By collaborating with the best creatives, Adobe Stock has produced some truly world-class imagery.
When you’re looking for high quality stock imagery at affordable prices, Adobe Stock is the obviously go-to for pro designers. Fully integrated into the Creative Cloud, and packed full of world-class photography, illustrations, graphics and video footage, Adobe Stock makes it easy to find the assets you need to make your design sing. But that doesn’t mean it's resting on its laurels.
The creative world moves quickly and the kind of imagery that designers need to stay on-trend is ever-changing. So Adobe Stock is working hard to make sure that its libraries are continuously updated to meet new demand.
As part of that effort, the platform often partners with other leading creative companies and professionals. In this article, we highlight five of the biggest recent collaborations, and how you can licence the resulting assets.
Meanwhile, if you’re new to Adobe Stock, then here's a great offer. Try Adobe Stock free for a month and get 10 standard assets with your free 30-day trial!
01. Bex Day: International Trans Day of Visibility
We hear a lot about diversity in stock imagery these days, but better representation isn’t just about race and gender. Adobe is committed to bringing greater diversity to its library in all areas, from age to disability. And a recent example can be seen in its partnership with photographer Bex Day.
To mark International Trans Day of Visibility (31 March), Adobe Stock worked with Bex to capture a collection of images that celebrate the UK’s transgender community. Shunning outdated stereotypes, the Berlin-based photographer cast trans models from Shropshire to Essex to showcase the diversity of the community in the UK across different ages, nationalities and fashion styles. To license the imagery, check out Bex Day’s Adobe Stock Contributor profile.
02. Andy Smith: Portraits of London
In an increasingly globalised society, our major cities are becoming multiethnic and multicultural patchworks of diverse relationships. So today's designers need to find images that will represent this new reality, in an authentic, cliche-free way that reflects life as it’s really lived.
To help promote this idea, Adobe Stock teamed up with photographer Andy Smith to produce a series called ‘Portraits of London’, which features real people, rather than models. Through this special photoshoot, Andy set out to capture people in their natural element and document what they do on a daily basis, whether they’re a cab driver, barber, butcher, or a lollipop lady. To licence the imagery, check out the Portraits of London collection.
03. Pantone Color Institute & The Ocean Agency: Glowing Glowing Gone
One of the few issues that’s bigger than diversity right now is climate change. When it comes to raising awareness, a picture can be worth a thousand words, and so demand for beautiful and engaging imagery on this subject has never been greater.
Adobe Stock has been playing a keen role in this area, and a prime example from 2019 has been its partnership with the Pantone Color Institute and nonprofit organisation The Ocean Agency, on a campaign to raise the awareness and support necessary to save coral reefs.
Glowing Glowing Gone centres around a series of images, captured by The Ocean Agency, of a coral reef in New Caledonia “glowing” in vivid colours. This is an especially bitter-sweet phenomenon, as corals produce these brightly coloured chemicals in reaction to fatally high water temperatures and sun exposure. It’s essentially a final line of defence before the coral dies and bleaches to white.
Using Adobe Color’s powerful colour engine, Adobe Stock extracted the specific fluorescing LAB values from The Ocean Agency’s images and converted them to RGB. In collaboration with Pantone, they then turned these digital values into Pantone Color Standards, and selected the custom palette that would become the signature colours for climate change protest: Living Coral, Glowing Yellow, Glowing Blue, and Glowing Purple.
Adobe Stock doesn't just offer stock photography, but also provides other vital design resources, such as illustrations, graphics, templates and video. One of its most sought-after offerings is icons, and the platform recently partnered with Design Crowd to host an icon design contest, inspired by the diversity of cultures and customs around the world. The winning design focused on Scottish culture and traditions, and you can see all the winners here.
One of the world’s most famous art galleries, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam put over 125,000 high-resolution images from its collection available online in 2013, available to download for free and use under a Creative Commons licence. It was a bold move: but that was just for starters. Five years later, the museum partnered with Adobe Stock to transform some of its most prized physical objects into 3D models.
A carefully curated selection of 28 models is available for free in this Adobe Stock gallery. Adobe Stock also have also worked with three talented artists to create breathtaking renders using these assets in Dimension CC. You can find links to these, and explanations of how they were made, in this blog post.
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In 2019, creatives at every level of the profession are harnessing the power of Adobe Stock to make imaginative and eye-catching designs. If you haven't started using Adobe Stock, then it's high time you got on board, and here's a great offer to help persuade you.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and author specialising in design, photography and technology. His latest book, The 50th Greatest Designers, was released in June 2025. He's also author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.
