AI, New Tools, and Takeaways from Adobe MAX

Welcome to the CreativePro podcast. I’m David Blatner and I’m here along with my co-host Teresa Jackson, our program manager. Welcome, Teresa.

It’s great to be here, David. Thanks for doing this podcast with me.

We are going to have so much fun.

We went to Adobe Max a couple weeks ago and we wanted to share our experience there. It’s just some insights about what we learned. We want to talk about who we ran into and some of the cool recommendations that they had that they wanted to share with the CreativePro audience.

We just want to talk about that. We also, at the end, have a little bit of news, super important news, that is going to be good for you to learn about. That’ll be great.

Yeah, that’s a good teaser to keep people sticking around, right?

Exactly.

I see what you did there.

Exactly. And I need to say this episode is sponsored by PageProof, which is really an amazing online proofing and approval and review system that you just kind of know about. If you work as a team, if you’re on a team of people and you need to make sure that your designs are shared around and you need to get approval, you have to check out PageProof.

They’ve really nailed what I think is the best proofing and approval system in the world. It’s better than anything Adobe has done, better than anything else I’ve seen. It’s very cool.

Check that out at PageProof.com. Yeah, that’s good stuff.

A question, David, you’re using it.

CreativePro Team’s using it, right? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. We used it extensively for our website redesign because the thing about PageProof is it’s not just about InDesign or Photoshop Illustrator or any of the Adobe apps. It’s about everything.

Anything you need to get approvals on or get comments on. You could use Excel documents. It’s totally open.

And it’s all online. So anybody, like the freelancers we worked with, anybody, not just on the team, but outside the team, anyone you invite can give you feedback and make new comments and stuff. It’s great.

Any kind of document. That sounds like it would make working in Excel kind of cool.

It could. PowerPoint, video, email blasts, like I said, the web stuff.

It’s really pretty impressive. They’ve got a really nice system.

Awesome.

Yeah. You should definitely check that out. But that’s not the main thing we’re talking about.

The main thing we’re talking about is our trip to Adobe Max. So you’ve been going to Max for a number of years, haven’t you?

You know what I did?

I pulled up my Lightroom classic catalog and I did a search for Max images because I lost track. My first Max was 2013. And I’ve been every year since then, except I didn’t go to Miami last year.

I wasn’t excited about going to Miami.

I really, I actually, I don’t know if I should say how much I hated going to Miami because I’m sure that we have watchers or listeners in Miami. I really did not enjoy the Miami Max.

I live in San Diego and LA is, it’s like the next town over. I mean, there’s a lot of traffic and it’s a couple hours to get there, but still, it feels like the next town over. You don’t have to go to the airport and get on a flight.

That’s a good point.

Right. So going to LA is just, it’s very easy and convenient.

LA, I went to school in LA. It feels like a second home. So yeah, I love visiting LA, but apparently we’re going back to Miami next year.

So we’ll have to talk about that.

I have heard about that. I think my first Max was 2011.

Actually, I went back and I pulled up, that’s funny. I don’t have a Lightroom.

You need one.

I should, exactly.

I’ve been trying to tell you.

You know what I did is I actually went back and looked at my handouts, all the old handouts that I created and I went, and when did I create this handout?

And I found these handouts for my session that I gave in 2011 as part of Russell Brown’s thing that he did, which was kind of fun. So yeah, that was kind of wild. And I’ve been most years, not every year, but most years since then.

So Max is fascinating. I got to say, wherever it is on the planet, once you’re inside Max, it’s fascinating. And one of the reasons it’s fascinating is that you’re just surrounded by all this cool stuff that Adobe is doing.

And that turns out to be an interesting double-edged sword. I just need to put this up right up front. It’s this kind of double-edged sword because you always have to remember that Max is a marketing event.

This is Adobe showing off their best side to users, to the press, to industry analysts. You know, they’re trying to make sure the whole world knows how cool Adobe is. And it works.

It really works. They do a great job. It’s very exciting.

Big animations, big keynotes, big stars. But it is a marketing event ultimately. So it’s kind of fun both ways.

The best part is being surrounded with all that creativity. And so many of our friends are there. That was a big part of it.

The biggest part of it for me is just connecting with people in real life. So many people that I talk to online and Max gives me that opportunity to actually be in the same room with somebody that I’ve known for years. But it can be overwhelming.

You know, there’s more than 10,000 people there. There were people that I thought I would see and never cross paths.

I know, me too.

Yeah, it is overwhelming. Totally, totally. In all ways, including just visually in terms of stimulation.

It’s exhausting. But it’s fun. Because like you said, we see our friends.

