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Adobe’s Agentic AI Assistant Is Here

Adobe has brought its promised ‘agentic AI assistant’ to Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat. The first version is fairly limited for now and is currently available as a public beta in Photoshop on the web and mobile, but not on desktop yet. Still, it gives us an early look at how Adobe plans to bring more autonomous AI tools into the Creative Cloud.

Inside Photoshop, the new AI Assistant lets you describe the edits you want using simple language. You can ask it to remove distractions, swap backgrounds, change lighting, or adjust colours. From there, you can choose whether the assistant should automatically apply those edits or instead walk you through the process step by step. Thinking about it, that second option could actually be pretty useful for learning Photoshop, since the software still has a reputation for being difficult for beginners. The assistant works through text prompts, and in the Photoshop mobile app it can also respond to voice commands.

There are also a few new AI tools tied into the system. In Photoshop for the web, a new AI Markup tool lets you draw directly on an image and add prompts explaining what should change in that specific area. At the same time, Adobe continues to expand its Firefly ecosystem, which powers features like Generative Fill, Generative Remove, Generative Expand, Generative Upscale, and Remove Background. These tools are now also available inside the dedicated Firefly Image Editor, and Firefly itself now supports more than 25 different AI models, including systems from Google, OpenAI, and Black Forest Labs. The AI Assistant beta is available now in Photoshop for web and mobile (iOS and Android), while the new Firefly editing tools have already started rolling out.

You can see full details on Adobe’s blog here

Canon’s New Catadioptric Lens Designs

A newly surfaced Canon patent shows some unusual catadioptric zoom lens designs, and it might offer a hint at how a very fast f/1.4 zoom lens for the RF system could be built without becoming extremely large. Recently there have been multiple reports that Canon is working on a constant f/1.4 zoom, which would fit into the broader trend of increasingly fast lenses. Even Fujifilm has been exploring extremely bright designs, recently floating concepts like a 33mm f/1.0 and an 18–50mm f/1.4 as possible future lenses.

The interesting part is how Canon might actually pull something like this off. The patent, numbered 2026-033938, describes catadioptric zoom lenses designed to achieve very bright apertures. For those of you that don’t know, catadioptric designs combine traditional glass elements with mirrors that fold the light path inside the lens. Instead of traveling straight through the optics, light is reflected several times, which allows the lens to be much shorter than a conventional glass design with similar specifications. Canon has explored similar ideas before, including patents for 400mm f/3.6 and 800mm f/5 mirror lenses, although those never ended up becoming real products.

Of course, mirror lenses come with their own compromises. Because of the central secondary mirror, highlights often appear as donut-shaped bokeh, and many classic mirror lenses had fixed apertures and slightly softer rendering compared to traditional optics. The patent itself outlines several possible zoom designs, including 28–45mm f/1.2, 28–55mm f/1.4, and 35–70mm f/1.4 lenses for full-frame cameras, along with a potential 15–35mm f/1.4 APS-C version. As always with patents, these are just design concepts for now, but they do line up fairly well with the recent rumours about Canon working on a fast new RF zoom.

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