Adobe’s plugin for Claude got a meaningful upgrade on September 24: Acrobat tools are now part of it, and there’s a new interactive editor so you can take over from the AI and adjust things yourself. The same day, Adobe brought a set of its creative tools into Google Gemini.
What changed
In Claude, Adobe says you can now call on more than 80 tools across Acrobat, Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, InDesign, Adobe Stock and more, all from one plugin. The new Acrobat side covers organizing PDFs (deleting, combining, or splitting pages), redacting sensitive information, and converting or exporting PDFs to other formats.
The bigger change for designers is the hands-on editing. There’s now an interactive PDF editor where you can reorder pages, edit text, and add comments and highlights. There’s also a layer-based editor for Express designs, where you can select and customize images, copy, colors, and fonts independently, instead of re-prompting for every small fix. A new Document Review skill asks Claude to analyze a document and leave recommendations and notes directly in that editor.
Adobe says this is rolling out globally across Claude and Claude Code on desktop, mobile, and web.
In Gemini, Adobe is adding tools from Photoshop, Lightroom, Express, and Firefly. Adobe’s examples are adjusting lighting and color on product photos, making platform-specific variations of social content, and customizing templates. Adobe says it’s rolling out globally and available across all Gemini plans, connected through Gemini’s connected apps settings with an Adobe sign-in.
Why it matters for designers
The weak spot of “design by chat” has always been the last little bit: the headline that’s one word too long, the photo that’s slightly off-center. Re-prompting for each tweak is slower than just doing it. A layer-based editor inside the conversation means you can let the AI rough something out and then fix details by hand without exporting to another app.
The Acrobat piece is less glamorous but probably more useful day to day. Splitting a proof deck, pulling pages out of a brand guidelines PDF, or redacting a client name before sharing a case study are all small jobs that usually mean opening Acrobat for thirty seconds.
What to watch out for
This is an announcement, and we haven’t tried the new editors ourselves. Adobe doesn’t spell out which of the tools need a signed-in or paid Adobe account versus guest access, so check before building it into a client workflow.
Redaction deserves extra caution. Before you send a redacted PDF anywhere, open it in a separate viewer and confirm the hidden content is actually gone, not just covered up.
The Gemini integration is a narrower set of tools than the Claude plugin, based on Adobe’s own list. If you’re choosing between assistants for Adobe work, the two aren’t equivalent right now.