It’s kind of like we have Creative Pro Week where we see our friends. And it’s a nice, it’s a, you know, a more intimate environment because we only have like 500 or 1,000 people. And then we see them at MAX and you may run into them or you may not.

And it’s great fun. The other thing, though, is it’s really fun seeing the cutting edge technology, what’s happening. I will tell you, my favorite thing about Max is Sneaks.

I love Sneaks. Now, Sneaks, you can also just watch it online because you don’t have to be there to do that. But Sneaks is really fun to see what’s coming, what’s probably coming.

Like I remember last year at Adobe Max standing in the audience and they had a big open area where you could kind of stand. It’s more of a party. And they showed, I remember seeing Project Turntable.

Yes.

And Project Turntable, that ability to in a vector, in Illustrator, a vector drawing program, the ability to move something in 3D. We all just lost our minds seeing that.

It’s like, you can’t do that. That’s, I’m sorry, you just can’t do that. And now a year later, it’s a feature in the program.

Yeah. Right? So you’re seeing that technology.

Now, not all of Sneaks turn into real features. Some of them are just technologies. They’re still, I remember seeing some technology, some Sneaks 10 years ago that I still, I keep asking, when am I going to see that?

Right. We had that conversation at Max. We were talking to product manager for 3D, Jeanette.

And we’re like, okay, fantastic fold. We’re still waiting.

Yeah.

Are we going to get it? Yeah. Fantastic fold.

Project Lincoln was one of my favorite of all time things. We can put links of these to the show notes. In the show notes, there’s probably video of them on YouTube or something.

But they’re great. Great technologies that have never really landed. But Turntable, that had to show up.

And that was just stunning. Did you see any of the Sneaks? What did you enjoy this year?

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I skipped Sneaks and went back to my room.

Oh my gosh. My favorite thing at Max and you skipped it.

Well, yeah, I needed a little break. I needed to change and get ready for Bash. And I’d just been so busy.

I’d been working the floor. I’d been working the booth, the Photoshop booth in the Creative Park.

That’s right.

And you were there as part of the Adobe Community Experts as well. And yeah, that was huge. That was really important.

I loved doing that because that really connected me with attendees. Attendees that are there to learn. They’re there to learn skills that they need to do their work better.

So anyway, I also know that Sneaks is online. It’s still online. You can go watch it.

It is. So I will watch it and get caught up. But this is also a real honest insight here.

And I’m curious if you have the same sense sometimes of overwhelm. It’s part of our job to stay in front of technology. Both of us.

It’s what we do. We watch a lot of videos. We read a lot of articles.

We talk to a lot of people. And it’s kind of a full-time job just knowing everything that’s happening, right? And that’s part of the reason why we go to MAX.

So that we know what’s happening. And the Sneaks feels sometimes like it’s just one too many. Like I’m having a hard time keeping up with everything that’s happening right now.

Oh yeah.

It’s growing so fast. And then to be thinking about what might or might not happen feels like, okay, maybe I’ll worry about that when it becomes reality.

Because there’s so much stuff that’s already happening currently that it’s hard to keep up with. Maybe it’s just me.

No, no, no.

That’s totally fair. I think the reason I like Sneaks is that it’s a magic show. It feels like going to a magic show where it’s just entertainment.

And I don’t have to worry about how did that work? It’s just like, how did that work? It’s just kind of shocking.

I think that’s what I like. So this year at Sneaks, I just got to throw out a couple of them in case people are curious and you want to go watch the videos later. Turnstile.

So they’ve now done, they took Turntable for vector and now they’ve added it for pixels as well. So in Photoshop, the ability to take a two-dimensional image in Photoshop and turn it in three dimensions. Wow.

That was crazy. Turnstile is what they’re calling that. And then there were several things that had to do with lighting, which I mean, you’re the photographer.

I mean, I can’t shoot my way out of a paper bag, but in some ways, maybe that’s why I was excited about it is I am really good at making crappy photos. And so these AI-based features that would allow me to make a crappy photo cool really kind of got me excited. Now, again, I don’t know if we’re going to see the technology.

I have seen that technology. And I think that has a lot of good use, a lot of potential really good use.

So I’m excited by that.

But I want to back up to something you said. You can’t take a good photo. I 100% disagree with that.

There is a good image, a good composition, a good story in just about every single image you take. It really comes down to learning how to edit it to pull that subject out or that story. So it’s there.

It’s there. You just need to learn to see it.

That’s awesome.

I can see a future session where I give you my photos and you make them look better. And everybody in the audience, we should do that at a conference because I think what’s going to happen is I’m going to give you a photo and you’ll be like, yeah, nevermind.

No, that won’t happen.

Unless it’s completely blurry. But then we make an abstract out of it. There’s always something you can do.

