Imagine telling a chatbot to ‘blur the background’ and watching Photoshop do it for you without leaving the conversation. That’s the premise Adobe rolled out on December 10: Photoshop, Adobe Express and Acrobat are now available as apps inside ChatGPT, and Adobe says the integrations are free and available globally across desktop, web and iOS (Express is already on Android; Photoshop and Acrobat on Android are coming soon).
These aren’t gimmicky add-ons. Adobe positioned the move as widening access to its core creative and productivity tools by marrying the simplicity of conversational prompts with Adobe’s well‑established editing engines. The company says hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users can now ask for photo edits, assemble shareable designs and tweak PDFs simply by naming the app in a prompt — for example, ‘Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background of this image.’ From there, ChatGPT surfaces the Adobe app and either performs the edit or provides the UI elements (like sliders for exposure and contrast) so you can fine‑tune results.
What’s inside the chat
- Photoshop in ChatGPT: targeted edits to parts of an image, adjustments for brightness/contrast/exposure, and creative effects such as Glitch and Glow. Adobe still runs the heavy lifting, so ChatGPT acts as the gateway and instruction layer while Photoshop performs edits.
- Adobe Express: pick from a library of templates (invitations, posters, social graphics), swap text and images, animate sections and iterate entirely inside the chat box.
- Acrobat: edit PDFs, extract text or tables, merge or compress files, convert documents to PDF and redact sensitive material — all without sacrificing formatting, Adobe says.
If you outgrow the in‑chat tools, projects can be opened in Adobe’s native apps so creators can pick up with full, granular control where they left off.
Why Adobe did this — and why it matters
For Adobe, the move is both defensive and opportunistic. Integrating with ChatGPT plugs its tools directly into one of the world’s most used conversational AI platforms and lowers the barrier for casual users who don’t want to learn standalone apps. It’s also a response to broader moves in the industry: Google has gradually added image editing and agentic features to Gemini, and Microsoft and others are racing to ship better consumer AI tools — see Microsoft’s own image work in MAI-Image-1. At the same time, Google’s push with Gemini’s Deep Research underscores how AI companies are trying to embed multimodal capabilities across daily workflows.
Adobe couches the launch as an extension of its agentic AI strategy and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), following recent releases like Acrobat Studio and in‑app AI assistants for Photoshop and Express. For non‑professionals, that could transform chores — touching up a family photo, whipping together an event flyer — into simple conversational tasks. For pros, the value is convenience and the promise of a smoother handoff into full apps.
Limits and realities
These ChatGPT apps are not full substitutes for the desktop versions. Professionals will notice missing advanced features and finer controls. Adobe says the chat experiences provide many popular features but not the full breadth of its native applications. There are real tradeoffs: speed and accessibility versus depth and precision.
Privacy and provenance questions linger whenever major editing tools move inside large language model platforms. Adobe notes that its software performs the edits (ChatGPT is the shell), but users should still be mindful about where files are uploaded and how outputs are stored or shared.
Try it (and what to bring)
If you want to experiment, you can upload an image or PDF in ChatGPT and begin a prompt by naming the Adobe app. For heavier work, you’ll probably end up switching to the regular Adobe apps on your laptop — a MacBook or similar device makes that handoff painless; if you’re considering a new machine, you can check a MacBook online.
This move nudges the creative stacks closer to where people already talk to AI. Whether it changes who uses Adobe’s tools in a meaningful, long‑term way will depend on how well the in‑chat experience balances simplicity with enough control to be genuinely useful. For now, it’s another sign of the fast convergence between conversational AI interfaces and traditional creative software.