Adobe Illustrator gets fun new AI colour feature

Adobe is going big on AI, and its AI generator, Firefly, has already been announced for Photoshop as well as Adobe Express. And rather than introducing AI capabilities for the whole suite of apps at once, Adobe seems determined to release them one by one, with Illustrator the latest in line for an AI makeover.

The additions to Illustrator do actually sound like they're worth paying attention to, though. The headline feature is Generative Recolor, "which magically accelerates colour variation development in graphics for ads, online content, packaging and more". 

What does that mean in real terms? Well you'll be able to input a text prompt and you'll instantly get colour variations that are ready to use in your designs, saving you the time of creating your own palettes manually. For example, if you input "neon jungle" or "moody bedroom", you'll get custom themes that can help you get started with your project. This is a standout feature among the best vector editors and should allow creators to easily test out various colour palettes much faster than before.

Businesses that already have branding that they want to use to create more assets, can also train Firefly with these assets so it will generate more that fit in with their brand language.

What makes Firefly stand out amongst other AI art generators is that its images are all safe to use commercially from a copyright perspective. In fact, it's so convinced of this that it says it'll cover any legal costs that business customers face as a result of using Adobe Firefly.

Other new Illustrator features announced today include Retype (in beta), new Layers functionalities and improvements to Image Trace. Read more about these features here. 

"Our new feature in beta, Generative Recolor, will allow designers to reflect their voice and vision in vectors," Rufus Deuchler, director of worldwide Creative Cloud Evangelism at Adobe, told Creative Bloq. 

"This will include faster colour capture where users can save time by quickly recolouring graphics using simple text prompts, colour discovery and transformation to product to deliver the right feel for users' artwork and multiple colourway variations to generate a plethora of colour variations from a single artwork file. These exciting enhancements will streamline the creative process for designers and free their time for the creative tasks that matter to them."

Generative Recolor and Retype are available as beta features in Illustrator from today.