All right. That’s very optimistic. I love that.

I love that. I’ve got a great way of taking good photos. And that’s called handing the camera to my wife because she can do it.

Good to have a partner who can take a good photo.

Totally is. Okay.

So Sneaks, really interesting. Some fun, magical stuff. We may or may not see it.

But what did you see since you didn’t see Sneaks? What did you see at Max that kind of got you excited?

Yeah.

I want to talk about what is current. What is not just what might be, but what is. The most exciting feature for me, again, we’re going to Lightroom.

I try to bring Lightroom into every conversation. I can’t help it. Lightroom has added a new calling feature.

It’s still in what they’re calling pre-release or beta. It’s in the actual app, but it’s clearly still version one. And what it does is it will use AI to look at a set of images and suggest where the good ones are and reject.

And you have sliders to determine how picky you want it to be, right? It will reject photos for you automatically. If you have a portrait, a whole bunch of portraits that are very similar, it will look for the one with the eyes open.

You know, the one in the mode that has the best focus. So it’s using AI to discern what your best photos are. And every photographer knows that the fun part of photography is not sorting through your images one by one by one, trying to find the best image.

We want to get to actually editing that image. So this calling feature should really speed that up. And I’m really excited about it.

And again, it’s only in the beginning stages. It’s mostly for portraits right now, but I’m sure it’s just going to evolve from here. And even more exciting, it’s in Lightroom Classic.

It’s not just the Lightroom app, which I kind of thought they might do, but it works in Lightroom Classic too.

Cool. That definitely sounds cool.

I like that. What else? Was there any other highlights from the show?

A few other things. I’m really cautiously, curiously excited about Firefly Boards. I think that Firefly Boards has the potential to be a really creative space to ideate.

The few times I’ve played with it though, I’ve fallen into rabbit holes that I couldn’t get out of. So that’s my challenge with Firefly Boards, is there’s no end to the direction you can take and the ideation you can do. It’s fun.

You can take two images and say, okay, let’s mash these images up. And then Firefly will spit out a whole bunch of different ideas of how those two images could be mashed together, which can create some pretty cool concepts. So I’m cautiously excited about that.

I’m curiously excited about Projects. Have you seen that in your apps?

I have.

Yeah, Projects have started coming out and I tried it and I got myself in some trouble. And then I, yeah. So I feel like that’s another one of those 1.0 features in Creative Cloud that I’m waiting to settle down a little bit.

Well, what I understand about Projects is it’s an online shareable way to collect all your stuff, right? So it’s not just your libraries. It could be libraries and cloud docs, a whole bunch.

There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can put in there. And you only need one share. So everything you put in a project, if you want to share it to your team, one share with a project gives them access to everything inside of that project.

So that sounds very useful. But again, I haven’t quite figured out what I’ll use it for, but it seems to have some potential.

Well, this whole movement toward collaboration, whether you’re collaborating through Firefly Boards or Projects, it’s clear that Adobe has been inspired by what’s happened in the industry, like with Google Docs and so on.

This extreme collaboration environment where the goal is you’re working on a team and everybody has access to this stuff. There’s no doubt that Adobe is moving in that direction. And I think that’s really important because increasingly it is about teams working, teams of people working together, often in real time.

So I think we’re going to see much more of that. Certainly on InDesign, which is my happy place, InDesign is very slowly moving in that direction. They added the ability to get into projects.

That’s where I got myself into trouble. So it’s not quite there yet. But they’ve added projects.

They’ve added the ability to share cloud docs more smoothly. You can now add... We talked a little bit about this on the previous podcast that I did with Anne-Marie.

The ability to share documents for a temporary amount of time, which is kind of an interesting idea as well. Like, hey, I want you to have access to this document for the next hour or day or something.

Drop everything you’re doing.

So it’s interesting. They’re working on it. They’re moving in that direction.

And it’s kind of exciting.

Yeah, InDesign was the last of our creative apps to go to cloud docs. And I expected it to be challenging for the programmers because InDesign is like a hub where a bunch of other stuff gets put into it.

So then where does all the other stuff live? And I think that creates the challenge.

It really does.

And every year it’s getting better, but it’s still... I feel like we’re in the middle of a process. And it’s going to take another couple of years to really pull it together.

So InDesign barely showed up at max. It was one of the most frustrating things for me. It wasn’t mentioned in the keynote.

It showed up on a slide. InDesign was on a slide, but it was barely mentioned anywhere. And that’s an ongoing frustration I have with Adobe is they don’t seem to understand how important that is to people’s workflows, professional workflows.

Well, you said it was a marketing event. It’s a marketing. They’re marketing to the largest numbers of people.

InDesign is probably not the largest number of Adobe users. No. It’s a very core important group, but it’s not the largest group.

No, but it is. My understanding is that the majority of people who go to Max, very similar to the people who go to Creative Pro Week, is they use InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator. I mean, all three of those tools are core.

That’s the trifecta. Now you might spend more time in Photoshop or more time in Illustrator or more time in InDesign, but those are the core tools. And we’re seeing a lot in Illustrator and Photoshop.

And we’re just hearing very little about InDesign. And it makes me sad. I think they could be doing a lot more.

And there are some good features in InDesign. It’s moving forward.

You did a full day pre-con, and I had the privilege of TA-ing for that.

That was awesome. Because I got to attend and be helpful a little bit. I was a little bit helpful to a few of the attendees.

But yeah, they were there because they want to be really good at InDesign. And InDesign is a really, really deep program. And you’re not going to know all the things you need to know in a 45-minute session.

So they were there to spend a full day and be able to ask their questions of you. And it was really valuable for them. So Max is still supporting that type of content.

But in the big flashy keynotes, that’s more for the whole world than maybe the attendees sitting in the audience. It didn’t get much love. And that was sad.

Yeah. But that’s okay. Because that’s why there’s more than just MAX out there.

That’s why we have Creative Pro.

And we’ve got the InDesign conference. We’ve got Creative Pro Week.

We’re trying to create those environments so that people can really wallow, as I like to say, wallow in these apps and really get into it.

Exactly. That was something that I wanted to share too.

Because under the category of what got me excited, honestly, it was the best match for me. And it wasn’t because of the Adobe things. It was because of the people and all the Creative Pro conversations I had.

Wow. It really was about Creative Pro for me. I talked to a lot of speakers, speakers I hadn’t met before.

I talked to a lot of attendees. And so many of them were familiar with who we are and what we do and wanted to learn more. And I love that.

That made it really special.

That’s really cool. The one other surprise I had, and you were talking about this earlier, and I wanted to bring it up.

AI was everywhere at Max. I mean, the keynote was all about AI. Every major feature was about AI.

And there was a wide variety of features. Some AI things were like, okay, I’m not sure I need that. All the way to my favorite feature.

And the one that got the biggest applause in the keynote was AI to help you rename your layers in Photoshop for the web. I thought that was just so wonderful. It was great that that is what people wanted.

AI to help me rename my layers. Such a mundane task. And yet everybody knew they, yeah, I want that.

Give that to me right now. That AI assistant, that was part of what they call AI assistant. And that AI assistant is something I got really excited about because we’re seeing that show up in more Adobe apps.

I haven’t seen it. Didn’t see in the InDesign -- Is it in illustrator?

I think it might be showing up in illustrator. Anyway, this AI assistant that you basically can have a conversation with, almost like a chat, like you’d have on a website, one of these automated chats. Hey, can you do this for me?

And it just does it. That’s compelling to me because I don’t always need AI to take care of the image or harmonize or all those things. I often, but what I do need is for AI to know how to do something that I don’t know how to do or to help me do a really mundane task that I know is just, it’s going to take me five or 10 minutes and it’s just annoying and I just don’t want to do it.

For AI to take care of that with this AI assistant, that’s very interesting to me.

Yeah, that’s what we want. I did work the Lightroom booth one shift and Photoshop booth another shift and I talked to a lot of attendees.

Nobody asked me how to use a new AI feature. Nobody asked me, oh, how does the generative expand work? Can you show me that again?

Or how does harmonize work? I’m not saying they’re not interested because people definitely need those tools and they are, but they were coming to the booth asking for help. Like one gal came and said, I just came out of a session that was all about selections and masking and Photoshop and it was all kind of new to me and I understand it’s important but I still don’t understand why.

Can you really explain? And I got all excited. I’m like, yeah, this is the stuff I want to teach.

Great.

So yeah, there is still a need and a want to understand how the tools work, not just have an AI automatic fix on things.

Right, right.

The automatic fix is going to be neat for a lot of people but ultimately professional designers, the professional creatives really need to understand how to do it, how to get their hands in there.

Understand it first so you know what you’re asking AI to do for you.

That’s great.

The other thing, and we’ve mentioned this several times, this idea of connecting with our friends and we did connect with a number of friends and one of the things we did was ask them some questions. We asked them what they recommend or what they’ve seen that’s kind of interesting, what they would like to share with the Creative Pro audience. And that was one of my favorite things that we did at Max was just kind of ask some of our friends, what do you want to pass on?

And we recorded them. So we got some recordings of folks. Who do we have up?

Who do we want to share? Who do we want to share first?

