At the Disney Imagineering booth at Adobe MAX in Miami Beach, I watched a sketch become a realistic scene. At the L'Oréal booth, creatives and marketing teams develop ads and test them against previous data.

Imagineering started from a sketch, and L'Oréal started from last cycle's results. Firefly Graph, now in beta, lets a creative build a workflow once and hand it to a marketing team that reuses it for the next campaign.

Disney Imagineering turns a sketch into a scene it can test

Disney can use that kind of scene to move projects along faster and test its ideas before anyone builds them.

The accuracy of the conversion from sketch to image impressed me most.

Adobe announced the Imagineering collaboration on June 16. It runs on Firefly Foundry, which builds custom models for a company from its own assets. According to Adobe's release, Imagineering's models are fine-tuned on its existing artwork and built on Adobe's commercially safe Firefly models. The planned steps turn rough hand-drawn sketches into rendered concept art, produce images that stay faithful to franchises such as Frozen and Moana, and convert 2D designs into 3D prototypes that designers use to plan construction and estimate materials.

In March, Adobe and NVIDIA announced a partnership to build the next Firefly models on NVIDIA computing. I wrote about it in that month and again in April, when the argument was that visuals built from exact inputs replace plausible guesses. At the Imagineering booth I saw that direction in action.

L'Oréal's teams test new ads against past results

In the L'Oréal Groupe demo, creatives and marketing teams develop ads in Adobe's customer experience agent, CX Enterprise Coworker, and test their ideas against previous data. The demo covered the Anthelios UV Sport campaign in four steps:

1. Coworker reviewed the last cycle's creative performance and compared the images side by side. Portraits with a natural face and a clear product story did best, and portraits with hidden eyes or an exaggerated expression did worst.
2. Coworker recommended the next hero portrait: a natural portrait with clear product placement and no distracting eyewear.
3. The brief set the guardrails in Firefly Graph. Keep the person's appearance unchanged, with no changes to hair, makeup, facial features or expression, and limit AI to lighting and assembly. Coworker pulled up the Graph the team used on an earlier campaign.
4. Coworker offered to scale out variations once the hero asset was done. The demo ended with a printed ad for L'Oréal Professionnel's Keratin Alpha Sleek line, credited to me and created with Adobe Firefly.

The first two steps involved no image generation. They used data from the last campaign to decide what to make, and the brief then limited AI to lighting and assembly.

Firefly Graph lets a creative build the workflow and hand it to marketing

Firefly Graph builds a workflow from connected steps called nodes, and an assistant helps write the parts a creative cannot code. In the keynote demo, a presenter used it to build a real-time lens flare shader, saved the workflow and shared it with a colleague, Wes Hopkins, as a reusable package Adobe calls a capsule. Adobe's release lists Graph as a beta.

What I saw at MAX is that people using these products can build brand assets in Firefly Graph, spend less time and iterate faster, without writing pages of prompts and guessing at the output.

In my view, Adobe's differentiation is fewer words and wider creation. At the event I heard the phrase "prompt and pray," which describes typing a long description and hoping the result fits. Adobe augments the prompt with what the tool already holds, such as saved brand preferences, a brief's guardrails and workflows from earlier campaigns, so you write less. The same approach reaches images, video, design and prototypes in Firefly.

The keynotes put working creatives on stage

Shantanu Narayen opened by saying Adobe has passed one billion monthly active users, then said goodbye after 29 years at the company. Anil Chakravarthy, who becomes president and CEO on December 1, spent much of his time on choice. He said some creatives want nothing to do with artificial intelligence (AI), and Adobe will keep improving the tools for them.

• Deepa Subramaniam framed Creative Cloud around three themes: precision and control, quality and performance, and being built for the future.
• Dacia Saenz removed a crew member from a surfer shot with Generative Remove, used the new AI assistant to mark every question in an interview, and graded footage in the new Color Mode.
• Anna McNaught built a great blue heron and full moon scene in Photoshop with generative restyle, which puts a slider on a generation, plus rotate object and the new relight layer.
• Michael Fugoso asked the Illustrator assistant to put a gradient on about 50 strokes while he kept working, then showed the new blend tool, dynamic text and concept-to-vector.
• Forrest Key introduced Firefly. Creator Lucy Street edited a travel video in Firefly with generated effects, transitions and captions. Creator Elise Swopes took a fragrance brand pitch into the Firefly agent and watched it build characters, plan scenes and generate shots. Paul Trani showed Firefly Design, Veronica Peitong Chen turned designs into app code with Firefly Builder, and another presenter built a workflow in Firefly Graph.

Chakravarthy said Topaz Labs has joined Adobe, and the keynote showed its Wonder model for image upscaling. He announced native Model Context Protocol support, an open standard that lets an AI assistant connect to other software, and said Adobe's tools already run inside assistants from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. On stage, outside agents operated Photoshop and Illustrator, adapting a poster to several sizes and languages and preparing a design for screen printing. Adobe said that work is coming soon.

Why Creative Cloud is back on my list

Adobe shipped 77 Photoshop features across 32 releases this year, and nearly 70 percent of professional Photoshop users use its AI features on a regular basis (Adobe, 2026). Creatives can choose whether to use AI at all. Creatives choose whether to use AI at all, and the tools shown on stage make Creative Cloud a precision system for an individual creative and for a brand team.

In my opinion, Adobe is one of the best B2B creative companies, and the work I saw at the L'Oréal booth is work only Adobe can do. The demo combined brand rules, advertising data from past campaigns and a reusable workflow in one tool. Image generation is the smallest part of what Adobe does. Some people believe AI-assisted coding can rebuild a platform like this in a short time. After seeing these demos and the reaction in the room, I do not.

I predict that Adobe GenStudio and Firefly will be the marquee products. They give Adobe a way into the back office and engineering, everywhere ideas are born and need to be expressed.

I am not an artist, and I left Creative Cloud after I stopped teaching at Georgetown. I still use Adobe Firefly through Claude and directly, and sometimes Adobe Express. Even with my limited use, I do not need to give a lot of instructions, and Firefly seems very intelligent as an image creation tool. This was my first Adobe MAX, and it gave me the push to try Creative Cloud again.