All the Adobe updates across Creative Cloud

There have been a tonne of Adobe announcements this year, and MAX London just added more. So, here's where we are with all the Creative Cloud apps at the moment.

If you've lost track of all the new stuff across all the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, a) we wouldn't blame you, there have been a lot and b) join the club. Some features are genuinely new, some launched at NAB, and some we already knew about and have been in the beta programme for a while. Yet others were talked about at previous MAX events.

So, we found a press release from Adobe detailing exactly where each of its most popular apps are rather useful. Here's the company's list of new and recent features that steps through each of the main apps as they stand in April 2025 and what they now bring to the creative table.

• Photoshop upgrades deliver a combination of greater speed, smarter suggestions and tools for working with precise details. They include Firefly-powered AI features like Composition Reference in Text to Image, which unlocks powerful creative controls for ideating by generating assets with the same structure and visual arrangement as a reference image; Select Details, which make it faster and more intuitive to select things like hair, facial features and clothing; Adjust Colors, which simplifies the process of adjusting color hue, saturation and lightness in images for seamless, instant color adjustments; and a reimagined Actions panel (beta), which delivers smarter workflow suggestions.
  

• Express upgrades deliver advanced video, animation and on-brand tools that empower creators to do more with their designs, illustrations and footage. These include Clip Maker to instantly convert long video footage into social- length clips; Dynamic Animation to animate still images with a single click; Enhance Speech to remove distracting background noise for polished, pro-quality sound; Generate Video using text and image prompts to generate custom, commercially safe b-roll or background footage; and Generate Similar to instantly generate a multitude of variations of a reference image. The new features help creative professionals work quickly across new mediums to extend the reach and impact of their content and make it easy for small business owners, teachers, marketers and others to elevate the quality and impact of their social, digital and in-real-life assets.
• Illustrator upgrades deliver new AI generation tools along with speedier performance. Firefly-powered Generative Shape Fill and Text to Pattern help designers jumpstart their design process and customize concepts in their own individual style. Menu access is now more responsive, so designers can start their projects more quickly and complete tasks faster than ever. Across the board, Illustrator’s most popular effects are now up to five times faster.
  
• InDesign upgrades deliver new Firefly-powered image generation along with productivity boosts like easily converting PDFs to InDesign documents. Generative Fill (beta) transforms vector graphics into artwork from simple text prompts. Math Expressions empower creators to place complex mathematical notations directly in layouts.
• Lightroom upgrades deliver new tools for editing and sharing photos on both desktop and in the mobile app. All-new Select Landscape in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic helps photographers automatically detect and create masks for common landscape elements like water, plants, sky and more. Additionally, Lightroom Mobile and Web are introducing new sharing capabilities. Upgrades to Quick Actions make it simple to retouch group photos with precision and control.
• Premiere Pro upgrades deliver tools for generating, editing and searching footage at lightning speed. Firefly- powered Generative Extend is now generally available and production ready with support for 4K and vertical video; Media Intelligence helps editors find relevant clips by searching terabytes of footage in seconds; and Caption Translation instantly localizes captions in 27 languages.
• Adobe Fresco upgrades deliver a new “created without generative AI tag” which can be included in an image’s Content Credentials to protect the author’s rights and the capability to link exports directly to social media accounts.

As well as all that, Adobe has also added more than 1500 of the most popular fonts to Creative Cloud applications through the Adobe Fonts library, including Arial, Gotham, Helvetica and Times New Roman.

One other thing worth mentioning too. Adobe used MAX London to invite the creative community to participate in a new Creative Apprenticeship Initiative, aimed at helping the next generation of creators establish themselves in their careers. The company says it  has recruited hundreds of mentors and employers to the initiative, which looks to provide participants with hands-on learning opportunities, mentorship and real-world experience. More details at the Creative Apprenticeship Initiative blog post.