I think we were going to take a look at Tony Harmer’s interview.

You were sitting, I think you were in a restaurant. Where did you do the interview? It wasn’t inside of Max.

It was not at Max. It was nearby in a restaurant. Now let’s jump in and see what Tony has to say.

My name is Tony Harmer. I am a British author, illustrator, artist, designer, all sorts of things. Funny guy.

So this is something by a company called Escape Motions who come from Slovakia. It’s a software called Rebel.

So that’s like rebel, but with an extra L-E on the end. I know Peter Plaskovic, the founder of it, who is an architect, but it’s a painting software.

It’s been around for about 10, 11 years now. Something like that.

Version 8 came out recently and it is the most amazing painting engine in the world. It is absolutely incredible.

Okay. This was really interesting to me, David. Yeah.

We’re at Adobe Max, right? Yeah. And Tony’s like a master and he’s an incredibly talented artist and trainer and he didn’t talk about an Adobe tool.

I know. It’s a little embarrassing actually, but I think it was great and I had never heard of this tool. Had you heard of that?

No, I got to check it out.

I’m so curious. I’m so curious and find out why he likes that more.

But that was great. That’s exactly the kind of thing that I like about coming to live events is you have these off conversations in this case, yes, at a restaurant and we’re chatting and I’m like, just tell me, what do you like? What are you into these days?

He talked about that. He also talked a great deal about pencils. We had a long conversation about pencils and his favorite pencil manufacturer.

So that’s the kind of thing you’d never get anywhere else. And that was really fun.

He wasn’t the only one that gave us an answer that was not Adobe.

That’s right. Let’s listen to what Sean has to say.

My name is Sean Duggan and I work on the Adobe Learn team and I am an instructor here at Adobe MAX.

The overall level of creativity at Max is always inspiring. But in our own session that we’re doing, we are using these super cool small lights made by the Harlow Lighting Company. And they have all these great accessories and they’re so easy to make creative lighting with these small lights.

So I’m really excited about using them and seeing our students use them.

That wasn’t exactly an Adobe tool, right?

No, no, again, again.

Yeah, it was something I was going to use for, they did some photo walks.

Yeah, there were several of those at Max. I got to do one. It was awesome.

But I checked those lights out after watching that interview with him and they’re really cool. Yeah, I definitely got to look into getting some of them. So we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

That was recorded in the line to get food, right? Once you could see people lined up and it’s a big warehouse room.

That was kind of funny.

All right, next up is Ben Wilmore. Ben Wilmore, who many of you know, he’s been teaching Photoshop for a bazillion years. And yeah, Ben also had a really interesting answer.

Before we jump into Ben, I just have to share this because it’s so important. It means so much to me. Ben really is what inspired me to go the path that I went to using Photoshop as an artist tool and then eventually into teaching and training others.

Yeah, goes way back. But I met Ben and it really changed my trajectory of where I went.

I love that.

Oh, he is great. Amazing photographer and amazing teacher.

Love that.

I’m Ben Wilmore and I teach Photoshop and photography and write books on those topics, that kind of stuff. Well, for me, I have found the newest generation of 3D printers to actually be interesting where I can either scan something with my phone, like just spin it in front of my phone and have it memorize its shape and then I can duplicate something or I can design things very easily.

Like if I have my X-Acto knife and my markers I need to store, I’ll design a container for them that’s custom for my desk or workstation. And I find that to be really interesting. Not what I expected.

Not what I expected at all.

That’s not about Photoshop.

But I love it. My takeaway from this, these conversations is our creativity just goes way beyond whatever tool it is we choose to use to express our creativity. And here we are at a Adobe Max event talking to our friends and they’re sharing what they’re excited about.

And it’s something beyond what we’re there for. And I, yeah, I love that.

Yeah, no, it’s really fascinating. And the idea that you’re, that we’re, for me, that the most interesting thing, I mean, I’ve seen a lot of 3D printers, but I’m really fascinated by this idea of, and we’ve seen this for the past couple of years, but the ability that you can use your phone to generate 3D objects. I believe that, and I’m going off of just what are you saying there, but I believe that we’re going to see increasing this sort of shift from everything’s about 2D to everything’s about 3D.

3D is clearly where we all need to be thinking. And it’s not necessarily, you don’t have to print it, just like you don’t have to print on a printer, but you do have to be thinking in 3D increasingly.

I just thought I had to share this. I know not everybody’s got video, but this is my pencil box. So Ben talked about making boxes for his pens and stuff.

My sister-in-law has a 3D printer and she made this for me. I gave her the dimensions. I said, I want a pencil box for my desk.

And she put the CMYK colors in here.

I love that. I love that. That ability to customize the experience.

