Adobe Brings Firefly Generative AI to Adobe Express for iPhone

Adobe has been betting big on AI image generation with its new Firefly engine, and now it’s bringing these powerful tools to the palm of your hand in a new Adobe Express mobile app that will help you turn ideas into images on the go.

The new Adobe Express app, currently in TestFlight beta, is the first Adobe tool to feature Firefly generative AI, letting you generate photos from text descriptions and manipulate existing photos by inserting and removing people and objects or adding text effects and styles. Quick actions allow for one-click removal of backgrounds, resizing of images, and more.

While you’ve been able to use Adobe’s Firefly AI features on the web since September — including through Safari on your iPhone — they’re a bit clunky to use that way unless you’re just playing around. The new Express app puts them into a more seamless workflow alongside Adobe’s other design tools.

Adobe Express also offers quick and simple video editing capabilities. It lets you combine video clips, images, and music, add animations, and even real-time captions in over 100 languages to quickly and easily create clips for sharing on your favorite platforms.

Taking a social-first approach, Adobe Express also includes a content scheduler to let you plan content for social media channels like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. However, it’s not just for solopreneurs and social media junkies. Images can be exported and used anywhere, including student projects, teacher lesson plans, business presentations, printed flyers, and other promotional content, and much more.

Creative Cloud subscribers can also pull up assets from Photoshop and Illustrator directly within Adobe Express and roundtrip them back into their original projects.

“Millions of users around the world are turning to Adobe Express to create more content than ever before – more than doubling the number of creations ever made in just the last year,” Govind Balakrishnan, Adobe’s Senior VP for Express and Digital Media Services said in the company’s press release. “The new Adobe Express mobile app puts Firefly – our generative AI models – front and center, giving users unprecedented ways to create videos, designs, photos and images that stand out.”

The new Adobe Express app offers Firefly-powered text-to-image creation, generative fill, and text effects while being designed to be safe for commercial use. This includes Content Credentials that indicate that generative AI was used in image creation and edits for trust and transparency.

During the beta, testers can enjoy the premium features in Adobe Express for free, such as the erase and remove background tools. However, the Firefly AI tools like Generative Fill and Text to Image will require Adobe’s generative credits, with 25 per month given to beta testers. Once the mobile app is released, access to the premium features will require a $10 monthly subscription, which provides 250 generative credits per month.

The new Adobe Express app requires iOS 16 or later and should support all iPhones capable of running that version. However, Adobe’s system requirements page raises some doubts as it omits the iPhone 8, iPhone 14 Plus, and the entire iPhone 12 and iPhone 15 families from the list.

While the TestFlight beta appears to be full for now, anyone interested in trying out the new Adobe Express can sign up on a waiting list.