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In the mood

Adobe’s Project Concept for mood-boarding.

Karen Moltenbrey

GenAI has opened the door to enable creatives to brainstorm ideas faster and more expansively than ever before, and Adobe has harnessed the power of those generative AI capabilities in two new offerings currently in beta. Project Concept is more akin to digital mood-boarding, providing a more expansive canvas for users to visualize ideas. It will be integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud. Generative Workspace (beta) lets users create and iterate many different elements in parallel. It will be added to Photoshop.

During its Max conference, Adobe unleashed an avalanche of new tools and capabilities, including a brand-new Firefly Model for video (in beta). Included in the product announcements and rollouts are new methods of enabling creators to ideate and explore concepts—with a little help from AI.

Project Concept. image
Project Concept. (Source: Adobe)

Adobe previewed Project Concept for multiplayer, collaborative creative concept development that involves the remixing of images in real time. According to Adobe, Project Concept, an AI-first product, enables creative professionals to make the most of their time by concepting live in a single canvas, giving them the ability to explore more potential pathways from the start of a project.

GenAI’s current prompt-based approach to brainstorming requires users to have a clear idea of what they want before they actually know what they are looking for, Adobe says, injecting limitations in that exploration process from the start. In contrast, Project Concept takes on more of a mood-boarding approach, in which users can add and then mix together elements, stock assets, newly generated assets, brand assets, or their own work.  Users start out with their sources of inspiration, and then Project Concept uses AI and collaborative tools to help with divergent and convergent thinking, before the user determines a final direction to take.

Project Concept integrates the latest capabilities from Adobe’s Firefly GenAI models. According to Adobe, the product enables creatives to quickly explore various potential artistic directions, mix together images, transform areas of an asset, and remix styles, backgrounds, and other ingredient assets.

Adobe plans to integrate Project Concept into Adobe Creative Cloud, with seamless incorporation with Photoshop, Illustrator, or Express workflows. Insofar as the AI is concerned, Adobe says Project Concept will leverage Content Credentials technology to properly recognize the source of images, respect generative AI usage and training preferences, and promote transparency for how content was created.

Project Concept is still in the initial stages of testing and will be released in private beta first sometime in the near future in order for the company to gather feedback from a small group of creatives.

In addition to Project Concept, Adobe introduced another method of exploring concepts and ideas with Photoshop (beta) desktop 26.0’s Generative Workspace (beta), while creating a range of assets at the same time without waiting. Users can create, curate, and iterate a variety of elements by entering a text prompt or locating an image from the Inspiration tab. Users can iterate and produce additional results while the previous prompt is still generating, enabling creatives to maintain their creative flow.

Generative Workspace.
Generative Workspace. (Source: Adobe)