I really believe we’re going to see this also increasingly, that the desire to personalize whatever it is around us. I mean, that’s so important. And it’s, especially when it comes to creating non-digital experiences, people are, we’re going to be hungry for these personalized non-digital experiences.

So that’s fascinating. So next up is Kara Plitschinich. Kara, who many of you know, does live streams for Creative Pro.

She’s been our host for a number of events. She’s awesome. And yeah, let’s listen to what Kara has to say.

My name is Kara Plitschinich and the people bring me to MAX. This place is so fun. I get to see so many friends and I just, yeah, I’m here for the people.

But I am also teaching a Photoshop lab. I’m pretty excited about that too. You know, I am really excited about the Harmonize feature that’s currently in Photoshop’s beta.

It’s going to be a game changer and it saves a ton of time. And I think for people who aren’t familiar with how to work with lighting and color and things when you’re compositing, I think it might help people learn because they’ll, you know, it’s all like AI driven. So you can run it and then you can see, oh, this is what I need to do to really make this work.

Hmm. That’s intriguing. Using technology to train our eye.

I thought that’s an interesting insight. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that.

Well, here’s our first Adobe thing in our interviews. Kara was sharing a new feature. I did that interview with Kara at the beginning of Max and it was still in beta at that point.

The newest full release of Photoshop includes Harmonize. So it’s out of beta. But what I loved is that she approached it as an instructor.

You know, she’s thinking about these tools in a way that they help people learn. And I love that.

I do love that. Now you said something interesting to me about Harmonize though, that it takes a lot of credits, AI credits, which I think is a whole new way that we’re not used to thinking about working with tools. It’s not just, can I learn the tool?

It’s also, can I afford the credits? This idea that we’re going to be tracking, oh, how many times have I been using the AI features? How many credits does this cost?

How much credit? That’s a really, that’s going to change a lot about how we’re using these and even determine whether we want to use some of these features.

It’s so true. Like I was describing the Firefly board, you can just go down these rabbit holes of like, oh, I wonder what this will do. And I wonder what this will do.

But it’s like spinning a roulette wheel, right? You don’t know what you’re going to get. And every time you pull that handle, it took another credit.

So think about that. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Well, it’s a business model, right? And that’s part of the business model of the future. We have moved from a certain kind of perpetual license into subscription models and subscription models have done extremely well for a lot of these companies, including Adobe.

And now this is a new phase of business model, which is you’re buying credits. And I think it’s, I’m not sure how I feel about it at all. I get why you have to do it.

AI, we all know AI is very expensive. Server time, AI server costs are very high. They need to recoup these costs somehow.

But we’re going to see. I’m challenged by this one.

It’s also really interesting and obvious why that when it’s in a beta release. So, you know, all users have access to a beta release of their apps now. Used to be that you had to be part of a pre-release program, but now they have pre-release, which is pre-beta.

And then we have public beta. And then we have the full release. Anything that’s in the public beta that’s AI is free.

You know, they’re getting you, you know, they’re hooking you. You can play with those tools. It doesn’t cost you anything, but as soon as it comes out in a full release and, you know, they’re learning from the data of all of the use in a beta.

So something to be thinking about if you’re using the beta app.

That is interesting. The other thing that was intriguing, like you said, this is a whole rabbit hole we could go down. But one of the big changes that’s happened is that Adobe have shifted their AI from everything’s about Firefly and the Firefly model, which remember, this was their big deal about it’s ethical, it’s legal.

You can trust it. Everything’s within Firefly. And this year they’ve started adding on all these new models.

So you’ve got the Nano Banana, you’ve got the Flux Context. You’ve got all these new models and those models are trained. We don’t know how those were trained.

Certainly. So I don’t know. I’m getting nervous about this as well.

I’m excited and people are very excited, but it does seem like for a lot of people, they’re like, yeah, we’ve just decided not to worry about is it legal? Is it ethical? Is it whatever?

Let’s just not worry about that.

We need to be worrying about it.

We need to think about it. And so I’m, I don’t know. I’m curious about Adobe’s decision to do this.

Mm-hmm.

So we ran into Adam Pratt and Adam Pratt used to be at Adobe, runs a different company now, he’ll tell you. And I am so curious because he talks about something that you just talked about, which was so interesting. Let’s jump in to listen to Adam.

Hey there, my name’s Adam Pratt and I’ve been coming to Macs for about 20 years. And the reason I come is three things. I love the inspiration.

I love the learning and I love the networking. So I’m the founder of Chaos to Memories. We’re a studio where we preserve and organize family photos and home movies.

And so I’m super excited about the automated curation in Lightroom. That’s going to help us a ton with big photo collections. There we go.

