The most exciting features launching for creative professionals at Adobe MAX 2025

Powerful tools with the potential to reshape workflows

Several people working on laptops in a casual, open space. Two people in the foreground are seated on bright pink lounge furniture, collaborating on video editing. One person looks on while the other demonstrates a feature.

Each autumn, I’m excited for the leaves to turn, the Halloween decorations to go up, and for Adobe MAX, our annual creativity conference. Hosted last week in Los Angeles, this year’s Adobe MAX was packed with updates, upgrades, and new releases across Adobe’s creative tools—which our design team has been helping to shape.

To chart the course for the future of our tools, we listen to customer feedback and feedback from the people across Adobe who also use our products—our design team included (I consider myself a power-user of Lightroom, so I’m excited to see some of my favorite new features out in the world). From powerful integrations, intelligent organization and search, and more precision and control, I’ve hand-picked the newest features in Adobe tools that will reshape how you work.

Smarter snapping and faster performance in Adobe Illustrator

I can’t overstate how much the latest Illustrator update was informed by feedback from the creatives who use it every day. The team behind Illustrator has had a multi-year focus on performance and day-to-day improvements including meaningful enhancements to existing features, speed bumps, and improved stability.

New and upgraded features include:

A new snapping panel with smarter snapping: Snapping tools, previously spread out in different areas of Illustrator, have been consolidated into a single panel for better discovery and easier control without chasing options around the interface. Support for tangents and perpendicular lines now gives you even more precision control.
Faster, more flexible artboard management: On canvas editable artboard labels, lock and rearrange options, and faster exporting provide more creative workflow control.
Elevated color tools for more efficiency: Fine-tune every hue and gradient with Illustrator’s precision-driven color updates, like new perceptual and dithered gradients, gradient presets, and a new color picker control, all inspired by user requests.
Better, faster app performance: We’ve been amplifying Illustrator’s performance and stability ,feature by feature, as part of a multi-year journey. As of this year’s MAX, the app now launches up to three times faster, and you can save even your largest files quickly with speeds up to six times faster.

A GIF of the new Snapping tool in Adobe Illustrator. It opens with a yellow cat face with round green eyes, a small triangular nose, short whiskers and only one ear. The animation shows Illustrator's pen tool easily creating a second ear. The next frame shows a lavendar bar alongside a yellow flag-shaped rectangle. The pen tool pops onto the screen again to rotate the flag and attach it to the lavender bar. The final sequence shows a bullhorn without a handle. Illustrator's pen tool drops into the frame one last time to quickly create the handle and snap it into position.

Snapping in Adobe Illustrator just got smarter, with more precision and control for tangents and perpendicular lines.

PDF integration, dynamic layouts, and smoother collaboration with Adobe InDesign

Long live print! If you were at MAX this year, we hope you grabbed a copy of our limited-run print zine on the current and future state of creative work from the Adobe Design and Community teams, made with—what else?—InDesign.

New and upgraded features include:

Edit any PDF in InDesign: We’ve all been sent a PDF of unclear origins that we’ve been expected to edit. The power of InDesign is now extended to allow you to edit PDFs created with any tool. We’re thrilled to roll out this much-requested feature that provides even more control over editing design.
Dynamic layouts with FlexLayout: This new feature for creating dynamic layouts adapts when content is added, removed or resized. FlexLayout makes it easy to modify layouts without manual adjustments, including auto-resizing text and elements.
Streamlined collaboration for designers and copywriters: InCopy on the web (now in beta) streamlines designer-copywriter collaboration. It ends file handoff and version issues common with traditional copy-editing workflows when using tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

To chart the course for the future of our tools, we listen to your feedback and the people across Adobe who also use our products—our design team included.

Powerful integrations plus new and improved editing features to uplevel your work in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is an everyday staple for nearly every creative pro, and it’s only getting more powerful with new features and more AI model choices inside the app.

New and upgraded features include:

New adjustment layers: Work faster with new, nondestructive adjustment layers for image temperature and tint that are even easier to access with improved layer organization on desktop.
Harmonize feature: Available across desktop, web, and mobile, Harmonize allows you to seamlessly compose elements into a new background by creating proper lighting, color, and shadows. The time savings and quality of the results are incredible.
Improved select subject and remove background: Quickly make detailed selections and image edits, with greater precision and control on desktop.
Image editing integrations: Integrations with three powerful AI models offer major new capabilities. Nano Banana (a.k.a. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) and FLUX.1 Kontext Pro (from Black Forest Labs) all allow you to quickly edit images with simple text commands within Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature. Images can also be enhanced with Generative Upscale, an integration with Topaz Labs’ technology, enabling you to sharpen photo resolution or remove noise.

Close-up of an owl’s face shown in a side-by-side comparison. The original image on the left has softer details, while the image on the right, upscaled using Topaz Gigapixel, reveals sharper feather textures and a vivid orange eye. Text labels read (from left): Original image (Before) and Upscaled with Topaz Gigapixel (After).

Images in Photoshop can be beautifully enhanced with Generative Upscale, an integration with technology from Topaz Labs technology, without ever leaving the app.

Do more with vector files and 3D objects in Adobe After Effects

Hopping between apps? Expanded vector support is welcome news for After Effects users.

