Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2024
Generative AI has revolutionised Adobe creative processes, improving outputs, offering a wealth of creative options and slashing time for creatives.
This emerged during an Adobe mini-MAX webinar hosted by Dax Data in partnership with ITWeb.
Bart Van de Wiele, Head of Solutions Consulting, design specialist and author at Adobe, said Adobe’s new Firefly Generative AI is proving transformative for both Adobe and its users. Firefly is a family of creative generative AI models for Adobe products, with an initial focus on image and text effect generation.
“Firefly came out around April last year and we have over five billion generations now. It was the most successful beta launch Adobe has ever had – bigger than Photoshop or pdf, and it is helping us transform into an AI company. This year will be a very exciting year for Firefly, with new technology and functionality coming out,” he said.
Van de Wiele demonstrated the image generation capabilities that allow creatives to create visuals with text prompts, apply numerous visual effects, and adjust colour, tone, lighting, composition and depth of field. Users can also use style references and advanced photo settings, change aspect ratios at a click and add texture effects to text. He noted that the Pro Creative Cloud subscription includes unlimited access to around 300 million images, including photos, vectors, patterns, and templates.
Van de Wiele said: “A major factor holding designers back is access to images – they have to ask someone to license the image for them. Limited access to stock images creates stress and restricts your thinking. With unlimited access to hundreds of millions of images and templates, you can search and save them into a Creative Cloud library and they can be dragged and dropped into InDesign or Photoshop to create concepts you can sell, instead of flat pdfs. This gives you the freedom to make more ideas and cut steps out of the process. For IT, this also simplifies the management of licences."
He noted: “There is a very advanced search function using AI – for example, searching for the Eiffel tower with the tower only on the left of the canvas.”
Addresing diversity
On a question around diversity in images, Van de Wiele said: “Adobe is doing a lot to address diversity. We have a separate team working on how inclusive results are around race and gender bias. This is something Firefly is still being trained on, it is top of mind to be as inclusive as possible. Therefore, a search for people should be representative of the region where the search is done, or a search for a nurse will offer nurses of various genders.”
Dominic Richardson, Dax Data CEO, said: “With Firefly, Adobe has lowered the barrier to do advanced image manipulation and make it look photorealistic. If you democratise those types of manipulations on a large scale, images could be manipulated for the wrong purposes. The reason Adobe was relatively late to the party was because they wanted something very specific to their market. The main reason people want to use Firefly is for commercial purposes, so whatever you build using it has to be commercially safe and [mustn't] not break copyright laws. Images in the Adobe stock database have been hand-curated and don’t carry royalties or break copyright laws and Firefly is trained on hundreds of millions of Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. This is what makes Firefly unique.”
Signing options
Carla Ralph, Adobe Solutions Expert at Magenta SA, demonstrated how Adobe streamlines key creative processes.
She said: “Everything designers create becomes a pdf in the end, and customers have to be able to sign off on those. There are various signing options, but there has been an update in the request for signature options within the Acrobat environment. Instead of job bags and sign off sheets, we can create sign off sheets with interactive form fields to be included with the pdf. You can set multiple people as signers and approvers, in a particular order, generate the email, and save the sign off agreement templates. You can also set reminders to be sent to clients to sign off the documents, and view a list of agreements and their progress in Acrobat.”
Ralph added: “The new AI assistant currently in beta is fantastic for longer documents. It enables you to see an overview of what the document is, ask questions about the document and see the most important points within the document.”
Ralph noted that purchasing Adobe solutions through local distributors such as Dax Data offered organisations additional value, support and training to the Adobe value proposition.
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