Curation.

Just what you’re talking about. It’s, he called it curation in the app. It’s called culling.

Oh, okay. Culling. C-U-L-L-I-N-G.

So if you’re looking for information on that new feature and search culling or look for that in your Lightroom apps.

Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, that’s very cool.

Okay. One last, one last person. This is a different one.

We had to end with this one because it was so out in left field, right? Right. So I grabbed Jason Hoppe and we’ve just grabbed, we’ve just gotten our little badges that say he, you know, he’s been using Adobe tools for 35 years.

And I grabbed mine. One that says I’ve been using for 40 years. And I’m like, Jason, Jason, come over to the, come over here.

And I move them over to a place where there’s not too many people. I’m like, tell me who are you? And what, what would you like to share with a creative pro audience?

What tips do you have? And here’s what he came up with.

I’m Jason Hoppe and I’m here at Adobe Max teaching Illustrator. And for my real life job, I teach graphic design at Seattle Central in Seattle, of course. Photoshop and design, Illustrator and Acrobat.

And I wrote a book on Acrobat through Rocky Nook. Just came out for its second publishing. And I don’t know if you know, but I carve a hundred pumpkins every year.

And so a couple of pumpkin carving tips, which by the way, I’ve actually made it onto YouTube is never carve the top of the pumpkin. Always carve the bottom of the pumpkin so you can sit it right over the lights. And the easiest thing to carve is with, is using a drywall saw.

It’s super easy to cut the pumpkin. It doesn’t bind up. And then use a really good ice cream scoop to go ahead and scoop out the inside.

It’s a great way to scrape it. And when you cut out the bottom, you can then go ahead and get it nice and flat, put it over the lights. And the lights I use are the ones that you buy for your patio that are on a string and they just kind of hang down.

I replace them with led bulbs and you can set them all out and put the pumpkins right on the led bulbs without carving the top. They don’t rot as fast. They give great light and it’s super easy to carve and clean out.

So that’s my creative tip.

That is a creative tip. That is great. I love that because I’m standing there, I’m holding the camera and I’m just laughing, like trying not to laugh out loud.

Like what? What? But it’s just what you said earlier, Teresa, that creative people are creative in all kinds of ways.

And it spills out everywhere. And his pumpkins, I’ve seen his pumpkins outside of his house. And it’s, they’re amazing.

A hundred pumpkins a year. And they’re all, and everyone is different. They’re, oh my gosh, they’re incredible.

Do we have video or photos that we can put in the show notes? Because I would really love to see what he’s created.

Yeah, we’ll definitely do that.

Yeah. And so we recorded this just before Halloween. So obviously it was on Jason’s mind, but maybe we need to revisit this clip next year, just before Halloween.

Maybe so.

It’ll be a perennial tip that we can get. And I love that. Always do the, cut out the bottom, not the top.

I’ve always cut off the top. Me too. Why?

Because our parents did and their parents did, right? That’s right. But now we have Jason to teach us.

So thank you, Jason, for that insight. That was terrific. All right.

Good stuff. Amazing. It was an amazing time.

I’m so glad I got to hang out there with you as well. That was really a fun event.

It was really special this year for me.

And well, it was, and it was also your first Max as a Creative Pro employee.

Right. And that made it, it really just made the whole dynamics different. And I was thinking about how all the past Max’s that I’ve attended have really been about me.

Like what am I? Well, you know, I’m there TAing and teaching, but I’m also there for myself to improve my own skills. But this year it really felt like it was about our community.

Like my being there, the focus of my being there was about the Creative Pro community. And I loved that. It just was way more special.

That’s really cool. I totally love that. But, but wait, that’s not all because there is the Creative Pro community continues onward and upward.

And we have a bunch of other stuff coming up, but we wanted to make sure that everyone is aware of like the InDesign Conference.

InDesign Conference, we are starting to gather the assets or the sessions for that in, oh man, it’s going to be so good. We have just the best of the best presenting, including me. I don’t count myself in that category, but the bar was set very high.

It’s going to be really valuable. I mean, if you live in InDesign, if that’s your happy place, then it’s just kind of a no brainer. You need to be at the InDesign Conference.

It’s all online.

It’s all online. Right. And you get access to recordings for a year afterwards and you’ll want them because they’re just, there’s so much depth in it.

But I would say, you know, even if InDesign isn’t your happy place yet, you’re, you’re using it for your work. It’s an important tool in your work and you would like it to be your happy place, but maybe you, you know.

That’s good. Fair.

There’s things you don’t know that you need to know.

That’s fair.

This is the right conference for you.

Totally.

What else is coming? December 9th and 12th online. You can register now.

Get your spot. Hope to see you there. We’ll be there.

