuming to do manually. In Premiere, the AI Assistant can import source media, sort it into bins, rename clips, identify interview questions in clips, and more.

“The best creative work has never been defined by how fast you can organize files, prepare exports or manage production workflows,” Adobe says. “It’s defined by your ideas, craft, taste and ability: the creative decisions only you can make, that connect with your audience and make your work distinctly you, the instinct that tells you found the perfect shade of a color to match the mood, the tweak that makes the latest cut land perfectly in your timeline — the detail no one asked for, but everyone notices in the end.”

The company says its goal with agentic AI is to give its customers more time to be creative by shifting repetitive, relatively mindless work into the background.

When Adobe last showed off its AI Assistant in March, it also outlined ways that users could have agentic AI make meaningful edits to photos, which can be especially useful for newer users who maybe don’t know how to do certain things on their own.

Theoretically, an AI Assistant could also be extremely useful for teaching novice photographers how to perform relatively complex edits step by step, serving as a helpful educational resource within Photoshop, which has a relatively steep learning curve.

Adobe has poured significant resources into its AI technology and features in recent years, to varying user responses. With its latest AI Assistant, it appears that Adobe is growing more focused on making AI work for its users to make their lives easier, rather than taking over creative tasks itself. This approach aligns with what working photographers are saying about how they use and want to use AI in their own workflow.

Adobe’s AI Assistant creative agent is now in public beta for Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io.

Image credits: Adobe