Adobe’s flagship event, MAX, touched down in London again this week, where the brand announced several updates across its Creative Cloud suite of apps, including new features in Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Firefly, its suite of generative AI models. And, as he kicked off the keynote, Adobe’s David Wadhwani invoked David Hockney, describing the artist as an early adopter of digital art tools like Photoshop and claiming he “embraced controversial ideas” – a subtle acknowledgment of the debate surrounding generative AI models and their role in the evolution of the creative industry.
Firefly was up first as Adobe announced an “all-new app” (available online now) built with its latest Firefly Image Model 4 and Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra generative AI models, the latter of which, according to Adobe’s Kelly Hurlburt, was developed with a “focus on improving hyper-realism”. Adobe also announced that its Firefly Video Model is “now generally available”, with users able to prompt the application to create using its simple Text to Image, Text to Video or Image to Video tools. The brand also announced Scene to Image, which is still in beta and allows users to easily create references to generate content.
Adobe also introduced Firefly Boards, which it described as “the generative AI-first approach to moodboarding”. After the keynote, Hypebeast caught up with British filmmaker and entrepreneur Brandon Baum and we asked him which of the day’s announcements excited him the most. “Firefly Boards is genuinely a really exciting tool that I never saw being announce today,” he told us, “it blew our minds!” And although similar apps already exist, Firefly Boards is directly integrated into the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite and so allows users to take advantage of all of the supercharged AI-powered tool and features found across its various applications.
Last month, Adobe celebrated Photoshop’s 35th anniversary with the release of a new app “purpose-built for phones.” At Adobe MAX London 2025, Photoshop took center stage as the brand announced several new features and functionalities for its most popular software. Among them is the Select Details option, found in the Object Selection tool, that allows users to easily isolate complex image elements – such as hair – with speed and precision, a task that typically takes much longer when done manually. The new functionality is available on both the desktop and mobile versions of the Photoshop app. While the new Photoshop mobile app, launched last month, is currently limited to iOS users, Android users can rejoice — Adobe confirmed it is working on an Android version, with plans to launch it in the coming months.
Additional updates to Photoshop announced this week include the new Adjust Colors feature, which uses AI to identify the most prominent colors in an image and provides on-canvas controls to change them. Adobe also unveiled an overhauled Hue and Saturation Adjustment panel, redesigned with larger sliders to give users more control when editing, and which allows you to “transform the look of an entire image and make selective color edits more accurately and intuitively, without having to apply various masks or adjustment layers by hand”.
Since its first foray into generative AI with the introduction of Firefly in March 2023, Adobe has rapidly expanded and updated its products with more AI-assisted features. Like anything new, generative AI has caused some panic, with people in the creative industry fearing it will replace human creativity and labor. Brandon Baum feels differently — in fact, quite the opposite — telling Hypebeast that “every time there’s been a new chapter of technology, it has opened the doors to a fleet of new, emerging creative talents.” Baum believes the adoption of AI within creative industries will help to break down barriers and inspire the next generation of artists, designers, filmmakers and such. Like Adobe, he sees generative AI as “a tool”, something to help creativity flourish, telling us that for him “it’s not about finding the tools that takes over the process, it’s the tools that you can integrate to offload the parts of the process that artists really artists don’t need to do and are just labor intensive.”
“I think it’s something that needs to happen every so often, to allow room for new voices to come in. Otherwise […] you’ll just have the same people at the top forever, and those voices [will] get to tell the stories.”
Adobe’s latest updates are live now across Creative Suite. To learn more, visit the brand’s blog now.
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