Adobe MAX 2026 Keynote: Highlights for Photographers

Adobe’s annual MAX conference opened in Miami Beach this week, and artificial intelligence was once again at the centre of the opening presentation. This year the focus was less about generative AI and more about the way AI is set to change the way we use and interact with apps like Photoshop and Premiere.

Here's a look at the new AI features along with some new updates for Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere.

Your new AI assistant

Adobe's AI assistant, Creative Agent, debuted in Firefly earlier this year and is now in beta across most of the major Creative Cloud applications, including Photoshop, Premiere. You tell it what you want to achieve, and Creative Agent works out the steps required to do it. It can handle simple actions or complex, multi-step operations. You can also use it as a learning tool, asking for advice to perform different tasks

Plan Mode lets you see what the assistant intends to do so you can change or approve the plan. Or you can simply let it run. Personal style or taste preferences can also be saved so you don't have to repeat them.

Adobe says early testers have been using it for tasks such as batch retouching portraits and turning product shots into social media videos.

In Premiere, the assistant can now apply effects across every clip in a sequence, track a masked subject through a shot, and adjust colour and exposure across an entire sequence.

The AI assistant is now available as a beta in Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Frame.io. 

Adobe also announced upcoming integrations with popular AI chatbotssuch as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, CoPilot and more. In practice, it means you will be able to work directly in apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects from the command line of your preferred AI assistant.

Importantly, results will be fully editable; layers, sequences and compositions remain intact, so you can refine or undo any changes.

Embedded AI assistants should give creatives more choices in the way they work, cut down on time spent in front of the computer, create more user-friendly workspaces for beginners, and shorten the journey from idea to finished product.

Integrations with AI assistants are expected to be available in private beta from early 2027.

Photoshop and Lightroom

Photoshop gets some new features including Relight, which lets you position up to three 'light sources' around a subject to create new lighting effects. The Remove Tool has been upgraded and Adobe says it now produces faster, cleaner and more seamless results.

Generative Restyle is a new feature that turns AI prompt-based edits into an adjustable slider so you can dial effects up and down. One example we saw showed a daylight photo of a house that AI had reimagined as a night shot complete with lamps and warm indoor lighting. Moving the Generative Restyle control back and forth created a smooth transition between night and day.

There's also improved Select Subject, Color Adjustment updates and AI powered Layer Cleanup that automatically deletes empty layers and renames layers based on their content. A new preview slider splits the screen vertically so you can easily see before and after progress.  

In Lightroom, Glow adds a soft, cinematic lighting effect with five styles to choose from. Blemish Removal offers one-click retouching with controls to fine-tune the result. Open Eyes, now in beta, tackles the problem in group photography where someone blinks at the wrong moment. Give Lightroom another shot from the shoot as a reference and it will replace the closed eyes with open ones. 

Premiere

Video editors get one of the more significant updates in Color Mode, a new colour grading system that Adobe describes as a first of its kind. We'll need to see it in action, but it's clearly aimed at making colour work in Premiere more approachable and more controllable.

Audio gets plenty of attention too. Enhance Audio does a great job of cleaning up poor recordings while Separate Crosstalk can take an audio layer with multiple voices and separate them into individual audio layers. This is ideal for situations where two people talk over each other in an interview. Separate Sound Source isolates different sounds within a recording. A new Generative Media Tool can create video clips, sound effects, ambient soundscapes and music directly in the timeline, and Generative Remove (beta) selects and erases unwanted objects from the video and fills in the gaps.

Firefly grows up

Firefly, Adobe's generative AI platform, is being repositioned as an all-in-one "AI creative studio". It now brings together Adobe's own editing tools and a range of AI models, both Adobe's and those from other companies including Google, OpenAI, Runway, Kling and ByteDance, so you can try different AI models without juggling multiple apps and subscriptions.

There are also new precision editing tools that allow users to change one part of an image while leaving everything else untouched. There's also a gallery of ready-made Quick Actions, from one-click fixes such as Remove Object to guided projects like building a product ad.

Other additions include expanded video editing, a new all-in-one design workspace called Firefly Design (beta) that's included with Creative Cloud, and Firefly Graph (beta), a tool for building repeatable workflows. Adobe also previewed always-on agents that can quietly handle routine work in the background, such as organising incoming files.

Topaz Labs joins the family

Adobe's acquisition of Topaz Labs was finalised in September and Topaz has now announced two new image enhancement models. 

Wonder 4 is an impressive tool for upscaling, noise reduction, “deblurring” and sharpening in a single click. The software's AI model determines which areas of the image need to be de-noised, sharpened without the need to create local masks. Image HDR gives standard images the look of high dynamic range pictures, with brighter highlights and more detail. 

Also announced

Adobe and Microsoft are bringing optimised versions of Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects to Windows laptops running Arm-based processors, including the new Surface Laptop Ultra. Adobe also announced a multi-year partnership with Disney, and a range of AI tools for large marketing teams through its GenStudio platform.

What's available now?

Most of the new Creative Cloud features, including Relight and Generative Restyle in Photoshop, Glow and Blemish Removal in Lightroom, and Color Mode in Premiere, are available today. Open Eyes in Lightroom, Firefly Design and Firefly Graph are in beta, while the AI assistants are in beta too. The integrations with external AI assistants are due in early 2027 as a private beta.

Follow us on instagram for more updates from Adobe MAX 2026.

For those unable to make the trip to Florida, the good news is that the main events and many sessions will be streamed online for free. The event runs from 10-11 November.

James Ostinga attended Adobe Max in Miami as a guest of Adobe.