Adobe has brought its Firefly tools for generative AI to its Adobe Express app for quickly generating posters, videos, fliers and other graphical material. The first two new AI tools that let you add images and text effects generated from a text prompt, Adobe said Thursday.
Adobe Express is what the company calls an “all-in-one content creation app.” Adobe released the features in a new beta version of the web version of Adobe Express and plans to match them with an updated mobile app in two to three months, said Govind Balakrishnan, senior vice president of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service.
Generative AI has captured the public imagination with the ability to produce song lyrics, essay question answers and countless other tasks. AI is trained to spot patterns in enormous sets of training data, but it can spout plausible sounding but completely wrong information. So be warned if you’re looking for tax advice or medical help.
Adobe’s generative AI tools, like a beta version of Photoshop in testing now, are arguably a more natural fit since many people using it will be looking for flights of fancy like colorful flowers or letters that look like they’re overgrown with ivy.
The new version of Adobe Express also gets video editing abilities, potentially handy for the TikTok or Instagram Reels crowd, and the ability to import, edit, and export PDF files.
Adobe Express is free in basic form but costs $10 per month for people who want more templates, photos, videos and fonts. When the AI tools exit beta testing, they’ll come with a free level of generated images — the threshold hasn’t yet been determined — and some pricing tiers for more.
“We will obviously have to put some sort of a limit on the number of generations,” Balakrishnan said. “These are expensive.”
Expensive it may be, but it’s also potentially very interesting to the creative set that already spends a lot of time coming up with new imagery.
“We continue to view generative AI as a tailwind for Adobe,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Matthew Swanson said in a Wednesday report.
