Photoshop and Adobe Experience Manager: Accelerating creativity through APIs

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re integrating Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom’s world-class imaging technology natively into Adobe Experience Manager Assets.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we have created the most powerful connection yet between Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud by integrating Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom’s world-class imaging technology natively into Adobe Experience Manager Assets, a platform used by the world’s top brands to manage and store hundreds of millions of assets.

By bringing the power of Photoshop directly to where the assets live, creative and marketing teams can now automate image editing on a massive scale, applying complex operations such as background removal, smart object replacement and even scripting through Photoshop Actions to thousands of files with a single click. Imagine you’re an art director responsible for creating a myriad of product images for online and print catalogs. Instead of having to manage multiple workflows for different audiences and deliverables, you can now create all of the assets you need, in the required formats, resolutions and dimensions without ever having to leave Experience Manager Assets. No desktop software necessary. In fact, this integration enables new workflows that would have been impossible to achieve with traditional desktop software.

In this example, the marketing team at Coca-Cola can quickly create a new sustainability campaign by using the Smart Object Replace feature of the Photoshop API. First, individual brand assets, like the soda bottles, are selected and cut out from their backgrounds and then placed within a campaign template that is color coordinated with the brand-specific guidelines, all within seconds inside of the native AEM interface.

This new capability will be available for general release through Adobe Experience Manager Assets in May 2021. For more info, check out this post.

Photoshop APIs on web and mobile

This exciting integration is made possible by powerful Photoshop and Lightroom APIs that also drive features in other products you might have experienced. One great example is Adobe Spark’s Remove Background tool. It uses the same world-class Sensei AI technology as Select Subject in the latest release of Photoshop. The Photoshop API powers Spark’s image cutout workflow to produce the same amazing results you get in Photoshop, even on difficult subjects like hair or other fine details — all with a single click.

In addition to cutting-edge web experiences, the Photoshop APIs can also be found in mobile apps such as the Creative Cloud app where Photoshop magic is just a tap away via the Quick Actions menu.

Other companies are getting in on the API action too. One of our earliest adopters is an e-commerce company called Dreamship that needed the power of Photoshop to create virtual mock-ups for its rapidly growing e-commerce platform base. According to Eli McNutt, CTO of Dreamship: “We have a complex workflow that involves multiple layers and transforming images (like wrapping an image around a mug) and Adobe was the only brand we could trust with manipulating Photoshop format files, which are the source of truth for all our assets.” You can read more about Dreamship and how they grew their revenue 12X in the last year, partially thanks to the power of the Photoshop APIs.

Meeting creativity where it happens.

Creative professionals know that inspiration can strike anywhere. And our responsibility as an engineering and product team is to make sure that Photoshop is right there with you. So, imagine a future where Photoshop is everywhere you need it to be, and a click away on your favorite mobile app or processing thousands of files on a server running in the background. Or forget the future — if the last year of remote work (and remote creativity) has taught us anything, it’s that our customers need to be able to access the tools they depend on in a reliable, high-fidelity way no matter where they are.

So that’s our challenge and that’s the future we hope to build. But we can’t do it alone. We hope you’ll join us by signing up for access to our Photoshop developer program on Adobe.IO, where we always feature the latest demos, links to documentation and other great resources. We thrive off your feedback and can’t wait to see what you create. As our own developers and engineers are fond of saying, “Hello world!”