Adobe Express Review: How I Put A Cow On The Moon

User Interface

When you start Adobe Express, you’re presented with options to work on content for social media, videos, photos, documents or marketing material.

You’ll also see an option for Generative AI tools which we’ll look at later.

If you’ve ever used a graphic design application like Photoshop or Illustrator, the first thing you notice when opening Adobe Express is that it’s far less intimidating.

It’s not ultra basic and still requires some getting used to, but nothing like the complexity of pro graphic design apps.

Adobe Express has a clean and uncluttered canvas with easy access to its various editing tools and features.

The main tools to work with are quite simply the:

• Menu Bar
• Tool Panel
• Workspace
• Properties Panel

The Menu Bar at the top is where you start if you want to open, import, save and export files.

The Tools Panel along the left hand side offers all the essentials editing tools such as crop, rotate, flip, straighten, resize (Premium version only annoyingly), adjust brightness, contrast etc.

The main Workspace is where your images or videos appear for editing.

The Properties Panel allows you to do things like change the theme, zoom in or out, change the background color etc.

As soon as you click on an image, you can start using these tools to edit it.

I found it very easy to crop, remove the background, add special effects and animate it – even if you’ve got no graphic design experience at all.

The best way to kick things off however is by using a Template.

Ready Made Templates

One of the aims of Adobe Express is that as the name suggests, it helps you whip-up graphics quickly. The templates are a perfect example of how it does this.

The templates are conveniently organized by category such as Seasonal, Instagram, Popular etc. Express will highlight upcoming Seasonal templates which at the time of writing was Easter.

But if you want to promote a Black Friday campaign on your website or social media, Adobe Express has specific ready made templates in the Seasonal Templates for it.

You can also search the templates by keyword too such as “Flyers” for which we found over half a million results alone!

When you click on one of these, you can then edit and customize them with your own branding and images using the Tools Panel.

I selected an Instagram Square template to customize to create a Daylight Savings post for Spring.

Some of the typical things you can apply using the Toolbar on the left are:

• Filters and Effects: These include vintage and cinematic styles to modern and artistic presets.
• Adjustment Controls: You can change the brightness, contrast, saturation and other tweaks. If you don’t have the time or skills to enhance images, Adobe Express offers an auto-enhance feature that automatically adjusts the exposure, color balance, and sharpness of photos with a single tap.
• Creative Assets: You can add stickers, overlays, text styles, and other effect to add a bit of personality to photos.
• Collage Maker: This creates photo collages of multiple images of a single composition.

If you want to tinker around with the text, you can also fill text with different textures, layouts and styles to make them more stylish. I went for a more springy effect for the text and messed around with the background colors which was all pretty straightforward.

I did find that Express eventually froze after applying some of these edits and the only way to get it working again was to reload the page in the browser.

Once you’re satisfied with the results, you can share it directly on social media, download it on your desktop, save it to a Cloud storage service or export it to another format.

To share on social media, simply click the big “Share” button in the top right corner and connect the appropriate account.

You can also save your designs as a custom template with your branding on that can be reused as much as you want.

Note that only a limited selection of templates are available in the free version of Adobe Express.

Those that are marked by a “crown” symbol mean that they’re only available to Premium subscribers which you can access for 30 days by clicking on the big “Try Premium” button at the top of the screen.

Social Media Integration

Adobe Express is very social media focused and has clearly aimed itself at those that want to liven-up their social media timelines.

If you’re sharing to social media, you’ll see a Preview first to make sure it looks how you want before sending it out to the world.

There’s also a post scheduling feature so that can publish social media posts at any time which supports posting to X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn.

You can also publish to multiple social media accounts at the same time.

The free plan is limited to two scheduled posts per month but the Premium plan offers unlimited posting.

AI Editing & Features

Firefly Generative AI allows you to create just about anything using Text-to-Image and Text-Effects simply by prompting Express with their own words in natural, conversational language.

You name it, Adobe Express will create it.

So for example, ask it to create “a man walking with a cow on the moon” and hey presto, Express makes it so.

This became highly addictive so next I asked it to create an image of “an octopus teaching a class of children how to dance”.

Again, not a bad attempt (although it did give some of the children octopus arms for some reason).

You can watch me having more fun with the Adobe Express Generative AI feature below:

Apart from wild and wacky images however, you can also use the AI in Express to remove backgrounds. There’s no messing around with a lasso tool to highlight the bits you want to remove like you have to in some graphic design apps.

The AI in Adobe Express does it automatically and is incredibly accurate at identifying the background and getting rid of it.

So let’s take this chap enjoying his coffee in the street.

Just go to “Quick Actions” on the Adobe Express dashboard and select “Remove Background”. Upload the image and just like that, the building is gone.

This AI wizardry even extends to Templates.

For example, I asked Express to create an Instagram Square post of a “clock flying off a spring into the air” for my Spring Instagram post. It took about 20 seconds to offer me the following creations:

The results weren’t exactly what I asked for (no spring in sight) but it still gave me a choice of other images I could use and even more if I clicked on “Generate more results”.

Like any AI tool, by tinkering around with the prompts you give it, you can also get better results (although for the life in me, I could not get Express to give me a clock flying off a Spring).

You can also apply AI effects to text with Adobe Fonts which is a collection of over 25,000 fonts.

Firefly can apply Generative AI to them to give them a unique style and character. In this case I asked to write “MacHow2” with the text made up of MacBooks.

Integrations & Collaboration Features

The Premium version of Adobe Express is integrated with Adobe Creative Cloud making it easy to polish, edit or share designs in other Adobe apps.

This is also useful if you want a more experienced graphic designer to do finer edits in app such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

Both the Free and Premium version allow you to collaborate with non Express users too simply by sending them a link although they’ll need to sign-up with an Adobe account first.

This then makes it possible for others to edit and share designs made in Adobe Express.

Colleagues can view and comment on anything you’ve created in Adobe Express which makes it easy to collaborate on projects.

This is also supported in the free version but anyone you send the link to will need to sign-up for an Adobe account to view and edit it.

You can also see the version history of edits so that its clear who edited what and when. Images are updated in real-time and when another user edits a project, you can configure an email alert or an in-app notification to be triggered.

Another big advantage of the Premium version is full access to Adobe Stock.

Adobe Stock is a huge resource of over 200 million royalty free videos and photos that offers professional standard media assets.

You can access Adobe Stock in Express by clicking on the square Web Apps symbol in the top right of the interface.

However, you only get limited access to Adobe Stock in the free version of Adobe Express and all images come with a standard license as opposed to a royalty free license in the premium version.

The inclusion of Adobe Stock in Adobe Express is a real bonus considering its not part of Creative Cloud and usually costs an extra $19.99 per month.