frankie’s highlights of Adobe MAX

I’ve recently returned from Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, where the energy was sky-high and Downtown LA’s massive Convention Center was buzzing with creative chaos. Imagine thousands of designers, illustrators and filmmakers collectively cheering for new Adobe features like automatic layer-naming (yes, that one brought the house down). Between sessions, the vibe was so fun and friendly, with the Adobe teams being endlessly kind and the LA heatwave sitting firmly in the mid-30s. I ate my way through incredible veggie dishes — charred okra! Mystery mushrooms! Pumpkin spiced ice-cream! — and soaked up all the inspiration from creatives working in completely different ways. Here are a few of my highlights of the conference.

FIREFLY UPGRADES Adobe Firefly delivered some seriously fun upgrades this year. ‘Generate soundtrack’ creates fully licensed, copyright-safe music to match the vibe of your video – whether you’re cutting a dreamy classical moment or a high-energy skate clip. Premiere Pro also introduced smarter AI tools that can instantly identify and isolate people or objects, making the process of adding in special effects way less fiddly. Photographers scored big too: Lightroom’s ‘assisted culling’ helps sort huge batches of images in seconds, while Photoshop’s generative upscale magically transforms low-res photos into crisp 4K versions. And for illustrators, new vector tools even let you rotate flat artwork as if it’s 3D.
CREATIVE TALKS Day two of the Adobe MAX keynotes is all about hearing from the creatives themselves – a nice contrast to day one’s big product reveals. This year’s standout was a chilled interview between Superman director James Gunn and Adobe’s Jason Levine. James’s advice hit especially hard: don’t be afraid of making mistakes and making “bad” work (it’s literally how you get better). “​​Go through the phase of allowing yourself to turn off your self-judgment, because that’s where I think true creativity lies. Then you're free,” he says. Before filmmaking, James was a muso. He admitted he wasn’t the best musician, but filmmaking clicked, so he chased the thing he loved (and was good at). Hearing that kind of honesty felt oddly freeing, like permission to just… try stuff.

EXPRESS MAGIC Adobe Express has had a bit of a glow-up lately. You can now whip up your assets and schedule them to socials from the same spot, which feels a bit like cheating (in a good way). The AI assistant is also way better at understanding plain old human language – no robot-speak required. You can literally say, “Hey, can you resize this for Instagram?” or “Please change the date and location on my event flyer,” and it just… does it?! It’ll even restyle your design with a cowgirl vibe, or give it a Halloween makeover, without you poking around a million menus. 

CREATIVE PARK One of my absolute favourite bits of Adobe MAX every year is the Creative Park – it’s basically a giant playground for grown-up art nerds. There are big, splashy activations (like an escape-room-ish thing you wander into), but the real gem is the market. Dozens of artists and makers from all over the US set up their own little stalls, selling everything from posters and tees to enamel pins, ceramics and delightfully random 3D objects. I walked out with a pair of excellent earrings from a maker called Lassoed Moon, plus a t-shirt from a stall I loved so much last year, Hellcats USA, that I went back for seconds — all old-school tattoo vibes and very up my alley. The best part? Getting to chat to the makers themselves and discover creators we’d never usually stumble across in our frankie-shaped corner of the world. It felt like a tiny universe of cool people doing cool things, all in one room.

SNEAK PEEKS The last night of Adobe MAX always ends with ‘Sneaks’, which is basically show-and-tell for the engineers — except the room is huge, there’s a celebrity host, and everyone is vibrating with excitement. This year it was led by Jessica Williams (actor, comedian, general delight), alongside an Adobe rep, and they spent the night introducing a parade of quietly brilliant engineers who usually hide behind their screens but suddenly find themselves onstage showing off the wild things they’ve been building. Sneaks is where you get a peek at the future — experimental tools, clever AI tricks, new ways of working with video, vectors or Adobe Express. The fun part is the audience reaction actually helps decide which ideas go into development. If something gets a huge cheer, that’s the one Adobe takes as a sign: OK, people want this, let’s make it real!

This useful roundup was brought to you in partnership with our pals from Adobe MAX 2025. Catch the highlights and explore talks from ​​150+ sessions from leading creatives on the Adobe MAX website.