Adobe Max London 2025 live – all the new features coming to Photoshop, Firefly, Premiere Pro and more
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Premiere Pro gets some useful upgrades
AI is supposed to be saving us from organizational drudgery, so it’s good to see Adpbe highlighting some of the new workflow benefits in Premiere Pro.
Kelly Weldon (Senior Experience Designer) is showing the app’s improved search experience in the app, which lets you type in specifics like “brown hat” to quickly find clips.
But there are naturally some generative AI tricks, too. ‘Generative Extend’ is now available in 4K, letting you extend a scene in both horizontal and vertical video – very handy, particularly for fleshing out b-roll.
Captions have also been given a boost, with the most useful trick being Caption Translation – it instantly creates captions in 25 languages.
Even better, you can use it to automatically translate voiceovers – that takes a bit longer to generate, but will be a big boost for YouTube channels with multi-national audiences.
Illustrator is next, homies!
It’s Illustrator’s turn for the spotlight now, with Michael Fugoso (Senior Design Evangelist) – the London audience doesn’t know quite what to do with his impressive enthusiasm and ‘homies’ call-outs.
The headlines are a speed boost (it’s apparently now up to five times faster, presumably depending on your machine) and, naturally, some new Firefly-powered tools like ‘Text to Pattern’ and, helpfully, generative expand (in beta from today).
Because you can never have enough fonts, there’s also apparently 1,500 new fonts in Illustrator. That’ll keep your designer friends happy.
We’re talking new Photoshop features now
Adobe’s Paul Trani (Creative Cloud Evangelist, what a job title that is) is on stage now showing some new tools for Photoshop.
Naturally, some of these are Firefly-powered, including ‘Composition Reference’ in text-to-image, which lets you use a reference image to generate new assets. You can also generate videos too, which isn’t something Photoshop is traditionally known for.
The new ‘Adjust colors’ also looks a handy way to tweak hue, saturation and more, and I’m personally quite excited about the improved selection tools, which automatically pick out specific details like a person’s hair.
But the biggest new addition for Photoshop newbies is probably the updated ‘Actions panel’ (now in beta). You can use natural language like ‘increase saturation’ and ‘brighten the image’ to quickly make edits.
Adobe addresses AI concerns
Adobe’s David Wadhwani is back on stage now to calm some of the recent concerns that have understandably surfaced about AI tools.
He’s reiterating that Firefly models are “commercially safe”, though this obviously doesn’t include the non-Adobe models you can use in the new Firefly Boards.
Adobe has also again promised that “your content will not be used to train generative AI”. That includes images and videos generated by Adobe’s models and also third-party ones in Firefly Boards.
That won’t calm everyone’s concerns about AI tools, but it makes sense for Adobe to repeat it as a point-of-difference from its rivals.
You can use non-Adobe AI models too
Interestingly, in Firefly Boards you can also use non-Adobe models, like Google Imagen. These AI images can then sit alongside the ones you’ve generated with Firefly.
That will definitely broaden its appeal a lot. On the other hand, it also slightly dilutes Adobe’s approach to strictly using generative AI that’s been trained on Stock images with a known origin.
Firefly Boards is a new feature
We’re now getting out first look at Firefly Boards, which is out now in public beta.
It’s basically an AI-powered moodboarding tool, where you add some images for inspiration then hit ‘generate’ to see some AI images in a film strip.
A remix feature lets you merge images together and then get a suggested prompt, if you’re not sure what to type. It’s collaborative too, so co-workers can chuck their ideas onto the same board. Very cool.
Firefly’s video powers are evolving
Adobe’s Kelly Hurlburt is showing off Firefly’s text-to-video powers now – you can start with text or your own sample image.
It’s been trained on Adobe Stock, so is commercially viable in theory. Oh, and Adobe has just mentioned that Firefly is coming to iOS and Android, so to keep an eye out for that “in the next few months”.
Jumping forward to Firefly
We’re now talking Adobe Firefly, which is evolving fast – Adobe is calling it the “all-in-one app for ideation” with generative AI.
Adobe has just announced a new Firefly Image Model 4, which seems to be particularly focused on “greater photo realism”.
A demo is showing some impressive, hyper-realistic portrait results, with options to tweak the lighting and more. Some photographers may not be happy with how easy this is becoming, but it looks handy for planning shoots.
And we’re off
Adobe’s David Wadhwani (Senior VP and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Media business) is now on stage talking about the first Max event in London last year – and the early days of Photoshop.
Interestingly, he’s talking about the early worries that “digital editing would kill creativity”, before Photoshop became mainstream. Definite parallels with AI here…
We’re almost ready for kick off
We’ve taken our spot in the Adobe Max London 2025 venue. As predicted, it’s looking a bit more colorful in here than the grey London skies outside.
You can watch the keynote live on the Adobe Max London website,but we’ll be bringing you all of the news and our early reactions here – starting in just a few minutes…
Welcome to Adobe Max London 2025
Good morning from London, where it’s a classic grey April start. We’re outside the Adobe Max London 2025 venue in Greenwich where there’ll be a bit more color in the keynote that kicks off in about 15 minutes.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how Adobe bakes more AI-powered tools into apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro and Firefly, without incurring the wrath of traditional fans who feel their skills are being sidelined by some of these new tricks.
So if, like me, you’re a longtime Creative Cloud user, it’s going to be essential viewing…
Refresh 2025-04-24T10:08:35.149Z Premiere Pro gets some useful upgrades (Image credit: Future) AI is supposed to be saving us from organizational drudgery, so it’s good to see Adpbe highlighting some of the new workflow benefits in Premiere Pro. Kelly Weldon (Senior Experience Designer) is showing the app’s improved search experience in…
