Adobe brings Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express to ChatGPT

Back in October, OpenAI announced apps like Spotify and Canva would be accessible in ChatGPT. At the time, the company said more software was on the way, and now one of the most popular professional applications is available through the chatbot.

Starting today, you can access Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express inside of ChatGPT. All the apps are free to use through OpenAI’s website, though before you can begin generating PDFs and illustrations using Acrobat and Adobe Express, you’ll need to sign into your Adobe account. To use any of the apps in ChatGPT, either name them in your prompt or select them from the plus menu.

Of the three apps, the way OpenAI’s chatbot connects to Photoshop is probably the most interesting. Depending on the prompt, the interface will change to display the sliders most relevant to your request. For example, if you want to brighten an image, you’ll see one slider allowing you to adjust the exposure, alongside other ones for the shadows and highlights. By comparison, if you want to add an effect to an image, ChatGPT might display options related to dithering and tri-tone, among others.

What’s interesting about all this is the way ChatGPT is interacting with Adobe’s tools, through an MCP server, to offer a slice of the company’s apps. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found Adobe software to be far too complicated, with often one too many ways to accomplish the same task. Granted, what I saw was a hands-off demo, but the routing Adobe created worked well.

“We build the Lego blocks, which are the MCP tools, and we create detailed instructions, and then ChatGPT figures out what it wants to do,” Aubrey Cattell, vice-president of developer platform and partner ecosystem at Adobe, explains. “Sometimes it does what we want it, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s the nature of it being non-deterministic, and we’re continuing to hone as much as we can from users’ intent and natural language to give them the result that they’re looking for.”

Of course, if you ever want more control, the web versions of Photoshop, Acrobat and Adobe Express are a click away.

For OpenAI, this is easily the biggest coup to date of its push to reshape ChatGPT into an operating system for all the apps its more than 800 million users depend on daily. For Adobe, it feels like the company is partnering with an entity out to eat its lunch. After all, OpenAI offers its own image generation. However, Cattell said Adobe doesn’t see it that way.

“A couple weeks back, OpenAI dropped Apps SDK as a new paradigm for accessing ChatGPT, we saw there was a natural fit in the work we were doing with our applications,” he said. “Essentially, they gave us an operating system we were able to leverage to bring our applications to their surface. There’s a lot of natural affinity there between the workflows OpenAI is trying to enable and Adobe’s best in class capabilities.”

Cattell promised Adobe would continue to explore what it could offer inside of ChatGPT, but added the company’s apps will continue to be the place users can go if they want more power, precision and control.