As has become tradition at its conferences, Adobe MAX 2025 concluded with what has become 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, developed by internal employees in response to customer demand and emerging trends, where experimental features can enter Adobe’s pipeline.
This year in LA, acclaimed comedian, author and actress Jessica Williams took to the stage with Adobe Senior Creative Cloud Evangelist Paul Trani to host the session, which included 10 individual ‘Sneaks’ demonstrated by their creators.
While the company stressed that not all of these will make it to production, we think they just might. Not only did the crowd go wild with 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
Have you ever taken a photo and gone back to the studio (or maybe just your phone editor) to realize that the lighting might not have been quite right?
This tool allows users to reshape light sources after capturing them, be it 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 within).
Project track deletion
“Say goodbye to clunky object removal,” Adobe writes in its summary blog post. This tool handles one of the most common Photoshop operations – cleaning up photos.
The demo sees a new track erasure 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 framework forward
When moving to video, Project Frame Forward removes the need to process each individual frame in video edits, making it easier and faster to make changes to an entire clip.
Users can comment and edit a single frame, and this under-development tool will transfer those edits to each 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 preserves original quality.
Project Clean Take
Next, an audio-focused tool that does everything you can ask of it – powered by AI, of course. Podcasters and filmmakers alike would be able to use the tool to make all kinds of changes to audio tracks without re-recording.
In addition to isolating voices and removing background noise, Clean Take can also correct mispronunciations. Editors can even go into the transcript and replace words that sound like they were spoken by the original speaker.
Special mention: Project Scene It
Scene It is worth mentioning, which allows marketers to generate 3D versions of products from a single image to place them in different scenes for promotional activities.
But the best part came at the end of the mini-presentation, when presenter and project manager Oindrila Saha turned an illustrated glass of champagne into reality and brought three glasses out on stage to share with Jessica and Paul.
Little did Oindrila know, those glasses of champagne were part of a broader plan to celebrate what was next — her offer of a permanent position at Adobe after joining as a research intern this summer.
While not everyone might make it, Adobe’s Sneaks session has always been about more than just hinting at what could be coming next. It’s about giving dreamers and creatives the chance to have their voices 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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