Adobe has announced plans to expand its Firefly family of creative generative AI models and unveiled new Al innovations in its popular Lightroom ecosystem.


New versions of Firefly will bring generative AI into Adobe’s video, audio, animation and motion graphics design apps. (Source: Adobe.)

The announcements, which were made at the NAB annual conference, reflect the growing importance of generative AI to content creators across a wide range of genres. Firefly is Adobe’s next major evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity, which focuses upon image generation and text effects. The company plans to integrate Firefly’s capabilities into Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Premiere Pro and other Adobe applications in the near future. The software ‘has been trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired and is designed to generate content safe for commercial use’. The initial emphasis will be on video production, where the following concepts will be explored:
•       Text to colour enhancements: Change colour schemes, time of day, or even the seasons in already-recorded videos, instantly altering the mood and setting to evoke a specific tone and feel. With a simple prompt like “Make this scene feel warm and inviting,” the time between imagination and final product can all but disappear.

  • Advanced music and sound effects: Creators can easily generate royalty-free custom sounds and music to reflect a certain feeling or scene for both temporary and final tracks.
  • Stunning fonts, text effects, graphics, and logos: With a few simple words and in a matter of minutes, creators can generate subtitles, logos and title cards and custom contextual animations.
  • Powerful script and B-roll capabilities: Creators can dramatically accelerate pre-production, production and post-production workflows using AI analysis of script to text to automatically create storyboards and previsualisations, as well as recommending b-roll clips for rough or final cuts.
  • Creative assistants and co-pilots: With personalised generative AI-powered “how-tos,” users can master new skills and accelerate processes from initial vision to creation and editing.

Adobe is inviting interested parties to sign up for the beta version of Firefly (https://firefly.adobe.com/) and join the conversation on Discord (https://discord.com/invite/dJnsV5s8PZ). There will also be a community live session on YouTube (https://youtube.com/live/9Fy4-VQqxIs)  on  Thursday, April, 20.

Adobe’s popular Lightroom software suite – Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mobile and Web – will be updated with new Al innovations powered by Adobe Sensei. Expanded Adaptive Presets and Masking categories for Select People make it easy to adjust fine details from the colour of the sky to the texture of a person’s beard with a single click. New features include Denoise and Curves in masking for removing digital noise and creating customised and precise edits by adjusting contrast, tone, and colour on specific parts of an image with Curves in masking. The Select People function introduced last year will be expanded to enable precise edits to clothing and facial hair by automatically generating a mask for individuals or groups in any portrait. New Adaptive Presets have been added to the existing library of portrait editing tools. Lightroom will also gain the ability to turn any videos into black and white and recreate classic film styles, with the tap of a button.

The latest releases of Lightroom are now available and can be downloaded via the Creative Cloud Desktop app. Updates to Lightroom mobile are rolling out globally starting today and can be downloaded in the Apple App Store, Galaxy Store and Google Play Store. For more information on updates and improvements to each Lightroom product, visit the What’s New pages for your operating system.