As is tradition with its conferences, Adobe MAX 2025 concluded with what is known as ‘Sneaks’: a highly anticipated interactive evening presentation designed to show what’s next (or what could be next).
Think of them as passion projects, devised by internal staff in response to customer demand and emerging trends, through which experimental features could be incorporated into the Adobe project.
This year in Los Angeles, critically acclaimed comedian, writer and actress Jessica Williams took the stage alongside Adobe’s Senior Creative Cloud Evangelist Paul Trani to introduce the session, which comprised 10 individual ‘Sneaks’ demonstrated by their creators.
Although the company emphasized that not all of them will make it to production, we believe it is possible that they will. Not only did the crowd go crazy for each and every Sneak, but with seemingly hundreds of new AI-powered features already launching at MAX 2025, we think there’s room for more in the years to come.
Below we list some of our favorites:
Light touch project
Have you ever taken a photo and returned to the studio (or maybe just the editor on your phone) to realize that maybe the lighting wasn’t right?
This tool allows users to reshape light sources after capturing them, whether by moving the light source to cast different shadows, turning day into night, or even adding a new light source to any part of the image (such as lighting a Halloween pumpkin from the inside).
Project Tracking Delete
“Say goodbye to clunky object removal,” Adobe writes in its blog summary. This tool addresses one of the most common Photoshop actions: cleaning up photos.
In the demo, a new trace erasing tool uses diffusion transformer models to erase elements associated with the object that has been selected, such as shadows, reflections, and environmental distortions, not just the main object in question.
Project Framework Forward
Moving on to video, Project Frame Forward eliminates the need to address each and every frame in video edits, making it easier and faster to make changes to an entire clip.
Users can annotate and edit a single frame, and this developing tool will transfer those edits to each relevant frame. Need to remove an unwanted object from a shot? Simply make the change to a single frame and those changes will be applied to the entire clip. Adobe boasts that this even maintains the original quality.
Clean Take Project
Next up, an audio-focused tool that does everything you can ask of it (powered by AI, of course). Podcasters and filmmakers alike could use the tool to make all kinds of changes to soundtracks without having to re-record them.
In addition to isolating voices and removing background noises, Clean Take can also correct pronunciation errors. Editors can even access the transcript and exchange words, which then sound as if they were said by the original speaker.
Special mention: It Scene Project
Scene It deserves its own mention as it allows marketers to generate 3D versions of products from a single image to place in different scenes for promotional activity.
But the best part came at the end of the mini-presentation, when presenter and project leader Oindrila Saha made an illustrated champagne glass a reality and brought three glasses on stage to share with Jessica and Paul.
Little did Oindrila know that those glasses of champagne were part of a larger plan to celebrate what was coming next: her offer of a permanent position at Adobe after joining as a research intern this summer.
While not everyone may make the cut, Adobe’s Sneaks session has always been about more than just hinting at what might come next. It’s about giving dreamers and creatives the opportunity to make their voices heard.
“What starts as a bold experiment in Sneaks often becomes the creative superpower of tomorrow,” Adobe concluded. “We’re excited to see where these ideas go.”
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
