Adobe Reveals New Firefly AI Tool to Help Illustrators Color Their Art

Adobe on Thursday revealed a third member of its Firefly family of generative AI technologies, a tool to rapidly try out different color schemes for illustrations.

With the “recolor vectors” tool, you upload a vector graphic file like a logo, illustration or, in Adobe’s example shown off during a Firefly live meetup, a mandala. Firefly then generates a quartet of illustrations, each with a new and, ideally, pleasing combination of colors.

“Firefly gets me into the realm of colors that I like … then I can tweak it from there,” said Adobe product evangelist Paul Trani in the demo. “This is such a pain in Illustrator to try to recolor all of this.”

Adobe isn’t the first to supply generative tools, a newly creative aspect of artificial intelligence technology. But its moves are important since Adobe is the top supplier of software to help creative professionals and amateurs.

The company launched its Firefly project earlier in March and has been gradually expanding access to the beta products to those who sign up on a waiting list. The first two tools let you turn a text prompt into an image and style text in rich new ways.

Adobe didn’t say when or even if it’ll ship the vector recoloring tool, but Trani called it a sneak peek, and Adobe often builds its sneak peek technology into its products.

You can guide the vector recoloring tool with sample images such as taxis, galaxies, butterflies and neon lights that already have colors you like. It works in conjunction with Adobe Illustrator software and its included artwork recoloring tool.

One of Firefly’s main selling points: the artificial intelligence technology was trained on Adobe’s own library of imagery and other licensed or public domain material so businesses won’t have to worry about copyright or trademark problems. Adobe also worked to counteract bias in training data and screen out potentially troublesome subject matter like sex and violence.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.