Adobe Creative Cloud has changed forever with world-first Luma AI Ray3 integration

For over a decade, Adobe Creative Cloud has been the industry-standard package for a lot of creative work, combining some of the best digital art software and video-editing software in an integrated ecosystem. Adobe's kept it that way with regular updates to its proprietary tools in apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.

Its initial integration of generative AI followed a similar approach, based around the creation of its own Adobe Firefly AI models, which were touted as being more ethical and commercially safe than those of rivals since they were trained only on licensed material.

But the creative software giant today sealed a recent change in strategy with a world-first integration of Luma AI's new AI video generation model Ray3. Does it turn out that commercially safe isn't commercially viable?

Adobe's change of strategy

Until this year a product announcement from Adobe almost always meant new proprietary features in its vast suite of creative software. Today's news that it's adding access Ray3 before any other platform other than Luma AI's own Dream Machine suggests it now sees the integration of third-party AI models as an equally big sell.

The change began earlier in the year. Last month, Firefly became one of the first platforms to add Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, aka Nano Banana, just days after media went wild proclaiming the new AI model to be 'the end of Photoshop', and just as those viral 3D figurines began taking over the internet.

Firefly now includes models from OpenAI, Ideogram, Pika, Black Forest Labs, Runway, with upcoming integrations planned with Moonvalley and Topaz Labs.

Creatives have always used multiple tools, but Adobe integrations tended to come in the form of plugins developed by third-parties rather than integrations promoted by Adobe itself. Adobe says the aim behind the change in approach is to make Firefly the creative AI ecosystem of the future – an all-in-one platform for creative AI so that users don't need to go elsewhere.

Where things get murky is what this means for the “commercially safe” pitch that Adobe originally made for Firefly. The company stresses that Content Credentials are added to all AI-generated assets to allow users to keep track of how they were generated, and it notes that creatives may want to use alternative AI models for ideation, not necessarily for generating finished assets for commercial use.

However, it will be users' responsibility to remain aware of how they generated each asset, whether it was with Adobe's own Firefly or AI models from ”trusted partners”.

"Our goal is clear: to make Firefly app the first place you turn to when new breakthrough creative AI models emerge," Adobe says. "Whether it’s a commercially safe Firefly model from Adobe or the latest model from our expanding partner ecosystem, we’re integrating the most in-demand AI models directly into the Firefly app – always with a focus on real creative workflows and the way you work today".

What is Luma AI Ray3?

Ray3 is the latest AI video model from Luma AI. It was built on a new multimodal reasoning system. The idea is that instead of responding randomly to prompts, it can "think through" what a user is asking, plan complex scenes, and judge whether its own output makes sense.

It does this by generating text and visual tokens, which Luma AI compares to a director sketching out a storyboard before filming. As a result, videos feel more coherent, with characters that look more consistent, scenes that unfold more naturally, and more natural movement and other physics, Luma says.

The company says Ray3 can generate cinematic, high-quality video footage of up to 10 seconds long. It’s the first video AI model to support native 10-, 12-, and 16-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) ACES2065-1 EXR format for deeper shadows and brighter highlights. Luma says the model can even be used to convert footage filmed in SDR into HDR.

Users can animate still images, while keyframes provide control over timing and scene changes, and Extend allows users to lengthen a shot. Early users say that compared to other AI video generators, Ray3 is less prone to hallucinations.

It also has features designed for creative use by including Draft Mode for faster iteration and native 1080p generation (the latter initially for select partners but rolling out generally). A neural upscaler can upscale output to 4K.

“Creative work is one of the most intellectually challenging things humans do, yet until now, many of the AI available to creatives has lagged far behind what’s possible in coding and analysis with language models,” Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma AI says in the release announcement. “Many generative models today have been more like slot machines - powerful but not intelligent.

“Ray3 changes that in a big way. Its groundbreaking reasoning system can understand intent, evaluate its own outputs, and refine results, significantly improving the accuracy and quality of generated video. More than twice the size of Ray2, Ray3 delivers new levels of fidelity, instruction following, and temporal coherence.”

How to use Luma Ray3 in Adobe Firefly

Ray3 is available as a model option in the Adobe Firefly app, making Adobe the first third-party partner to launch it outside of Luma AI’s Dream Machine platform.

Adobe suggests that creatives use it via Firefly’s Text to Video to quickly generate b-roll or background footage to fill gaps in videos or build dynamic transitions for social media posts.

Ray3 also appears as a video generation option in the new Firefly Boards app, where Adobe suggests creatives can use it to explore visual directions for environments, shot compositions and camera perspectives before moving forward with a shoot.

Everything generated with Ray3 in Firefly can be synced to your Creative Cloud account, so you can bring it into apps like Premiere Pro for more editing and refinement.

For two weeks, Ray3 will be available only in Adobe Firefly and on Luma AI’s Dream Machine platform. Adobe is allowing unlimited free Ray3 generations for all customers on a paid Firefly plan or Creative Cloud Pro plan until 1 October.