7 Takeaways from Adobe Max 2023 & New Features in Adobe Creative Cloud

15 min readOct 20, 2023

In this day and age, people are creating MORE than ever before. Creativity is fueling the economy! This year at Adobe Max 2023, lots of new innovations were unveiled — it’s the year of AI. Most of the AI innovations weren’t even on the roadmap for this year.

Thanks to my employer, Barcoding, for giving me the opportunity to attend Adobe Max in person!

Now let’s get into my takeaways from all the sessions I attended and a preview of all the new updates and features for Adobe products.

Takeaway #1: AI is here to eliminate mundane tasks.

Adobe Firefly is the AI technology behind all the new Adobe AI features. It’s a standalone web application you can check out at: firefly.adobe.com.

The new features in Adobe Firefly offers new ways to improve creative workflows with generative AI. Adobe Firefly is now integrated into apps natively across the board — helping us improve our workflows in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc. Adobe Firefly will now handle the mundane tasks and you can do the work that is more meaningful. Watch the keynote from day 1.

Adobe’s 4 Pillars of AI:

Exploration
Productivity
Creative Control
Community

Takeaway #2: Make your stuff & take chances.

I was incredibly blown away and inspired by the Inspiration Keynote with Creative Director, Karen X Cheng; Graphic Designer, Aaron Draplin; Creative Director, Walker Noble; and Record Producer, Songwriter, and Entrepreneur, Oak Felder. It was amazing to hear about their creative processes and what inspires them.

For any creative or designer, it is incredibly important to create your own stuff. Draplin encouraged everyone to start working with their family and friends and see where that takes them. Your own work is what separates you from the competition. Draplin and Cheng both said that not everything is about money — it is okay to just do/create things for passion. Noble encouraged everyone to take chances — why not you?

Inspiration Keynote Highlights:

Break free from the algorithm
Be proud of your flops
Seek respect, not attention
Human+AI will always be stronger
Boredom is your secret weapon to creativity
Watch the keynote here.

I got to network & meet many creatives such as Aaron Draplin!

Takeaway #3: Use Adobe Capture and Adobe Libraries hand in hand.

At Adobe Max, you get the opportunity to attend hands-on labs with all the technology at your fingertips to learn new features and tools. I attended a lab with Daniel Scott, host of the Bring Your Own Laptop YouTube channel.

If you aren’t using Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries — now is the time! You can use the libraries to gather a variety of design assets from color palettes, character styles, logos and icons, and photos. These libraries can be shared and used across many Adobe apps and can contain up to 10,000 assets. Libraries make your workflows more efficient & faster!

In the lab, Scott walked us through the Adobe Capture app. You can use your mobile device to turn photos into color palettes, patterns, type, materials, brushes, and shapes. You can save these assets to your libraries and use them across the desktop & mobile apps. The Adobe Capture app is great for when you need a bit of inspiration to help you complete your creative project.

Use the layers search bar to your advantage — there are lots of ways to search and filter your layers. This is just another reason to make sure your layers are named well. With the search icon, there is a drop-down showing a variety of different ways to search within your layers. Next to the search bar, a series of icons show up as well to filter your laters more. With the toggle, you can turn the search off.

Takeaway #4: Use Scripts to Automate Adobe InDesign!

In the session with David Blatner, CEO of Creative Pro, he unveiled tons of InDesign hacks everyone needs to know to become more efficient with InDesign. Creative Pro is another resource available to creatives — they host their own events for creative professionals.

Blatner revealed the magic of scripts — they can make your workflows so much more efficient! Now is the time to start using scripts — even though it's not a new feature. You can find lots of downloadable scripts on the Creative Pro site and online elsewhere.

Some Examples of Useful Scripts:

Under Samples > Javascript > MakeGrid: Create a grid super fast!
Under Samples > Javascript > FindChangeByLast: A life-changing hack: removes double spaces, extra paragraph spaces, changes dashes to em dashes — in SECONDS!
Under Samples > Javascript > SortParagraphs: If you ever have information to sort or place into alphabetical order, you can quickly do so with this script.

MakeGrid Demo (Left), FindChangeByLast Demo (Right)

More SuperHero InDesign Tips:

Take advantage of nested styles and do not click on character styles. Right-click to edit so your styles don’t get screwed up!
Create charts and graphs with Chartwell (an OpenType font)
Create Layout zones and assign zones — this is a great feature for when you need someone else to work on a certain section in your InDesign document.
Double-click to go into a frame, and click escape to exit a frame.
Use paragraph styles for a paragraph, and use character styles for parts of a paragraph.
Check out the recording and this document with all sorts of resources, shortcuts, and more from the session.

Takeaway #5: How to become an expert with Adobe Premiere Pro & After Effects.

Everyone in the graphic design field always thinks video is a hard thing to learn — but all it really takes is some practice, googling, or watching videos on YouTube. I attended a few stellar sessions with Valentina Vee, and a session with Zipeng Zhu.