New and upgraded features include:

Expanded vector capabilities: SVG files like logos can be imported as native shape layers. lllustrator vectors will also now maintain their gradients, transparency, and gradient strokes when converted to native After Effects shape layers.
New 3D object capabilities: Leveraging the power of Adobe Substance 3D, After Effects users will have more options than ever to design and animate in 3D. Using parametric meshes, you can create spheres, cubes, cones, and more, and customize and animate their size, shape, and appearance. Make meshes look plastic or metallic by adjusting simple, physically based material properties, or assign a Substance material for even more visual impact.
New 3D scenes: Build beautiful 3D scenes, rich in shape and texture, natively within After Effects using Substance 3D Materials (.sbsar files). These dynamic, adjustable materials can give 3D models and parametric meshes almost any look, from photo-real to highly stylized. Get access to thousands of free materials through Substance Community Assets.
Easy keyframe and layer adjustments with Quick Offset: Quick Offset is a time saving tool that allows you to highlight and shift the positions of multiple keyframes or layers with one simple click-and-drag. No more clicking and shifting one layer at a time - a real bonus when you have dozens of them!

Masking made easier and intelligent search functionality in Adobe Premiere

New ways of working in Premiere on desktop are designed to eliminate the tedium of manual tasks so you can spend more time telling your story.

New and upgraded features include:

Shape masks and tracking improvements: The redesigned shape masks and tracking in Premiere allow you to quickly isolate objects to edit, remove, or replace. The update also provides solutions for complex clips with occlusion by using masking and tracking tools that follow subjects moving behind or within unwanted areas of the frame.
Simple, automated clip search: Premiere’s AI-powered Media Intelligence automatically identifies visuals across every clip in your project; and with this update, it can do even more: search speech and sound effects, find similar clips to identify alternate takes in seconds, and bleep or mute unwanted words with just one click.
More effects at no extra cost: Introducing more than 90 new, modern effects, transitions and animations designed for pro editors, all included in your plan. You can adjust and customize every parameter from scratch for complete creative control—from glowing highlights to dynamic glitches and everything in between.

A screenshot from Adobe Premiere showing a video clip in the timeline with a red shape mask applied over a person’s upper body in the preview window. The workspace includes panels for project files, timeline tracks with video and audio layers, and effect controls on the right displaying mask properties such as position, scale, and opacity.

Editing work in Adobe Premiere has been accelerated with redesigned shape masks and faster, refined tracking of moving objects.

Automated corrections and intelligent culling in Adobe Lightroom

Skip the repetitive stuff and get back to the work that matters with a Lightroom release that enables you to automate corrections and speed up culling, selection, and search.

New and upgraded features include:

Intelligent photo culling: Lightroom is speeding up the photo selection process for you by intelligently filtering photos based on different criteria, detecting lower quality images, grouping similar photos, and more.
Batch file renaming: Customize and organize image names with just a few clicks.
Automated blemish and dust spot removal: Lightroom can now find blemishes on people's faces (in public beta for mobile) and dust spots (available on desktop) and automatically remove them. Save time on what would otherwise be manual corrections.
Upgrades to landscape masking: This includes a new snow-detection model.
Control over color variance and better color labeling: New color features have better harmony, greater separation, and the ability to add color labels for searching and organizing images by hue.

Two images stacked. Each shows a screenshot from Adobe Lightroom with an image of a purple-toned sky reflected in a calm lake. The top image displays the original photo with visible dust spots, while the bottom image shows the same photo with markers indicating areas selected for removal. A panel on the right lists distraction removal options such as reflections, people, and dust, with "dust" selected.

Automatically remove dust spots in Adobe Lightroom (desktop) with the new Distraction removal feature.

Train your own AI model with Adobe Firefly and expand your ideation potential in Adobe Firefly Boards

In beta at MAX Firefly Custom Models is a major step toward making AI truly work for and with you. Individuals or teams can use their own images to train a custom style or subject model for consistent image generation across projects.

Adobe’s ideation surface, Firefly Boards, is also getting more powerful. Now out of beta, Boards is an infinite canvas that supports multiple, simultaneous collaborators and integrates with other Adobe tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Fresco, Adobe Fonts, and Adobe Express. Early users of Boards love the intuitive visual inputs that go beyond text prompts and enable them to upload images, sketches, or videos and remix them with advanced control.

New and upgraded features include:

Image generation and editing model integrations: Upscale images just like you might in Photoshop with an integration from Topaz Labs, which joins a growing ecosystem of models in Boards that include Adobe Firefly, Black Forest Labs, Google, Luma AI, Moonvalley, Pika, and Runway.
Presets for speedier ideation: For creators who want to skip manual prompt engineering and jump straight into high-quality output, new preset features bundle complex workflows into a single click.
New rotate object feature: Turn any 2D image into a 3D asset, rotate it in your artboard, mock up 3D scenes, experiment with depth, and generate variations.

Finally, an idea that began with our Design team and was part of Adobe’s internal incubator, Project Graph, was shared for the first time on the MAX stage. While not yet available to the public, Graph is a professional grade node based AI creation tool and a great example of how we’re rethinking creative workflows for a new era—as a platform that brings multiple generative models, effects, and Adobe tools into one visual interface. Watch a preview of Project Graph below:

We can’t wait to hear what you think about these updates—and as always, we’ll be on the lookout for ideas and feedback that will help you continue to uplevel your creative work.

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