Adobe’s head office in San Jose, California

Adobe on Tuesday said it is rolling out new image-generation technology that can draw inspiration from an uploaded image and match its style, in its latest push to compete with start-ups challenging its core business.

Image-generating technology from firms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have threatened Adobe’s customer base of creative professionals who use its tools like Photoshop.

The San Jose, California-based company has responded by aggressively developing its own version of the technology and injecting it into its Creative Cloud software programs.

Adobe, which has promised its customers that generated images will be safe from legal challenges, said those customers have used the tools to generate three billion images, a billion of them in the last month alone.

The new generation of tools announced on Tuesday will include a feature called “Generative Match”. Like Adobe’s earlier tool, it will allow users to generate an image from a few words of text. But it will also allow users to upload as few as 10 to 20 images to use as a basis for the generated images.

Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s chief technology officer for digital media, said the company aims to let big brands upload a handful of photos of a product or character and then use generative technology to automatically make hundreds or thousands of images for various needs like websites, social media campaigns and print advertisements.

“Up until a few months ago, it was still a very manual process to get all those photos — not only to take the photos, but then to process them,” Greenfield said.

Vector graphic generation

“Some amount of photography is going to move to virtual photography, where you’re generating from whole cloth. But a lot of it also is going to be, you do some amount of traditional photography or traditional creative work, and then you do a bunch of adaptation using this generative technology.”

Adobe on Tuesday also rolled out tools that generate vector graphics, which can easily be resized and are commonly used for logos and product labels, as well as tools for generating templates for brochures and other items.