Write the visual brief

This course follows one product job from start to finish.

You have a studio photograph of an olive-oil bottle. It sits on grey seamless paper under one large softbox, and every word on the label is sharp. In the Layers panel this photograph is locked, so nothing can paint over it by accident.

The client is a family producer. They want the bottle on a stone table outdoors, late on a summer afternoon. Generative tools can now build that setting in seconds. A generative tool is software that makes new image content from a text prompt, such as Adobe Firefly or generative fill in Photoshop.

One rule governs the whole job: the bottle in the picture must match the bottle on the shelf. A shopper who buys it should get what they saw.

You'll get questions like these right away: where does the glass touch the stone? What does the shadow do there? Should the stone reflect the label? Does evening light agree with the softbox in the original shot?

In this Intro course you work on one image only. Producing the full set of sizes comes later in the track.

Work that used to take hours of masking, cloning and hand-painting can now take seconds. Who says so matters here.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's chair and chief executive, calls AI "an augmentation tool". He says the people at risk are the ones who don't use it, and he expects the biggest benefit at the start of a job, when you're exploring ideas. Keep in mind that Adobe sells these tools, so this is the vendor's view.

Adobe's own 2025 research (also vendor research) reports that 96 percent of more than 1,600 marketers said demand for content had at least doubled in two years.

An independent survey shows a split. In Creative Boom's 2026 survey of 882 creative professionals, 86 percent use AI tools, but only 10 percent think its effect on the industry is positive.

So most people in your field already use these tools, and most of them are uneasy about it. You don't have to settle that debate in this course. Your job here is to use the tools without losing control of the picture.

Lisa Carney finishes Hollywood movie posters. She's often the last person to work on the key art. She says her own work has already fallen sharply as the tools got easier. She also says the hard part hasn't gone away: the eye that sees "that head's too big", a shadow that's off, a colour that doesn't match. That eye still separates professionals.

Chris Do, designer and founder of The Futur, points to the 1980s and 90s. Many professionals were angry about desktop publishing, yet it replaced phototypesetting anyway.

That leaves two ways to fail:

1. Refusing: you mask by hand on principle while the work goes to someone who uses the tool. That's what happened to the typesetters.
2. Flattening: you take the first generation, merge it down, export it and put your name on the machine's guess.

Between them sits a habit the craft already has, called non-destructive editing. That means every change sits on its own layer and the original stays intact underneath. In practice: generate what helps, destroy nothing you can't get back, and ship nothing you haven't inspected up close.

A visual brief is a short written statement of what the image must achieve and what it must contain. The most useful thing it does is split everything in the picture into two groups.

Required means it must not change. For this job that's the bottle itself, every word on the label, the cap and the oil colour. These belong to the product. They aren't yours to change, and a shopper will compare them with the real bottle.

Optional means it's open to choice. That covers the stone, the light, the time of day, and props such as an olive branch. You can explore these freely, and different concepts can try different versions.

A simple test: would the client have to reprint packaging or recall stock to make the real product look like this? If yes, it's required. A darker oil colour or a reworded label fails the test. A warmer sunset doesn't.

Write each required item as a specific statement, for example "Label text unchanged, every word legible at 100 percent zoom." A vague line such as "keep the bottle accurate" is hard to check later.

Scott Kelby, chief executive of KelbyOne and a long-time author of photography books, opens one of his talks by admitting AI left him "freaked out as a photographer". His answer was to use AI where it makes him more productive and keep a line around the rest.

Your brief gives that line its own section, the AI boundary. It states which parts of the image may be generated and which may not, and you write it before you prompt anything.

For the olive-oil job:

• AI may generate: the stone surface, the outdoor setting, the background, the late-afternoon light, and optional props.
• AI may not touch: the label, the cap, the oil, or the bottle's shape.

The AI boundary usually follows the required/optional split, but it's a separate decision. A required area can still be off-limits to any change, including hand retouching beyond cleanup the client has agreed to. Writing the boundary down also helps later. When you use generative fill in Photoshop, your selection must stay outside the protected areas, and anyone reviewing the file can check that it did.

A reference is any image you use to guide the look: a stone texture, a mood shot of evening light, a competitor's ad. A source image is one whose pixels end up in the final file, such as the bottle photograph.

Your brief lists every reference and source image with three facts:

• Source: where it came from (a client delivery, a licensed stock image, your own photo).
• Owner: who holds the rights.
• Permission status: permitted, not permitted, or unknown.

Two rules apply here.

First, unknown permission is not approval. If you found a lovely stone photo online and can't name its owner, mark it unknown and flag it for a person to decide. Don't upload it to Firefly in the meantime.

Second, confidential client files stay out of cloud tools the client hasn't approved. An unreleased label design is a good example. Firefly runs in the cloud, so ask before you upload.

This course doesn't give legal advice on copyright. Your job is to record what you know, state plainly what you don't know, and hand the open questions to someone who can answer them.

Now put it together. Your brief fits on one page and has six sections:

1. Intention: one or two sentences, for example "The client's olive-oil bottle on a stone table outdoors, late on a summer afternoon, warm but true to the product."
2. Required: bottle, every word of the label, cap, oil colour.
3. Optional: stone, light, time of day, props.
4. AI boundary: what may be generated and what may not.
5. References and permissions: source, owner and status for each one.
6. Open questions for a person: decisions you can't make yourself.

The first open question is always the same: does this client accept a generated setting at all? Some clients want AI-made work, and some want none. The answer belongs to the client and the producer, not to you or the software.

Draft your brief and paste it to the tutor. The tutor will check for vague required items, gaps in the boundary and permissions marked as known when they're really guesses. In the next lesson you'll use this brief to write Firefly concept prompts.