Not resting on its laurels, Adobe is continually adding Firefly-powered capabilities to its venerable design products, with Photoshop and Illustrator receiving several new tools and updates designed to elevate the software and assist users with their creative workflow and speed up productivity. The latest release of Illustrator includes new Firefly-enabled features such as Generative Shape Fill, along with the Dimension tool, Mockup, Text to Pattern, the Contextural Taskbar, and performance enhancements. The most recent release of Photoshop includes the all-new Selection Brush tool and general availability of Generate Image, Adjustment Brush tool, and additional workflow enhancements.
Adobe’s Firefly continues to create buzzy innovations in the company’s design applications, the latest being new AI-powered features in Illustrator and Photoshop that speed up user workflows and enable artists to spend more time on the creative aspects. Not all the updates, though, are AI-related, as both software applications were given several non-Firefly-boosted capabilities.
The latest release of Illustrator contains some Firefly-enabled features for accelerated productivity. These include the all-new (beta) Generative Shape Fill tool for quickly adding detailed vectors to shapes, in the artist’s own style, by using text prompts, entered directly in the Contextural Taskbar. This process be used for concept ideation or adding more detail to existing artwork.
Driving the Generative Shape Fill tool is the latest Firefly Vector Model, available now, which offers increased speed, power, and precision, according to Adobe. Another Firefly-powered feature in Illustrator includes the enhanced Text to Pattern (beta), Illustrator’s AI-generated SVG pattern generator, which enables artists to ideate, create, and scale customized vector patterns faster across design projects by using simple text prompts. Also, the Firefly-powered Style Reference helps designers quickly edit and scale vector graphic creations (subjects, scenes, icons, etc.) in their own style.
Other additions to Illustrator include:
- Mockup (beta)—For easily creating high-quality visual prototypes of art on objects such as product packaging, apparel, and more by automatically adjusting the art to fit the curves and edges of the real-life object.
- Dimension tool—For easily and accurately sizing any area of a design, whether for packaging, architectural, or fashion projects.
- Retype—For converting static text to live, editable text and identifying the ideal font for projects.
- Enhanced selection capabilities—For assisting designers in selecting objects with more precision, especially in intricate and crowded designs. Included is the new Enclosed Rectangular Marquee Selectiontool.
- Enhanced Pan and Zoom—For faster and smoother performance so designers can navigate highly complex documents up to 10 times faster, with scalability from 3.13% to 64,000%.
- Contextual Taskbar—For faster workflows resulting from a menu that presents relevant next steps in a user’s design process.
The latest Photoshop release also has features designed to save users time by accelerating core workflows and streamlining repetitive tasks. Like Illustrator, some additions to Photoshop are receiving a boost from Firefly. Adobe has introduced the new Text to Image feature, called Generate Image, and now out of beta. For the Photoshop app and Photoshop on the Web, the feature is powered by the Firefly Image 3 Model and is meant to jump-start the design process in order to help artists ideate and create. It streamlines repetitive tasks directly in Photoshop and enables users to generate ideas in minutes, gets the creation process rolling, and results in complex, custom outputs—all through the use of simple text prompts. Also, the new Enhanced Detail improvement for Generative Fill provides greater sharpness and detail in large-size image formats.
Other Photoshop enhancements include:
- Selection Brush tool—Brand-new, for selecting, compositing, and applying filters more intuitive.
- Adjust Brush—For easily applying non-destructive adjustments to certain parts of an image.
- Type tool—Enhanced for quickly creating bulleted and numbered lists.
- Contextural Taskbar—Improved with popular settings for working with shapes and rotating objects.