Adobe Firefly Review

Here's where I land after genuinely putting Firefly through its paces: it's a tool built for a very specific person, and if you're not that person, it's going to frustrate you fast. The generative fill is legitimately one of the best features I've tested in any AI image tool — and pro tip, it performs better in the browser than inside Photoshop, which surprised me. Firefly Boards gave me a visual storyboard from a script in minutes, which used to eat up a ton of my time sketching things out manually. For thumbnail mockups, b-roll generation, and quick photo cleanup on client assets, it genuinely pulls its weight. But the video side is a different story. You're capped at five-second 1080p clips, it charges 20 credits per second — so one five-second video burns 100 credits — and there's no way to cancel a bad generation mid-run and no refund when the output is completely unusable. I burned through credits fast, and that stings when the output glitches on human faces, which it does, often. RunwayML and Seedance have way more control for video. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion blow Firefly out of the water on photorealism and artistic range. The trade-off Firefly makes is that everything it generates is commercially safe and copyright-clear — and for client work, that actually matters. But that safety comes at the cost of creative ceiling, and the credit system punishes experimentation in a way that feels genuinely anti-creator.