What else is coming up? Mike has his office hours in December on December 19th.

Good. Good.

So yeah, those are great. The office hours we had this week, one of our members came with a really odd challenge. Couldn’t figure it out in InDesign.

And then they used, you know, they all put their minds together, everybody that was there, and I’m pretty sure they helped her figure it out. So great. Great for that.

It really is about people. Creative Pro is always about people helping people. You know, we like to say together we thrive because no one person can know it all.

No one person can figure out some challenges. But when we all put our heads together, we can. And that is, that’s, I love that Mike is doing these office hours where we can work together to solve things or, and also just to support each other in what we need to, what we need, what we need to learn, what we need to, how to be more creative, what tools we need to be aware of and so on.

It’s a great opportunity for Creative Pro members. It’s great.

It is. It’s a great way to just hang out with people that you, that you’re similar to, that you like, that struggle with the same things, you know, just feel belonging. A lot of us work remotely now and we’re in our own little space and office hours is a way to just, you know, be at that water cooler talk in the, in the lunchroom if you don’t have access to that anymore.

So good. So good. In the spring, we’ve got the presentation design conference.

That’s going to be amazing.

We’ve added, we added a fourth day for that because there’s so much good content for presentation design. So if you do any type of presentation, whether you give presentations or you design the presentations, this is the conference that you want to go to. Again, it’s online and the recordings are available for a year.

We have an incredible lineup.

And I should mention that if you’re listening to this, members get a member discount to all these, which is awesome. If you’re not a member and you’re listening to this, you still get a hundred dollars off any of our events. If you have multi day passes, if you use the code podcast.

So just to keep that in mind, sign up, get involved with those online events. And of course the big event that we, everyone needs to be on everyone’s calendar, of course, is Creative Pro Week. So that’s coming up and you’ve been working on that as well.

Creative Pro Week is going to be in Nashville. I’m so excited. And I just have to say, if I could only go to one conference a year, I’d pick this one over Adobe Max without even a second thought.

It’s such a great community. It’s all of the speakers are there with all the attendees. There’s no hierarchy of, Oh, you have your own room because you’re a speaker and everybody else has to go over here.

We don’t, everybody’s just part of the same community and everybody’s there to learn from each other.

Exactly. Exactly. It’s so important, I think, to have everybody learning.

Every time we do one of these events, every speaker says to me, thank you for just making it available to everyone. Thank you for keeping it at that level where we’re all learning and we’re all connecting. And it’s a very special, it’s a special way to learn, I think.

It really is. And it’s in person. We also have, it’s hybrid, so you can attend Creative Pro Week online.

Of course, we’d really love to have you there in person, but if it’s not possible, you can still get access to the learning with an online ticket.

You can, although there are things that we do at the in-person event that we can’t do online. And so I just, look, being there in person is, that’s where the magic happens. I mean, yes, you can learn stuff through the videos and being there online.

And I want to encourage, if you can’t be there in person, absolutely, second choice is to see it online, of course, but there’s just stuff that we can do in person that there’s no way to do online. And so that’s just better.

This year, earlier this year for Creative Pro Week, which was in Phoenix, we did two early morning photo walks and they were pretty early in the morning. So I wasn’t sure how many people would get out of bed to like go on a photo walk in the desert, but they were packed. They were packed.

People loved it. And we also had the craft mornings and we had to bring in extra chairs and make room for more people because we really saw this people really wanted to get their hands involved in what they were creating. Again, it goes beyond the digital tools that we use.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s not the core learning that happens there, but it’s all the extra stuff that happens around the lunches, the breakfast and lunches that we serve people. You sit down at a table with other attendees or speakers or experts, and they’re just that kind of conversation.

You can’t get anywhere else.

You don’t get it at Max.

No, you don’t get that. Too many people. So funny.

Anyway, so we encourage people to check it out. You could go to creativepro.com slash events, learn about all of those, use the podcast discount code to get a hundred bucks off. It’s going to be a really fun that this coming year is going to be really fun.

Lots of good stuff in the store at all of those events. But Max is Max. And it was, like I said, it was fun to see, be there with you, fun to learn stuff, get inspired, learn some new stuff, and even stuff about Adobe, about not Adobe, about other things outside of Adobe.

Right. It’s great. Great.

Thank you, Teresa, so much for sharing these ideas and for sharing them with the program manager responsible for programming the podcast, which, you know, there’s a little, what am I going to do this month? And then you’re like, well, we’ll talk about Max. So I love it.

So thank you.

It’s exciting. It’s exciting to talk about this stuff and share it. All right.

Until next time, I guess. It’s been, this is the Creative Pro podcast. Take care.