Adobe’s Firefly Video Model officially launched last week, albeit in an underwhelming public beta form, alongside new Firefly premium plans. Photographers and hybrid creators may wonder if they need a Firefly plan in their workflow. The answer? Probably not, at least not yet.
As is frequently (and frustratingly) the case when Adobe announces new subscription offerings, users must hop around to different Adobe blog posts, FAQ pages, and support documents to get the complete story.
What Is the Adobe Firefly Plan?
With the launch of the Adobe Firefly Video Model and associated features like Generate Video (text-to-video and image-to-video) and Translate Audio, Adobe has created a new “premium” tier of Adobe Firefly features. These features require users to have an active Adobe Firefly subscription, a premium add-on separate from any other Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
Adobe Firefly plans start at $9.99 per month, although this is a promotional early access price slated to increase to an undisclosed new fee beginning on March 15. Users can lock in the current price by paying for an annual subscription, starting at $100 a year (basically, users get two months “free”).
With a premium Firefly subscription, users can generate up to 20 five-second videos or translate up to six minutes of audio and video. If users require more uses of the premium generative audio and video features, they must up their subscription to the next tier, which is $30 monthly and allows users to create up to 70 five-second videos or translate up to 23 minutes of audio and video. A third higher tier for even busier users is in the works, but for now, users are advised to “buy multiple Firefly Pro plans” if they require more monthly generative credits.
What Are Generative Credits?
Here’s where things get a bit complicated. The two Adobe Firefly plans have generative credits (2,000 and 7,000 per month). However, these credits only apply to premium audio and video features like Generate Video and Translate Audio. Users with these Firefly plans have unlimited access to Adobe’s other Firefly features, including Generate Image, Generative Fill, and more. While Adobe reserves the right to throttle Firefly features if an account is doing something crazy and flooding the system with frivolous requests, that’s unrealistic for even the most heavy-duty users.
Adobe customers with Creative Cloud Single App, Creative Cloud All Apps, and Photography Plans also get monthly generative credits, ranging from 100 to 1,000 depending on their selected plan.
Although the generative credits are called the same thing, these credits are lesser in practice as they do not provide access to all Adobe Firefly features. There is no way for non-Firefly subscribers to burn a bunch of their credits to generate a video from scratch. They do have “limited generations” to try the premium audio and video Firefly features, but these are very limited in terms of uses (two per user) and quality (720p instead of 1080p).
It’s already getting muddy, but the primary takeaway is that users must have an active Adobe Firefly plan for full access to Adobe’s new Firefly Video features.
Most Photographers Don’t Need Anything New
Given that the new separate Adobe Firefly plans offer “unlimited access” to the Firefly features that photographers use, like Generative Fill in Adobe Photoshop and Generative Remove in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw, photographers might be wondering: “Do I need a Firefly plan now?”
Probably not. While Adobe will happily sell photographers a Firefly plan, photographers get at least 100 generative credits per month with their current Adobe plan. Typically, one generative action deducts one generative credit. So, suppose someone uses Generative Remove on a batch of photos; this could deplete the store of generative credits quite quickly.
However, it is not as simple as “You ran out of credits, you can’t use Adobe Firefly generative features anymore until you buy more.”
Although Adobe announced that it would begin enforcing the use of generative credits last June, it was not the case that users would be locked out if they used all their credits. Instead, when customers deplete their credits, some Adobe Firefly features may become slower.
Eagle-eyed Adobe users may notice that the text below their generative credit allotment on their Adobe account page says, “When credits run out, you can continue to generate content at no additional cost for a limited time.” Beneath this text, there’s a link to “buy more” generative credits, which then opens up the new Adobe Firefly plan page.
PetaPixel reached out to Adobe when it announced its new Firefly plans, curious if the new premium plans would impact Adobe’s policy concerning generative credit depletion.
“Once you reach your monthly limit on standard features, you may experience reduced speeds. Adobe reserves the right to limit or throttle your use of generative AI features. Firefly plans are needed for access to premium video and audio generative AI features such as Generate Video and Translate in Adobe Firefly. If you run out of credits for premium video and audio generative AI features, Firefly plan subscribers may upgrade to Adobe Firefly Premium or choose to stack an additional Firefly Plus plan for increased capacity,” Adobe tells PetaPixel.
So, no, photographers still don’t need to purchase generative credits or subscribe to Adobe Firefly to continue to use non-premium Firefly features, which currently includes every Firefly feature photographers might use in their workflow. If someone uses Firefly all the time and notices the impact of reduced speeds once they’ve used their monthly credits, they may want to buy more or get Firefly, but that is likely an extreme edge case.
Two questions remain. The first, what about the impressive Generative Extend in Premiere Pro? This is currently only available in Premiere Pro’s beta release, and as such, does not use any generative credits. It is technically a generative video feature, but as of now, does not fall under the purview of “Premium features.” Whether this will change when Generative Extend receives a public release remains to be seen. PetaPixel will report on this as soon as information is available.
The second question concerns what “limited time” means in the context of Adobe’s very loose generative credit enforcement. Adobe has technically been “enforcing” generative credit usage on Creative Cloud accounts for over a year, and nothing has actually changed for nearly every user.
Users have credits, which they can monitor on their Adobe account, and a wide array of standard Firefly features technically cost credits. However, customers are never actually locked out of using standard Firefly-powered tools even when their credit allotment hits zero. This could change at any time, but it hasn’t changed yet, even as the Adobe Firefly landscape continues to evolve.
Photographers in the Adobe Ecosystem Can Stay the Course
So, yes, Adobe has new Firefly plans that include unlimited access to all the Firefly features photographers are likely to care about. However, photographers do not need to subscribe to Adobe Firefly to retain access to these generative AI tools and functions. While power users may deplete their monthly allotment of generative credits, Adobe’s existing policy of not locking users out of things like Generative Fill and Generative Remove if they run out remains in effect. For now.
Image credits: Screenshots via Adobe. Featured image created using a photo by Jeremy Gray.
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