Adobe Illustrator AI Tools and Features

Possibly out of all of the Creative Cloud apps Adobe Illustrator AI tools and features are some of the most exciting. Admittedly they are shared with CC apps. We love the Generative Recolour which powered by Firefly (AI Sensei) lets you recolour artwork with typed prompts.

The best one, in our opinion is the ‘mockup’ feature – we love this. Creating mockups with a few clicks – seriously what’s not to like.

Whatever your take on AI whether you use it to generate artwork from scratch or use it to edit or rework features there is little arguement that Illustrators AI tools do improve productivity and expand on new creative ideas.

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Adobe InDesign AI Tools and Features

Sometimes if feels as if InDesign has been a little left behind with AI features. Photoshop and Illustrator seem to have a plethora of updated generative tools almost on a weekly basis. Lets see if that really is the case and look at some of the Adobe InDesign AI Tools and Features.

Not too sure that weekly updates is totally accurate but it does feel like that sometimes.

Take a look at the recent Adobe Photoshop AI Tools and Features post to see what’s happening on the AI front in Photoshop.

However not with this feature which is extremely powerful and super easy to use.

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We generated the image on the left in a few seconds using a generative prompt with just a few words along the lines of Victorian cake, blue and birds and voila said descriptive image appeared.

Theres a massive amount of AI choices but we thought we’d mention some of our delegates favourites and the most useful ones in Photoshop.

Why not check out the Adobe InDesign AI Tools and Features post

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Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 New Features

Released 1st October 2024 Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 new features are quite impressive. Lots of useful practical new tools including the Remove Tool which to be fair has been available in Photoshop since 2023 but hey ho better late than never and to be fair it does work well.

Although to be fair 2025 is not such a massive leap from Photoshop Elements 2024 which on its release came with a much more visually accessible and user friendly interface and included a number of very clever updates including the Quick Actions Panel.

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Using Adaptive Presets
in Photoshop Camera Raw Filter

Adobe Photoshop is full of Adaptive Tools, one of which are Adaptive Presets. These are one of those hidden tools and in this instance are found in Photoshop’s Camera Raw Filter which is accessible from the Filter menu directly inside Photoshop.

What are Adaptive Presets?

Adaptive Presets are AI generated and work very similarly to any normal preset with the difference being that they concentrate on an area. This is a specific area such as the background, a person, the sky, they actually work on these specific attributes by automatically generating masks.

You can hover the cursor above the preset, apply it and even edit it inside the filter.

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Turn off SmartObject Layers in Photoshop

What are SmartObjects anyway?

SmartObject layers in Photoshop contain all the same information ans any normal raster (Photoshop) layer and are great if you just want limited editing resources.

They are great when you need to retain the integrity and original look of a vector image /graphic so are great if you want to rescale, skew, rotate with no loss of quality but are limited when the intention is to edit and manipulate pixels.

Basically this comes down to the way Photoshop works with what are known as destructive and non-destructive workflows.

Quite often though you’d prefer to open an image as a pixel based layer and not have to go through the rigmarole of rasterising it. (rasterisation converts the Smart Object back to a regular raster layer. Once rasterized, the content is flattened, and the special properties of the Smart Object (like scalability, linked updates, and editable filters) are lost).

So if you rarely use SmartObjects it makes sense to turn them off by default.

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Adobe Photoshop Transform Tools

Pressing Control /Command T brings up the transform tool which is used to resize and edit existing shapes on the canvas. But there is so much more to transform; you just need to check out it’s additional features.

Try going to the Edit Menu and scrolling down to Transform to reveal its sub menu of different options which is where the fun begins.

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Why Choose Camtasia?

So why choose Camtasia? Well to be fair the first go to for virtually any video project is usually Premiere Pro or After Effects which is fair enough. But like most things it really does boil down to what you actually need from software and for many people Camtasia fits their bill. We thought it might be useful to write a quick piece about why Camtasia is very popular with many people.

Camtasia is described as eLearning software and does contain quizzes and reports to LMS (Learning Management Systems) it is finding its niche as top quality screen recording software.

The simple answer to is Camtasia is quick to use and easy to learn, screen video recording, audio, voice overs and PIP (picture in picture recording with webcam) are easy to do with little fuss. Quite simply Camtasia does exactly what it says on the can but without the faff.

And as always budgets are always involved and Camtasia is kind on those and at time of writing Camtasia is still a one off purchase.

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Affinity Photo Lighting Filter

On a recent training course the question popped up about filters in Affinity Photo and which one was the best which forced a bit of a frown and a long conversations about filters and filters in general. In the end it was the Affinity Photo Lighting Filter that won the day.

We did actually cover a number of filters in the software and as usual some weird and wonderful effects were created, smiled about and then discarded or used.

We’re good with that although Greta’s still pondering on her favourite filter because she’s not so sure but she did say “it’s like everything with graphics, personal choice”.

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What is Adobe Premiere Pro?

So, what is Adobe Premiere Pro?

The short answer is, it’s video editing software and a member of Adobe Creative Cloud. 

It’s a straightforward process to edit a solo video clip but the game changes considerably when you need to work with multiple video and audio clips which need to be strung together to make a complete movie. This is when you move into the realm of video editing and probably using Premiere Pro.

There are other software alternatives but Premiere Pro really is King of video editing and used both professionally and personally and of course integrates seamlessly with the rest of Creative Cloud.

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