The future of Illustrator is here: Hue will never be the same

Image created using Adobe Illustrator.

We’re delighted to announce that generative AI has landed in Adobe Illustrator: As of today, you’re able to use Generative Recolor (beta), powered by Adobe Firefly, our family of creative generative AI models. This brand-new feature transforms colors in a magical way from a simple text prompt, sparking your imagination and pushing your creative boundaries.

Generative Recolor (beta) will be truly game-changing for the design of brand identity graphics, digital drawings and illustrations, and marketing and advertising assets. And this is just the first step: We’re planning many more generative AI features for Illustrator that will accelerate the realisation of your creative vision.

At the same time, we are also shipping a series of new and updated features to help you significantly speed up the most common workflows in Illustrator. Let’s take a look at what’s new.

Introducing Generative Recolor (beta)

Adobe’s powerful generative AI technology is now in Illustrator with Generative Recolor (beta), which will transform your vector artwork colors into various, energising palettes and themes using everyday language.

Starting with an existing artwork, just type in a prompt such as “Neon lights” or “Salmon sushi”, and your entire graphic will be instantly recolored. Then adjust as you see fit to get a unique look — a great way to quickly experiment with different colors for your design.

Generative Recolor (beta) helps you capture colors faster, as it enables you to quickly try out an infinite array of colors, explore color palettes, and create multiple color combinations to match the vision you want your artwork to express. Color can be continuously changed, so you can keep editing your graphics at any time to take them further until you get just the right look and feel.

The automatically generated color variations can be used to create multiple color combinations from a single artwork file that you can apply anywhere whether it’s for social media, print, or the web. You can also adjust your existing work for different styles or seasonal changes. Or show a wide variety of color options to a stakeholder or client.

Generative AI features like Generative Recolor (beta) function as your trusted creative co-pilot that helps you explore your ideas faster and more efficiently. While it’s not for commercial use in the beta, you can still create confidently. Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock’s hundreds of millions of professional-grade licensed, high-resolution images, which helps ensure Firefly won’t generate content based on other people’s work, brands, or intellectual property.

Here are some examples of how Generative Recolor (beta) can help you in your day-to-day work:

Brand identity graphics

Using Generative Recolor (beta) speeds up the workflow as you no longer need to manually adjust each color and research color themes. You can also use it to spark inspiration and moodboarding and share options with stakeholders or clients.

In the below example, the original artwork (left) was quickly recolored to explore color palettes (right).

This is a great way to come up with color recommendations based on a simple text prompt to arrive a multiple brand identity graphics for product packaging:

Digital drawing and illustration

With Generative Recolor (beta) you can personalise a theme and get to the right look and feel faster. For example, you can take a vector art illustration, like the below landscape art, and further refine its colors based on the style or vision you want to express.

Marketing and advertising graphics

Generative Recolor (beta) enables you to quickly create variations of an existing ad or poster for seasonal or holiday changes. In the below example, you can generate different options using the text prompt “Autumn.”

For more on Generative Recolor (beta), update Illustrator to try it out yourself or experiment with it, and all of Firefly’s capabilities, on firefly.adobe.com.

Disclaimer: Generative Recolor (beta) is available to all Creative Cloud members with a subscription or trial that includes Illustrator. Generative Recolor is currently not available for commercial use while in beta, not available in China, and works with English-only text prompts.

What else is new in Illustrator

In addition to Generative Recolor (beta), we’re also introducing new innovative and time-saving tools that will help you design with even more precision and efficiency.

Introducing Retype (beta)

The next time you’re inspired by a font you see in the wild, take a photo and bring it into Illustrator. Now you can detect a font from a static or non-editable text (either text from a raster image or outlined vector text). Retype identifies and pulls up the closest font matches from Adobe Fonts — no more sifting through thousands of fonts trying to find the one that matches your design!

Image Trace improvements

Converting raster images to vector art is now even easier with new enhancements to Image Trace. Auto-detect or choose an Image Trace preset, select any single color to ignore, and customise color modes. We’ve also given the panel a fresh look and feel and introduced auto-detection for the recommended preset based on the image.

Save time with Layers search & filter

Now you can search for and filter by names, text, shapes, and various object effects or properties to quickly find specific graphics and navigate through multiple layers. Open the Layers panel, and use the search function or select a filter.

PDF enhancements

This release also includes new functionality based on your requests. Check out PDF Preset Memory, for example — now when saving your PDFs, your latest presets will be remembered and become the new default. Also, new working hyperlinks can be added to text and images when saving PDFs.

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