Item: Adobe Firefly
Rating: 9
Author: Eric Gangnath

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Firefly

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Working as art director in house for a growing brand with limited resources, Adobe Firefly has been very helpful for a variety of uses inward facing and with business partners. The biggest use case is in creating storyboards and creative pitches for our campaigns and new product development. While Adobe Firefly images does look realistic enough to pass as actually real, we strictly use AI generated assets in the development phase of our consumer facing final products. My team and I have used Adobe Firefly to imagine anything from stylized photography for campaign pitch decks, to illustrations, patterns, and icon concepting for our brand assets. It has been the most useful with storyboarding our creative concepts without worrying about budget or timelines to actually photograph or illustrate concept narratives or photography compositions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creating rich photography in a stylized way
Imagining patterns or icon styles
Creating textures for our new product development renders
Imagining new product forms for our packaging innovation

Cons

Image creation involving a specific number of people
Anatomy of humans - limbs, hands, feet etc
Rendering out people who are average looking as opposed to model perfection
Rendering people of races other than caucasian

Return on Investment

Increased our conceptual thinking speed
Saved money on outsourcing creative needs for storyboards
Helped elevate our packaging innovation cycle with creative approaches to form in the packaging world
Helped speed up the creation of campaign pitch decks and has reduced the number of revisions needed by allowing for more accurate depictions of concept earlier in the process of pitching internally.

Usability

It's easy enough to work and create. Prompt specifics are challenging some of the time and don't seem to follow an exact science or method to allow for consistent generations of creative assets.

Alternatives Considered

ChatGPT, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC and Adobe Substance 3D Collection

Midjourney was not in this list but that is the most similar to Firefly in my opinion. I find that Adobe Firefly and Midjourney have a lot of overlap. The generative fill options on Photoshop and Illustrator also include very similar use cases with generating photography and extending areas of a photo to imagine outside of the crop.

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Firefly delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Adobe Firefly's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Firefly live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Adobe Firefly go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Adobe Firefly again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Bridge

Likelihood to Recommend

I recommend using Adobe Firefly in the early concepting phase for an open ended creative approach. Firefly is great for sparking new ideas and compositions. I also think Firefly does an incredible job with accurate lighting and perspective. Firefly is strong developing patterns and rendering difficult textures -- like iridescent or metallic finishes on packaging. I do not recommend Firefly for very specific prescriptive compositions or narratives. For instance, creating a scene where composition needs to be exact or even close to exact is difficult. I also don't think Firefly is very useful for consistent narrative builds. For instance, creating a storyboard with the same characters in multiple orientations or narrative arcs usually will not work for me.

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Accelerate Conceptual Phase Process with Adobe Firefly