Skip to main content

Adobe Firefly

Today I learned to use Adobe Firefly1. I was scanning through the annual Adobe Max2 conference presentations so I upgraded Illustrator and whipped up this graphic in about five minutes while watching one.

I 'text prompted' in the landscape background, set those colors in my pallate and then generated the house, dog, birds, smoke, and fisherman separately. Maybe 10 minutes tops... it took longer to write this post about it.

There are a lot of granular controls over the style and color. The text to image generations is as good as Dall E 23 without some of the hallucinations. The graphics are are generated in pretty neat editable layers. Being able to just mix them as fills within Photoshop and Illustrator is a winner. And I'm sure the ability to edit and use fills in Premier is super time saver for editing.

It's going to change how some folks work. Again, it's like Github CoPilot4... you still need to know what your doing, but it'll greatly speed up the productivity of those who do and also have this tool in their belt. The prompts will allow you to modify the colors and style of any type of layer.

I've been looking at anti-digital illustration techniques because I think some of these polished gradients and sharp lines of digital illustration will become passé as they become more abundant... just like Photoshop techniques have become. I did a 'scratchboard like' logo in Illustrator some years ago, so I spent some time in Firefly seeing if I could duplicate the effect without all of the manual labor.

The strawberry illustration on the left is by Micheal Halbert5 who is known for his scratchboard work and the one's on the right are the best I could come up with Firefly. The AI generators don't have the same sort of rhythm that a manual scratchboard illustration has. Real strawberries have that same rhythm and the AI generated images, much like the early DALL-E images. Take a look at the one I generated for my first essay on Artificial Intelligence 6 because it reeks of AI.

I'm sure it'll improve and it's nice to see it available to use as fill from within the Adobe products. For now, it's just going to speed up the production of lower quality graphics and will serve to heighten the importance of good craftsmanship in the long run. Every school teacher, social media maven, and marketing expert is using products like Canva to drown their communications in graphics. Like every other symptom of the information age, as computers graphics get more powerful and easy to use, it really encourages me to use graphics more sparingly and/or go back to creating handcrafted artwork.

  1. Adobe Firefly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Firefly
  2. Adobe MAX - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_MAX
  3. DALL-E - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DALL-E
  4. Github CoPilot - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot
  5. Micheal Halbert - https://inkart.com
  6. Artificial Intelligence - https://davidawindham.com/artificial-intelligence