Adobe’s redesigned AI studio remembers what your creations look like

Adobe is introducing some new capabilities for its Firefly AI assistant, alongside a “reimagined” AI studio that lets you edit and generate new designs from a single interface. The new Firefly experience launching today in private beta is designed to give you “persistent context, reusable assets, and organized workflows” across your projects, according to Adobe, making it easier to go from ideation to production-ready designs without switching between apps.

This is the latest of several design overhauls to Adobe’s all-in-one Firefly AI hub since it was first launched in September 2023. In addition to the UI updates, the new Firefly AI studio is launching two new features that aim to improve design consistency and make projects easier to organize.

The first is “Elements,” which allow you to save characters, locations, and objects you’ve already created so that they can be reused across Firefly and Firefly Boards. That means you can upload reference images of characters or environments and give them a name, so you can tell Firefly to generate a scene in “Charlie’s bedroom” without laboriously typing out prompt descriptions each time and hoping the chatbot will stick to the same design. The second feature is “Projects,” which houses your assets, generations, and creative context together to make them easier to organize and pick up where you last left off.

The Firefly AI assistant that Adobe launched in beta earlier this year, which lets you make and edit things using descriptive conversational prompts, is also getting some new tools and features. It can now generate brand kits, including logos and color palettes, based on descriptions of your company name and style. There are some new video editing capabilities too, such as Quick Cut for quickly assembling clips into a polished first draft that you can refine — a feature that arrived in the Firefly app in February. The Firefly AI assistant can also generate storyboards to help visualize video projects, and transform images into short-form video content, allowing you to turn those image-based storyboards into video when required.

The idea is that these conversational editing capabilities will help creatives to cut out some of the more tedious editing and design tasks, without sacrificing creative control. You can start a project with the Firefly AI assistant and then make manual adjustments in Firefly or one of Adobe’s many Creative Cloud apps. According to Forest Key, Adobe’s vice president of agentic AI for creativity and productivity, Adobe is aiming to make Firefly into “more of a co-working partner” than something that will replace the majority of human work with conversational prompts, but that all depends on the user.

“Does this all culminate with just people talking in English to the tools? I think for some users, absolutely. For other users, absolutely not,” Key told The Verge. “Creativity has many paths, and the idea is that the agent can kind of meet those users however they want to work with the agent.”