Take Advantage of Essential Graphics (Valentina Vee):

Use Essential Graphics — this is where you can find pre-made and your own titles and graphics. You can create essential graphics with text, shapes, and clip layers.
Don’t be afraid to break the template and make your own templates.
Name templates well — for example; Square Lower Third.
If you download other templates online for After Effects, you can edit them directly in After Effects.
Take advantage of the Production feature — you can pull clips directly into your projects without having to recreate anything!

All it takes is simple gestures and ideas (Zipeng Zhu):

Animation is simple — all it takes is small and simple motion gestures.
Experiment with position, scale, rotate, and opacity.
Don’t forget to make work for fun and make something for yourself.
Start simple and go NUTS.
Watch YouTube tutorials to learn how to create simple animations.

Takeaway #6: Try a new camera lens & experiment with new angles.

While at Adobe Max, I attended an urban photowalk with Kenneth Hines, Jr., ZEISS Ambassador, Lightroom Instructor, and Multi-Discipline Photographer. We were tasked to pick one lens on our mobile phone and stick to that lens the entire time — with no zooming.

Hines encouraged us to find unique points of view of the Downtown LA urban scene. This photowalk was surprisingly eye-opening and has made me look to photograph and film from more unique angles. We then edited the photos in Adobe Lightroom.

My favorite shots from the photowalk — edited in Adobe Lightroom.

Takeaway #7: Ground your decisions in data.

In this session with Russ Nelson, Director of Adobe Solutions & Services, CDW, and Peggy Waite Bradley, Experience Optimization Architect, CDW, they discussed how Adobe solutions can help bring creative and marketing closer together.

How do you get into the flow? Nelson and Bradley talked about focusing on the balance between a skill and a challenge. Let AI do the more nuanced and boring tasks so you can do the more fulfilling tasks.

Here are some ways CDW collaborates with creatives in their processes:

Plan:

Involve Creating in Planning
Plan Visibility

Create:

Firefly Gen AI
Auto-Tagging Assets
Auto Crop+Renditions

Experience

Marketing Copy Generator
Auto-Targeting
Content-Targeting

Measure

Customer Behavior Data
Report Templates
Natural Language Data Query
Feedback to the Plan
Analytics Visibility

This session really opened my eyes and made me realize that when you make design decisions or changes — they need to be grounded in data. For example, for the home page of a website, you need to do heat mapping to determine where you might need to add a new section or a add different CTA/button. There is so much to discover with data and reporting. Watch the session recording here.

Adobe Photoshop Updates

Generative Fill and Generative Expand

One of these new Firefly-powered technologies are Generative Fill and Generative Expand. The new technology allows you to add, expand, or remove content from images in a non-destructive way while using simple text prompts. All it takes is a prompt and a few seconds to generate your image! The new AI-powered technology will automatically match and blend the perspective, lighting, and style of your image.

When you are using the Generative Fill, it gives you 3 variations — different options you can choose from. When you make new search prompts, it saves previous variations. This new powerful tool can help you generate more concepts and variations than ever — allowing you to experiment more and be more efficient.

Generative Expand allows you to automatically expand the canvas/artboard and resize any image in Photoshop using the Crop tool. After you expand the canvas with the crop tool, select generate in the Contextual Task Bar. Generative Expand fills empty space with generated content that blends with the existing image.

This new AI-powered tool will save so much time — no more wasting time searching for different images to use! Now there are no more limits for the border of your canvas/artboard!

Remove Tool

The Remove tool allows you to draw around an object you want to disappear — no need to brush over the object entirely. This will save lots of time to remove objects that are not needed! This will be super helpful for retouching and repairing photos.

Contextual Text Bar

The Contextual Task Bar is a menu that presents relevant next steps and tools in your workflow. There are several different presents/toolbar variations. You can also hide the bar, and reset/pin its location by clicking the 3 dots.

New Document Workflow: This bar appears with you open a blank document.
Open Image/File Workflow: This bar appears when you open an image.
Type Tool Workflow: This bar appears when you use the Type tool.
Masking Workflow: This bar appears in the Select and Mask workspace. This tool can help you refine your mask!
Generative Expand Workflow: This bar appears when the Crop tool is used. The Generative Expand feature comes in handy if you need to expand your canvas.
Selections Workflow: This bar appears with options to refine a selection/create a mask once a selection is made. There is a Generative Fill option here as well.

Adjustment Presets

Adjustment presents have also been added to Photoshop! This allows you to easily apply present settings to images and make non-destructive changes/adjustments later. When you click on present, it automatically adds any adjustment layers. This a is great tool when you want all your photos to have a specific look and feel.

Adobe Illustrator

Text to Vector Graphic

This new tool powered by Adobe Firefly, allows you to generate vector graphics easily. You can create a subject, scene, icon, or pattern. You’ll get a few variations to choose from as well. You can also extract a style from anything on your artboard to test out different variations. I see this being most useful in the concept and early process stages of design/illustrating workflows.

Retype

With the power of Retype (beta), you can pull in any image with typography and find font suggestions from Adobe Fonts (or your computer). This makes it so much easier to find specific fonts! With this feature, you can convert outlined text to editable text. All you have to do is grab your image, and go to Type > Retype (beta).

