Adobe Express with Firefly moves out of beta

The latest version of Adobe’s AI-first, all-in-one content creation app, Express, gets an official release.

Two months after first announcing it would be adding its Firefly generative AI tools to Adobe Express, Adobe has taken the resulting online service out of beta and given it an official launch.

It’s not exactly been a quiet beta either. The company reckons that Adobe Express already has millions of users of all skill levels doing everything from creating social media content to designing book reports. AI-first is new terminology for it though, highlighting the expanded role that Firefly plays in the new release. Indeed, load up the page and the second and third carousels you see are Firefly-powered text-to-image and text effects.

Here, for examples is the word RedShark made up of, er, red sharks. 

And here’s a red shark with a vector effect added.

Miraculous not even a year ago, this is all approaching fairly standard stuff now, though it has to be said that the way that Express presents it all seamlessly within a single interface and in a very user friendly style is impressive. Beyond generative AI there’s plenty of other new stuff in the release too though. Here’s the list:

• New all-in-one editor covering multiple formats
• Firefly integrated into Express makes it possible to quickly generate custom images and text effects from text prompts in over 100 languages and designed to be safe for commercial use
• Deep workflows with Creative Cloud apps allow user to easily access, edit, and work with creative assets from Photoshop and Illustrator directly within Express, or add linked files that always stay in sync across apps
• New video, multiple page templates, and design elements include nearly 200 million assets including video and design templates, royalty-free Adobe Stock images, video and audio assets, almost 22,000 fonts, plus more icons, backgrounds, and shapes. 
• PDF support in the new all-in-one editor
• Some useful quick actions such as remove background in images and videos, animate a character using just audio, convert to GIF, and edit PDF
• Real-time co-editing and seamless review and commenting capabilities
• Animations including Fade In, Pop, Flicker, and Bungee. With Animate from Audio, powered by Adobe Character Animator, you can even watch characters come to life with lips and gestures syncing to recorded dialogue.

Users can access Express for desktop for free and do an impressive amount with it, while there are also plans to bring the latest version of Express to mobile soon. For existing Creative Cloud members, the Express Premium plan, which includes premium templates, cloud storage and more, is included. As a standalone it starts at $9.99 a month.