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Dubai: If you are a student in India, Adobe just made your creative life significantly easier, and completely free.
At the India AI Impact Summit held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on February 19, Adobe announced that its flagship tools, including Photoshop, Acrobat and its AI platform Firefly, will be available at no cost to students through accredited higher education institutions across the country. The move is part of a broader investment in India’s creative and AI economy, and the scale of it is significant.
Why is Adobe offering free products
Adobe’s announcement ties directly into the Indian Government’s Create in India vision and the Union Budget 2026, which has set a target of creating two million jobs in Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics by 2030.
“Adobe is expanding the opportunity for creativity for millions of students across India, empowering them with AI skills, further accelerating Prime Minister Modi’s vision,” said Shantanu Narayen, Chair and CEO of Adobe. “I look forward to seeing what the students of India create with Adobe’s industry-leading tools.”
The free offer will be rolled out across 15,000 schools and 500 colleges that will be home to Content Creator Labs, giving students not just the software but also curriculum, training and industry-recognised credentials to take into the workforce.
Adobe has also partnered with NASSCOM FutureSkills Prime, a government-backed digital skilling initiative, to offer free AI-focused courses and certificates to learners across India.
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What are the free tools
If you have not used Adobe’s suite before, here is a simple breakdown of what students are getting access to.
Photoshop The industry standard for image editing and graphic design. Photoshop is used by photographers, designers, marketers, and filmmakers worldwide. It lets you edit photos, create graphics, remove backgrounds, retouch images, and build visual content from scratch. Its AI-powered Generative Fill feature means you can now add, remove or expand parts of an image simply by typing what you want.
Acrobat Pro This is Adobe’s PDF tool, and it is far more useful than most people realise. With Acrobat Pro, you can create, edit and convert PDF documents, edit text and images directly within a PDF, and collaborate on documents with others. For students writing reports, submitting assignments, or preparing presentations, it is genuinely useful on a daily basis.
Adobe Firefly This is the one that is changing the game. Firefly is Adobe’s AI creative platform, and it goes well beyond generating images from text prompts, though it does that too.
Firefly brings together over a dozen AI models under one roof, including Adobe’s own tools alongside models from Google, OpenAI, Runway, ElevenLabs and more. Instead of juggling multiple apps and subscriptions to access different AI tools, students get everything in one place.
Here is what Firefly can actually do:
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Generate images and videos from text descriptions
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Generative Fill in Photoshop, which lets you add or remove elements from photos just by describing what you want
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Text effects and vector graphics created from prompts
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Video editing including automatic captions, translations, background removal, and video enhancement
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Ideation boards, an infinite scrolling canvas where you can generate and combine content to build out creative concepts
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Quick actions for everyday tasks like cropping, converting files, captioning videos, and generating QR codes
Importantly, all content created through Adobe’s own Firefly models is designed to be safe for commercial use, meaning students can use what they create professionally without copyright concerns.
What this means for students
For a design student working on a campaign, a media student producing short films, or a business student putting together presentations, having Photoshop, Acrobat and Firefly available for free removes a barrier that has historically been significant. Adobe’s tools are widely used across industries, and knowing them well is a genuine advantage when entering the job market.
During the Summit, Adobe also showcased Kathāvatār, a series of five short AI films based on Indian folklore, created by a new generation of AI filmmakers, giving a glimpse of what is possible when these tools are in the right hands.
Students across India can access the offer through their accredited higher education institution. The tools come with curriculum and credentials built in, so the learning starts from day one.
Areeba Hashmi is a trainee at Gulf News.