Mockup

Mockup (beta) allows you to grab your vectors and place them on various objects such as digital items, packaging, mugs, t-shirts, etc. All you have to do is select your vector, Go to Object > Mockup > Make. When you apply your vector on the raster objects, Illustrator will automatically honor the curves and edges of your object. Keep in mind, that you need an Adobe Stock license to use this feature.

Smooth

The Smooth slider is an enhancement over the Smooth tool — it lets you manually control the smoothing levels for a path. You can find this slider under Object > Path > Smooth.

Generative Recolor

Generative AI was added to the Recolor tool with the power of Adobe Firefly. You can recolor vector artwork easily — select the image and go to Edit > Edit Colors > Generative Recolor.

You can choose from sample prompts or add your own simple description. You can also add specific colors to guide the prompt. From the Recolor menu, you can also use the color theme picker to pull colors from other images.

Adobe InDesign

Auto Style

One of the newest typography functions in InDesign is Auto Style. There are several preset Style Packs available — you can also create your own custom style pack. To use this feature, select your text boxes and go to Type > Auto Style.

File Naming: Add Suffixes

When exporting JPEG or PNG formats, you can add suffixes such as incremental numbers, page numbers, and page size. This new feature makes it a lot easier to keep your files organized, share different sizes for different platforms, and share with various stakeholders.

Hide Spreads

This new feature is great — you can now hide your draft spreads while presenting or exporting a document. All you have to do is select a page and right-click on Hide Spread.

Adobe Lightroom

Lens Blur Tool

This was one of the features I experimented with for my photowalk session at Adobe Max. You can now add an aesthetic blur effect (like bokeh) to any part of a photo through the new AI-powered Lens Blur. This is available on the mobile app as well!

HDR Photos

Another new feature is the ability to edit and save HDR photos in formats such as AVIF and JPEG XL. These formats offer higher-quality images at a smaller file size.

Adobe Premiere Pro

Text-Based Editing

A new powerful tool has now arrived to Premiere Pro — Text-Based Editing. This will make editing so much faster and more efficient — you can delete pauses, delete filler words, and select text to add to your timeline. This is a game-changing tool to edit videos!

The text-based editing makes it easier to create rough cuts — and even helps you create clips. This will be a great tool to make clips for social media such as Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.

When you import your video files, enable Automatic transcription under the Import settings. Once the transcript has been transcribed, you can start editing. You can also use copy and paste here to be even more efficient!

Enhance Speech

You can now use AI to improve audio in your videos! It can magically remove noise and improve the quality of dialogue — they will sound like they were professionally recorded! Learn how to use this new feature.

Templates

You can now save projects as templates — you can start your new project with bins/sequences that are already organized. All you have to do is, select File > Save as Template. This helps to retain formatting, branding, colors, assets, etc. across many projects.

Restore Projects

Oh no! Premiere Crashed? Good thing Premiere Pro now has automatic project recovery. You can now easily recover any projects should the app crash. When Premiere Pro reopens, select Reopen to open any crashed projects.

Frame.io

If you have a frame.io subscription, Frame.io is no longer only used for video. You can upload all file types! This is another handy review tool to get feedback from stakeholders.

Adobe After Effects

Next-Gen Roto Brush

This update to After Effects is powered by a new AI model — it extracts objects from footage faster and more accurately. See an example of this new and improved tool here.

There were a TON of new features released this year for the Creative Cloud. It is amazing to see all the new, faster, and more efficient new processes. There are some amazing new features to come in the future as well. These are unreleased and “sneak peaks” of what is to come.

#ProjectFastFill: Leveraging the Generative Fill Technology — this brings the future ability to remove and add objects/items from a Premiere/After Effects Project!
#ProjectDrawAndDelight: This exciting tool turns rough doodles into polished and refined drawings. This will be useful for those early process stages.
#ProjectNeo: Enables creators to incorporate 3D shapes in their 2D designs — all without requiring technical expertise.
#ProjectSceneChange: Makes it easy to composite a subject and scene, from two separate video captures, into a scene with synchronized camera motion.
#ProjectPrimrose: This was an exciting technology to see in person — an interactive dress created with Adobe Firefly, After Effects, Stock, and Illustrator.
#ProjectGlyphEase: Beginning with a hand-drawn letter shape, you will be able to use AI to automatically generate an entire set of glyphs matching the input lettering style.
#ProjectPoseable: This tool will create a 3D rendering from text input, take depth and perspective consideration, and re-align the object. This will be useful for storyboarding and concepts!
#ProjectResUp: A tool that will easily convert low-quality video to high-resolution video!
#ProjectDubDubDub: With just a click of a button, it will be possible to automatically translate a video while preserving the voice of the original speaker.
#ProjectSeeThrough: A cool new AI-powered tool that will make it easy to remove reflections from photos.
#ProjectStardust: This was the MOST exciting — #ProjectStardust will allow you to magically move and remove objects simply by clicking on them. You will be able to select a subject, move them around, and also change elements — like the color of the clothing, or the position they are in.

Watch the Sneaks Live:

Adobe Max 2023 was a blast!

Which features are you most excited about? It was so exciting to network and meet so many designers! I learned so much from this conference and it was such an incredible experience.