Adobe: New Firefly Graph can turn creative workflows into reusable assets

Adobe’s Firefly Graph is now available to Creative Cloud customers, offering a node-based workflow tool designed to help business create content at scale with generative AI (genAI). 

With Firefly Graph, users can connect multiple tools in visual workflow, with each “node” performing a specific task before passing its output to the next node. This gives creative professionals more control over generated outputs, according to Adobe, and makes it easier to try out ideas by swapping, adjusting or adding components.

For example, a user could start with a text prompt box that connects to a node that generates an image using an AI model from Adobe or third-parties such as Google and OpenAI. Further along the chain, the user could add nodes to remove a background or upscale an image, for instance, before producing an image, video or other asset ready for use.

Changing one aspect, such as adding a reference image or adapting the text prompt, would change the final output.

It’s an approach similar to node-based workflow tools such as ComfyUI — a startup valued at $500 million which claims more than 4 million users. Others include Weavy, acquired by Figma last year for a reported $200 million. 

With so many AI tools available to creative professionals, workflows can get complex and hard to replicate, said Elliot Sedegah, senior product marketing manager at Adobe. Firefly Graph provides access to more than 300 different node types, including images, video editing and AI generation tools across Adobe’s portfolio and third-party tools. 

“Whether you’re working at a mom-and-pop shop or a larger enterprise, you’re looking for consistency and then bringing that into a workflow so that you’re not hopping in and out of different tools,” he said. “Putting all that together takes massive amount of time, and sometimes it’s very difficult to even know what you did.”

Once created, workflows can be shared across an organization as repeatable processes for other individuals or teams to use. “Think of that rock star creative that you have and the recipes they create: those are now canonized as workflows, as assets, that the rest of the organization can take and reuse over and over again,” said Sedegah.

In addition, while creative professionals are needed to created high quality assets, reusable workflows can be put into the hands of broader teams to create content for large audiences, said Sedegah.

Firefly Graph addresses a challenge that most large creative organizations face, said Lisa Gately, principal analyst at Forrester — namely that their best creative workflows “live inside the heads of a few experts.

“Teams can generate images and video with AI, but reproducing the exact sequences of creative decisions, model selections, edits, and refinements that lead to a high-quality result is difficult and inconsistent. Firefly Graph turns those workflows into reusable assets,” she said.

While other node-based workflows aim to address similar problems, Adobe’s pitch is that Firefly Graph provides customers with the benefit of integration into its product suite. 

“Firefly is a full, broader AI creative studio, not just a node-based tool, so [Firefly Graph] is a part of a bigger picture,” said Sedegah. “The strength is having everything in one place with the tools that people know.” 

“Where Adobe differentiates is in enterprise integration,” said Gately, with Adobe connecting Firefly Graph to a range of other Adobe tools. Those include Creative Cloud applications; Firefly Boards for ideation; and Firefly Creative Production. 

“The workflow becomes part of a broader content supply chain instead of a standalone creation tool,” she said. ”Organizations committed to other tools are unlikely to migrate for a node-based canvas — making a change is about the broader content supply chain.”

Project Firefly is available now to Adobe Creative Cloud for Enterprise subscribers (pricing details were not immediately available), and in a public beta for individual users; the wait list sign up is available here.