Adobe is delighted to announce that generative AI has landed in Adobe Illustrator. As of today, you’re able to use Generative Recolour (beta), powered by Adobe Firefly, their family of creative generative AI models. This brand-new feature transforms colours in a magical way from a simple text prompt, sparking your imagination and pushing your creative boundaries.
Generative Recolour (beta) will be truly game-changing for the design of brand identity graphics, digital drawings and illustrations, and marketing and advertising assets. And this is just the first step: They’re planning many more generative AI features for Illustrator that will accelerate the realisation of your creative vision.
At the same time, Adobe is also shipping a series of new and updated features to help you significantly speed up the most common workflows in Illustrator. Let’s look at what’s new.
Introducing Generative Recolour (beta)
Adobe’s powerful generative AI technology is now in Illustrator with Generative Recolour (beta), which will transform your vector artwork colours into various energising palettes and themes using everyday language.
Starting with an existing artwork, just type in a prompt such as “Neon lights” or “Salmon sushi”, and your entire graphic will be instantly recoloured. Then adjust as you see fit to get a unique look — a great way to quickly experiment with different colours for your design.
Generative Recolour (beta) helps you capture colours faster, as it enables you to quickly try out an infinite array of colours, explore colour palettes, and create multiple colour combinations to match the vision you want your artwork to express. Colour can be continuously changed, so you can keep editing your graphics at any time to take them further until you get just the right look and feel.
The automatically generated colour variations can be used to create multiple colour combinations from a single artwork file that you can apply anywhere whether it’s for social media, print, or the web. You can also adjust your existing work for different styles or seasonal changes. Or show a wide variety of colour options to a stakeholder or client.
Generative AI features like Generative Recolour (beta) function as your trusted creative co-pilot that helps you explore your ideas faster and more efficiently. While it’s not for commercial use in the beta, you can still create confidently. Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock’s hundreds of millions of professional-grade licensed, high-resolution images, which helps ensure Firefly won’t generate content based on other people’s work, brands, or intellectual property.
Here are some examples of how Generative Recolour (beta) can help you in your day-to-day work:
Brand identity graphics
Using Generative recolour (beta) speeds up the workflow as you no longer need to manually adjust each colour and research colour themes. You can also use it to spark inspiration and mood boarding and share options with stakeholders or clients. This is a great way to come up with colour recommendations based on a simple text prompt to arrive a multiple brand identity graphics for product packaging:
Digital drawing and illustration
With Generative recolour (beta) you can personalise a theme and get to the right look and feel faster. For example, you can take a vector art illustration, and further refine its colours based on the style or vision you want to express.
Marketing and advertising graphics
Generative recolour (beta) enables you to quickly create variations of an existing ad or poster for seasonal or holiday changes. For more on Generative recolour (beta), update Illustrator to try it out yourself or experiment with it, and all of Firefly’s capabilities, on firefly.adobe.com.
What else is new in Illustrator
In addition to Generative recolour (beta), Adobe is also introducing new innovative and time-saving tools that will help you design with even more precision and efficiency.
1. Introducing Retype (beta)
The next time you’re inspired by a font you see in the wild, take a photo and bring it into Illustrator. Now you can detect a font from a static or non-editable text (either text from a raster image or outlined vector text). Retype identifies and pulls up the closest font matches from Adobe Fonts — no more sifting through thousands of fonts trying to find the one that matches your design!
2. Image trace improvements
Converting raster images to vector art is now even easier with new enhancements to Image Trace. Auto-detect or choose an Image Trace preset, select any single colour to ignore, and customise colour modes. Adobe has also given the panel a fresh look and feel and introduced auto-detection for the recommended preset based on the image.
3. Save time with Layers search & filter
Now you can search for and filter by names, text, shapes, and various object effects or properties to quickly find specific graphics and navigate through multiple layers. Open the Layers panel, and use the search function or select a filter.
4. PDF enhancements
This release also includes new functionality based on your requests. Check out PDF Preset Memory, for example — now when saving your PDFs, your latest presets will be remembered and become the new default. Also, new working hyperlinks can be added to text and images when saving PDFs.
5. Share for Review
Share updates with your team or clients using the same link to get feedback faster. Link recipients don’t need an Adobe account to open and review your document, and you can set a password for added security. All comments flow back into your file.
The future of Illustrator is here
Try all the new features, including Generative recolour (beta), and experiment with them in your workflow by updating Illustrator to the latest version today.
This is just the beginning of Illustrator’s generative AI journey. Over the next few months, Adobe is going to roll out many more Firefly-powered features that will help accelerate your workflows, spark your inspiration, and arrive at your creative vision faster.
Generative AI fast-forwards the creative process, and Adobe can’t wait to see what you will create! Contact Dax Data, local Adobe distributor, to find out more.
