Alexandru Costin is Vice President, Generative AI and Sensei at Adobe.
There was no getting away from Firefly at this year’s Adobe Max London. Already infused across the Creative Cloud suite, the AI image and video generator has been massively upgraded with new tools and features.
Ahead of the events, we sat down with Alexandru Costin, Vice President, Generative AI and Sensei at Adobe, to explore what’s new with Firefly, why stories matter when using the best AI tools, and how professionals can use it to enhance creativity across the board.
- What can users expect from AI at Adobe Max?
At Max, we have the next generation of our image model, two versions of it. We have a vector model, we have the video model. So, a lot of progress on the model from Adobe, commercially safe, high quality, amazing human rendering. A lot of control and a great style engine, et cetera. We are also introducing third-party model integrations.
Our customers told us that they want to stay in our tools, in our workflows. They are still using other models for ideation purposes, or for different personalities. So, we’re announcing OpenAI’s GPT image integration and Google’s Imagen and Veo 2 in Firefly, and Flux integration in Firefly Boards.
The third big announcement is Firefly Boards is a new capability in the Firefly web application. We look at it as an all-in-one platform for next generation creatives to ideate, create and produce production content. Firefly Boards is an infinite canvas that enables team collaboration, real-time collaboration, commenting, but also deep Gen AI features stepping in, into all of these first-party and third-party models, new capabilities for remixing images.
- How easy is it to deliver something like that?
It’s not easy. We’ve been working on the project concept for like, a year. Actually, that underlying technology, we’ve been working on for many years, like real-time collaboration with deep integration, with storage, and innovation in Gen AI user experiences, remixing, auto-describing images to create the prompts for you. There’s a lot of deep technology that went into it. It looks like magic, and is very easy [to use]. We hope it’s so easy. Our goal is to build a complex layer. So for customers, it’s like magic, and everything just works.
- What’s your favorite new feature?
My favorite feature is integration between image, video, and the rest of the Adobe products. We’re trying to build workflows where customers that have an intent in mind, and they want to paint the picture that’s in their mind, can use these tools in a really connected way without having to jump through so many hoops to tell their story. Firefly Image 4 offers amazing photo realism, human rendering quality, prompt understanding. You iterate fast.
With Image 4 Ultra, which is our premium model, you can render your image with additional details, and we can take them into the Firefly video model as a keyframe, and create a video from that whole image. Then you can take that video into Adobe Express and make it like an animated banner, add text, add fonts. In Creative Cloud, we have a lot of capabilities that exist already. We’re bringing Gen AI inside those workflows, either in Firefly on the web, or directly as an API integration.
But for me, I think the magic is having all of this accessible in an easy way. The Photoshop team is also working on an agentic interface. They call it a new Actions panel. You type in what you want. We have 1000 high-quality actions we’ve curated for you. There are all these tools in Photoshop that are sometimes hard to discover if you’re not an expert, but we’re gonna just bring them and apply them for you. I mean, you will learn along the way, but you don’t need to know everything before you start. Not only we’re helping you achieve your goal, we’re also teaching you the ins and outs of Photoshop as we go through this.
- That must be one of the biggest barriers to entry for a lot of users
It is. It’s too powerful to some extent. It has so many controls, it might be intimidating, but with the new Actions panel, we want to take a big chunk of that entry barrier away.
- How important is it for you when it comes to lowering those barriers to entry?
Everybody will benefit from this technology in different ways. For creative professionals, it will basically remove some of the tedium, so they can focus on creativity. But with things like Firefly Boards, they will be able to work with teams and clients much better. The client can upload in boards some stylistic ideas, and then you can take it and integrate it very fast in your professional workload.
For consumers, with people that want to spend seconds to create something, with Firefly, you just type in the prompt and we do it for you. It’s a great capability.
In the middle, there are the folks learning in their careers, aspiring creative professionals, next generation creatives. And for them, we want to give them both Gen AI capabilities, but also a bridge towards the existing pixel-perfect tools that we have at Adobe. Because we think a mix of those two worlds is the best mix that next generation creatives need to be armed with.
- Where can further improvements be made in that area, making it more accessible?
For me, a big opportunity is better understanding of humans, like prompt understanding agentic, having a creative partner to bounce ideas off of. Another thing we’re announcing is the [upcoming] Firefly mobile app. This is a companion app that can use many of the Firefly app capabilities, generate text, generate video, et cetera. But also, because it’s on mobile, you have access to the camera, you have a microphone, there are many new opportunities to make these interactions easier. So, we’re looking into that. We do think next generation creatives are a big target market for us because we want to give them the tools of the trade.
- What’s the motivation behind these new additions in Firefly?
For us, customers are why we get up in the morning every day, they are telling us what they need, and they told us they want more quality, better humans, more control, better stylization. That’s what’s behind the image model updates. We just want to make them more usable in more workflows for actual production use-cases. Because our model is uniquely positioned to be safe for commercial use, we want customers to use it everywhere.
For video, video is also growing, and many of our customer-base doesn’t know how to use the video product. So, making video creation more accessible is another great accelerant for creativity. We want to offer a larger population of people the tools to tap into video and be able to start achieving their goals there. While, of course, inside products like Premiere Pro, we’re continuing to integrate deeper, more advanced features, like a couple of weeks ago at NAB, we launched Generative Extend. It won one of the awards. Gen Extend is a 4K extension, enabling professional videographers to basically extend clips so they don’t have to reshoot.
What motivates us is helping our customers tell stories, better stories, more diverse stories, and be successful in their careers.
- When everyone is using AI, how do artists and businesses differentiate themselves from rivals?
I think through human creativity and engineering, how do they differentiate today? They’re all using Photoshop. They do find ways to differentiate because, in reality, Gen AI is a tool designed, at least from an Adobe perspective, to be of service to the creative community, and we want to give them a more powerful tool that should help them level-up their craft.
They’re describing it as going from the person editing to a creative director. All of our customers can become directors of these Gen AI tools to help them tell better stories, tell stories faster, et cetera. So, we think the differentiation will still be in the creativity of the human using the tool. And we’re seeing so much innovation. We’re seeing people using these technologies in ways we haven’t even thought about, which is very exciting, always. Mixing them in novel ways. Because that’s how you differentiate. And we do think there will always be many ways to express somebody’s creativity.
We think creativity comes in a variety of ways, and there are different tools creative people will use and mix together to tell better stories and change culture.
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