Adobe Max 2025: you need AI to work out what’s going on!

If you are in the creative industry as marketeer or a content provider or an advertising agency or a publisher, you will probably eventually unravel what Adobe is offering at Adobe Max 2025 and work out what will be useful to you and what will not. Good luck.

Adobe Max is a regular conference for Adobe professionals to discover what’s new in the Adobe ecosphere and what it can do for them. It’s a launchpad for new features, new ideas and new insights. And right now it’s all about AI.

Adobe is besotted with AI, particularly generative AI, which it sees as the future of content generation. It’s unleashing a positive avalance of buzzwords, workflows, AI models, strategic partnerships and ‘ideation’ tools on a brain-numbing scale. 

I’ll try to decode some of this jargon.

Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s generative AI platform. It’s sold as a standalone application/plan but also integrated into Adobe Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop, Adobe Express, Premiere Pro and more. Until now, Firefly has used Adobe’s own Firefly AI models. Adobe has announced its new Firefly 5 model, but has also introduced support for third-party AI tools from Google, OpenAI and others.

Adobe GenStudio is an end-to-end AI suite for marketing professionals. It supports the planning, managing, activating and measurement of content. If you’re a regular solo creator don’t worry about it, it’s not for you.

AI Assistants, also described as ‘agentic AI’ are a new tool designed to interpret natural-language text prompts to carry out various tasks, such as describing what you want to accomplish and the look and feel you’re trying to create. You can think of it as an extension or development of the current generative AI prompts designed understand more clearly what tyou want or where you want to go next.

AI Models are at the heart of generative AI, and it looks like Adobe is tacitly admitting that other companies’ AI models are better. So Firefly (Adobe’s AI platform, not its Firefly AI models) now supports the industrys ‘top AI models’ from Google, OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Luma AI, Runway, ElevenLabs, Topaz Labs and no doubt more to come.

Generative AI credits will apply across the board. Every Adobe plan comes with a set number of monthly credits, and once they’re all used up you have to wait until next month or, if your plan is never going to have enough, subscribe to an additional Firefly subscription to get more. The sting the tail is that while routine generative actions using Firefly will cost photographers a single credit, other AI models will cost considerably more. A Gemini 2.5 Flash image will cost 20 credits, while a ChatGPT image will cost 60. That’s pretty tough if you’ve got a regular Photography Pla, which comes with just 25 credits per month.

Generative Upscale is a new feature for Photoshop that uses Topaz Labs’ upscaling technology and not Adobe’s own. Is this Adobe admitting that other companies are doing this better. Like they say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Photoshop and Lightroom new features

Photoshop gets a choice of generative AI models, not just Firefly, but they will eat up a lot more generative credits. It also gets ‘agentic AI’ to try to understand what you’re trying to do, and a new AI powered ‘Harmonize’ feature for, well, harmonizing the lighting and colors for composited images. It also gets the Topaz Labs upscaling option.

Lightroom gets a new automatic dust removal option – about time, since Capture One has had this for some time, plus a new Assisted Culling tool, though this seems to be designed solely for portraits.

What’s wrong with Generative AI (technically, not ethically)

It doesn’t match the resolution of digital camera images. Anyone who’s used Adobe’s Generative AI tools will have found that out. It’s fine on image downsized for web use, but if you use it on a 24MP mirrorless camera image you’ll see that what it adds has a much lower resolution than surrounding areas. Adobe is very pleased that Firefly 5 now offers resolutions up to 4MP. It’s taken a long time for it to get specific about generative AI resolution.

Where is Adobe going with all this AI?

The Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem is complex, confusing and constantly changing, but a couple of threads are emerging – these are my thoughts, not the official line.

Adobe is selling software solutions to creatives. It is not a ‘photography’ company, and while it does offer products designed for photographers, including Lightroom (definitely) and Photoshop (up to a point), this is just a niche, a small part of its main business. In the Adobe universe, photography is just a raw material, not necessarily an end in itself.

Adobe sees AI as an additional income generator aside from its existing software subscriptions. Nobody said AI was ever going to be free, even if it might have looked like it in the early days. Somebody’s got to pay for those trillion-dollar datacenters, right?

AI remains interesting to photographers for its masking capabilities, noise reduction, image scaling, generative fill and generative expand capabilities, but photographers operate only at the edge of Adobe’s new AI economy and many of the announcements at Adobe Max 2025 are for an entirely different audience.