Color is one of the most important elements of a consistent brand identity. But for small teams and solo entrepreneurs, making sure templates, images, and photos all align with a brand’s colors can be a big challenge. So Adobe Researchers collaborated with the Adobe Express team to create On-brand Recolor. The new feature uses AI and tailored algorithms to thoughtfully recolor graphics with a brand’s color palette in mind.
“Businesses want to bring out the subtle color elements in their creations so customers can immediately make a connection to the brand,” explains Principal Scientist Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, whose team developed On-brand Recolor. “But the major pain point for users is that, when they bring in their own images from another context, it’s very hard to make those images look on-brand. That’s where our recoloring technology comes to the fore.”
Users begin inside Adobe Express, where they can create a Brand Kit to define their key branding elements, including colors, fonts, assets, and logos. From there, On-brand Recolor taps into the brand’s colors to recolor a single page, or a page within a template, with just a click. Users choose from several options, and they can adjust the color of individual elements as needed.
The On-brand Recolor feature made its public debut this fall at Adobe MAX.
The research behind On-Brand Recolor
When the Adobe Express team came to Adobe Research, they had the idea for a recoloring tool and wanted to tailor it to Express users, who aren’t usually professional designers. They knew that recoloring images by hand was too cumbersome, and simply applying a tint to an entire image wouldn’t work either. If your brand color is bright red, for example, you might want to apply it to a few parts of an image, but you wouldn’t want a red tint for the sky in the background.
To develop the new feature, the Adobe Research team first tapped into an existing algorithm that allows users to recolor black and white photos. Then they updated it to apply a brand’s colors instead. “But when we surfaced this technology to our designers and user research partners, we saw that a standard recoloring algorithm produces a lot of artificial colors,” says Srinivasan. “We went back to the drawing board and figured out that the key was simply not touching every pixel. So, we added a module that identifies the regions of the image that should be recolored.”
Natural elements like human skin and hair, water, and skies, needed to keep their original colors, while things like a person’s clothing or the text on an image could be adjusted. To make it work, researchers built a taxonomy that identifies “natural” and “unnatural” elements in an image. For even better results, they applied constraints to make sure the new colors harmonize well.
During the process, researchers looped in designers, asking them to recolor images manually so researchers could adjust their algorithms to achieve similar results. “We wanted to know what the ideal output would be if someone did everything by hand because we wanted our users to have the power of a creative professional at their fingertips,” says Srinivasan.
Adobe Researchers worked closely with the Express team, including product managers, designers, user researchers, engineers, and the deployment team, all the way from the early brainstorming phase through co-developing the model, shaping a great user experience, and writing the code that allows the feature to produce high-resolution graphics nearly in real time.
The grand finale of the collaboration was seeing On-brand Recolor revealed at this year’s Adobe MAX. “It was really exciting because this is one of the marquee events for Adobe, and we felt very good about being able to deliver one of the distinguishing features for the release,” says Srinivasan.
The future of On-brand Recolor
Advances in AI make On-brand Recolor possible, and Srinivasan sees the feature as an important step forward in providing more creative control for users. “There are powerful AI models that create images and text from prompts, but they don’t give people much flexibility to edit. So for On-brand Recolor, we wanted to leverage the advances in language vision models and image segmentation that help us understand more about images and user intent—and then add a layer of control so users can get exactly what they’re looking for.”
In the future, Srinivasan says On-brand Recolor will be able to recolor multiple pages at a time and apply recoloring to videos within animated templates. Eventually, he hopes the technology will move beyond color to other important elements of brand identity, from fonts to tone of voice. “On-brand Recolor helps pave the way for us to give even more capabilities, and control, to users,” he says.
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