Adobe has announced a new feature called Elements that tackles one of the most persistent frustrations of AI image generation: the inability to keep a character visually consistent across different prompts. The announcement came during a press briefing this week where the company also unveiled a public beta of AI assistants across several Creative Cloud applications, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator.
For any creative professional trying to use generative AI for storyboards, mockups, or campaigns, the character drift problem has made the tools nearly unusable for sequential work. You spend time refining a character's look, finally get the result you want, and then ask for a different pose - only to receive someone who looks like a distant relative.
Elements brings character consistency
Elements lets you define characters, locations, and objects and reference them across image and video generations. In a demo, Paul Trani, Adobe's senior creative cloud evangelist, showed a character called Carla, a 3D-animated girl with brown hair and a pink dress, created in Firefly using a single text prompt. With Elements, Carla was saved as a reusable reference and called up in a later generation - a bedroom scene with a "fun, cute little alien cat" - using barely more than her name and a brief description. "I'm doing this for my girlfriend's niece," Trani said.
Alongside Elements, Adobe is introducing Projects, a way to keep all your generations, assets, and creative context in one place. Both are currently in private beta. Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe's vice president of product marketing for creative professionals, described the pair as foundational. "This is how you get consistency in your generations, whether you're generating images, videos, or both," she said.
AI assistants roll out across Creative Cloud apps
Adobe's AI Assistant is now in public beta for Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, with After Effects following in private beta. Each integration is designed for the specific tasks people do in that application, not as a generic chatbot bolted on.
Trani demonstrated the Premiere integration by asking the assistant to organize a project that was in chaos. The assistant analysed the clips, renamed files descriptively, and sorted everything into folders, including syncing multi-camera shots into a single composition. In Photoshop, the assistant fact-checked a design file and caught a date error, flagging that June 17th was a Wednesday, not a Thursday. In Illustrator, it duplicated a circle 100 times with randomised positions, varied colours, and size changes based on stacking order. "Could you imagine doing that yourself?" Trani asked. The Illustrator integration can also generate 50 versioned files from a spreadsheet and run pre-flight checks to catch colour mode errors or missing fonts before anything goes to print.
Deepa Subramaniam outlined the philosophy behind these tools in a blog post: "Creatives remain in control, choosing what to hand off, what to refine and how to apply your taste, expertise and judgment to shape every editable outcome. These tools are built for how you've told us you actually work." According to Adobe's own Creators' Toolkit Report, which surveyed more than 16,000 creators globally, 75% describe AI as integrated or essential to how they work, but 85% also say the final creative decision should always remain theirs.
Agentic skills for small businesses and social creators
Adobe also added new agentic skills to the Firefly AI Assistant, aimed at social creators and smaller businesses. These include brand kit creation, short product video reels, Quick Cut for assembling footage automatically, and Storyboards for sequencing ideas before generating video.
During a brand kit demo, Trani prompted the assistant to build a brand for a jewellery business called Ola Jewelry. It walked through questions about aesthetic direction and audience, then generated logo concepts, colour palettes, and typography - all editable and exportable as vector files. "Where's your vector of the logo?" he joked, a nod to every small business owner who has only ever had a JPEG.
Finally, Adobe confirmed its creative agent is now available inside ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Slack, with Gemini support coming soon. The aim is to bring Adobe's tools to wherever creatives already work, rather than requiring them to leave their current environment.
Why this matters for creatives
For anyone working in visual disciplines that require continuity - from storyboarding and campaign mockups to animation and comics - Elements removes the biggest practical barrier that has kept generative AI out of serious workflows. The character consistency problem is now a solved one inside Adobe's ecosystem. Meanwhile, the app-specific assistants are built to handle the real grunt work that happens inside each tool: file organisation in Premiere, error checking in Photoshop, and batch generation in Illustrator. You keep the final say, but the repetitive, time-consuming tasks get handed off to a system that understands the context of the tool you are actually using.
Your membership also unlocks:
