Adobe Releases Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra, Integrates Third-Party Models from Google, OpenAI

Adobe announced a slew of new features and improvements at its annual Adobe Max conference on Thursday. The software giant announced new Firefly artificial intelligence (AI) models, support for third-party models, new Adobe Express features, and a new Firefly mobile app. The company also unveiled its Adobe Boards tool for storyboard creation, and a Vector model to let designers create editable vector-based artworks. The company also announced that its Adobe Firefly Video model, which was teased last year, is now generally available to subscribers.

Adobe Firefly Image 4 AI Models Released

In a blog post, the software giant detailed the two new text-to-image AI models. Dubbed Image Model 4 and Image Model 4 Ultra, these are the successors to the company's Image Model 3 series, introduced last year.

With the Model 4 series, Adobe claims that users will see significant improvement in accuracy, prompt fidelity, and realism in generated images. The Firefly Image Model 4 is geared towards faster image generation, and the company says it is best suited for creating simple illustrations, icons, and basic photo objects.

On the other hand, the Image Model 4 Ultra is the flagship-grade AI model, and the company claims that it can generate photorealistic scenes, human portraits, and complex imagery. Both models come with features such as filters, style options, and match compositions. These are now available with Firefly subscriptions.

New Features in the Firefly App

Separately, Adobe also introduced several other Firefly-based tools. The new Adobe Vector Model can generate editable vector-based artwork, logo variations, product packaging, icons, scenes, patterns, and more using natural language text prompts. It can be accessed within the Firefly app.

A new Firefly Boards tool is also available in the Firefly app in public beta. The interface lets users work on storyboards, mood boards, or explore concepts. Initially unveiled as Project Concept, the tool offers a text-to-image generator, various AI-powered creation and editing tools, as well as an inline AI editor feature. Adobe says the platform is suitable for iterating on different variations of ideas and refining them.

Further, the Adobe Firefly Video model is finally generally available to all users. The video generation tool was first unveiled in September 2023.

Apart from in-house innovation, Adobe is also expanding the Firefly app with third-party AI models. Currently, users can access OpenAI's image generation capabilities and Google's Image 3 and Veo 2, as well as the Flux 1.1 Pro, which used to power Grok's image generation feature, before the release of xAI's native Aurora model. “Adobe also plans to integrate additional models from partners including fal.ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika and Runway in the coming months,” the company said.

Notably, Firefly has several paid subscription plans for individuals, students, and teams. The starting plan for individuals, Firefly Standard, is priced at $9.99 (roughly Rs. 852) per month.

New Features in Adobe Express

The company also introduced several new features in Adobe Express, its content creation platform. Most of the new features are aimed at video editing. Adobe says these features will eliminate the tedious parts of creating video content.

A new Clip Maker feature will let users turn longer video footage into shareable clips using AI. The AI feature will also let users optimise the content by identifying key moments, adding captions, and reframing clips.

Adobe Express new features
Photo Credit: Adobe

The company is also adding a Firefly Video Model-powered video generation tool that accepts both text and images as input to generate custom b-roll and background footage. Another Enhance Speech tool removes background noise, while Video Self-Record allows users to record themselves within Adobe Express.

Additionally, the Drop Zone tool can compile clips into sequences while Scene View rearranges clips, so users can batch-edit videos in a single flow. Adobe Express is also being integrated with Vimeo to let users directly export and publish their content on the platform.

Apart from video editing, the content creation platform is adding a Dynamic Animation tool that adds natural motion effects to objects to turn still images into animated photos.

For enterprise users, the Generate Similar feature can create a collection of visual assets by taking reference from a single on-brand image. Adobe is also adding more than 30 new filters to try out inside the Adobe Express app.