Better object removal, improved lighting and more – these “Sneaks” could be Adobe’s next big leap forward
As has become tradition at its conferences, Adobe MAX 2025 concluded with what’s become known as ‘Sneaks’ – a hotly anticipated interactive evening presentation designed to showcase what’s next (or what could be next).
Think of them as passion projects, dreamt up by internal staffers in response to customer demand and emerging trends, whereby experimental features could make it into Adobe’s pipeline.
This year in LA, critically acclaimed comedian, writer and actress Jessica Williams took to the stage together with Adobe Senior Creative Cloud Evangelist Paul Trani to host the session, which comprised 10 individual ‘Sneaks’ demonstrated by their creators.
Although the company stressed that not all of these will reach production, we think they may just do that. Not only did the crowd go wild at each and every Sneak, but with seemingly hundreds of new AI-powered features already launched at MAX 2025, we think there’s room for more in the coming years.
We’ve listed some of our favorites below:
Project Light Touch
Ever taken a photo and gone back to the studio (or perhaps just your phone editor) to realize maybe the lighting wasn’t quite right?
This tool allows users to reshape light sources after capturing them, be it moving the source of the light to cast different shadows, turning day into night or even adding a new light source to any part of the picture (such as lighting up a Halloween pumpkin from within).
Project Trace Erase
“Say goodbye to clunky object removal,” Adobe writes in its summary blog post. This tool addresses one of the most common Photoshop actions – cleaning up photos.
The demo sees a new trace erase tool use diffusion transformer models to erase elements associated with the object that has been selected, such as shadows, reflections and environmental distortions – not just the primary object in question.
Project Frame Forward
Moving over to video, Project Frame Forward does away with having to address each and every frame in video edits, making it simpler and quicker to make changes to an entire clip.
Users can annotate and edit one single frame, and this in-development tool will transfer those edits to every relevant frame. Need to remove an unwanted object from a shot? Just make the change to a single frame and those changes will carry through the entire clip. Adobe boasts that this even maintains original quality.
Project Clean Take
Up next, an audio-focused tool that does everything you could ask of it – of course, powered by AI. Podcasters and filmmakers alike would be able to use the tool to make all manner of changes to soundtracks without re-recording.
Besides isolating voices and removing background noises, Clean Take can also correct mispronunciations. Editors can even go into the transcript and swap out words, which then sound like they’re being said by the original speaker.
Special mention: Project Scene It
Scene It is worthy of its own mention, enabling marketers to generate 3D versions of products from a single image to place them in different scenes for promotional activity.
But the best part came at the end of the mini-presentation, when presenter and project lead Oindrila Saha turned an illustrated glass of champagne into a reality, bringing three glasses out on stage to share with Jessica and Paul.
Little did Oindrila know that those glasses of champagne were part of a broader plan to celebrate what came next – her offer of a permanent position at Adobe after joining as a research intern this summer.
Though not all may make the cut, Adobe’s Sneaks session has always been about more than just hinting at what could come next. It’s all about giving dreamers and creatives the chance for their voices to be heard.
“What begins as a bold experiment at Sneaks often becomes tomorrow’s creative superpower,” Adobe concluded. “We can’t wait to see where these ideas go next.”
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As has become tradition at its conferences, Adobe MAX 2025 concluded with what’s become known as ‘Sneaks’ – a hotly anticipated interactive evening presentation designed to showcase what’s next (or what could be next). Think of them as passion projects, dreamt up by internal staffers in response to customer demand…
