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What is Adobe Firefly? The generative AI tech explained

It seems as though every company has its own generative AI model these days, and Adobe is no exception.

In fact, Adobe Firefly might be one of the most powerful AI art models in the game. Stay on this page to learn everything you need to know about Adobe Firefly, including what it is, which features Firefly is behind, and which Creative Cloud apps support it.

What is Adobe Firefly? 

Adobe Firefly is a set of generative AI models developed by Adobe and first announced in 2023. The models focus on image and text effect generation to improve creative workflows across Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, including Photoshop and Adobe Express. 

“The vision for Firefly is to help people expand upon their natural creativity. As an embedded model inside Adobe products, Firefly will offer generative AI tools made specifically for creative needs, use cases, and workflows”, explained Adobe on its website when Firefly was first announced. 

Key features include content-aware image generation in Photoshop, the ability to generate custom vectors, brushes and textures for illustrations and the option to change the mood, atmosphere and weather in videos.

Adobe began rolling out its most recent update to Firefly in April 2024. 

Based on the Firefly Image 3 model, the latest version of Adobe Firefly generates more detailed images, a wider variety of facial expressions, and more complex structures. Firefly now supports the option to upload images as references for structure and style and generate backgrounds and results similar to those previously generated. 

How does Adobe Firefly compare to other generative AI models? 

One of the biggest differentiators for Adobe Firefly compared to other AI image generators, like DALL-E 2, is that Adobe has included a universal “Do Not Train” Content Credentials tag. The idea behind this tag is to make it possible for creators to opt out of having their art used as part of a dataset to train generative AI models anywhere on the web. 

When it comes to Adobe’s own generative AI model, the current Firefly model has been trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock images, openly licensed work and public domain content where the copyright has expired.

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This means the model has not been trained using any Creative Cloud users’ personal content, though whether it is appropriate to train AI art models on any artwork without explicit permission from that artist remains a conversation that is very much up for debate.

Adobe Firefly Image 3 model generated image

Is Adobe Firefly free to use? 

You can try Adobe Firefly online for free at firefly.adobe.com, or access it in other Creative Cloud apps, including Adobe Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and InDesign. However, most of these will require a Creative Cloud subscription (or at least a free trial). 

Adobe also announced in April 2024 that it would soon be rolling out new generative AI audio and video tools in Premiere Pro and After Effects.

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