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Your best bet would be to write a plugin that accomplishes your idea or something close, this would have copyright protection and then you could present it to Adobe to buy or alternately post it on Adobe Marketplace for sale.
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If you are already using the software, be aware that in the Adobe General Terms of Use, which you agree to when you choose to use the software, it says in Section 4.6:
4.6 Feedback. You may choose to provide us with feedback regarding the Services and Software, including in the form of ideas, suggestions, proposals, examples involving your Content, ("Feedback"). In such event, you agree that we are free to use the Feedback for our business purposes, including by incorporation into the Services and Software without any payment or attribution or other obligation to you.
This is very standard legal language found in many companies’ legal terms of service. If you have a great idea and require payment, the best way to proceed might be to secure legal counsel, such as an intellectual property lawyer, who can help you find out the best way to present the idea to a company in a standard way, such as licensing. But for an idea alone, payment is not common and should not be expected.
I perfectly understand the terms of service.
I don't even want a lot of money for it but I can't hand it to you for free.
"¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "
I perfectly understand the terms of service. It's just that with the advent of AI and the ongoing problem of dealing with payment collection issues from clients as designers add this feature would not be that hard for your coders and it would bode well for Adobe. I don't even want a lot of money for it but I can't hand it to you for free.
By @joem76294518
You said “you” but just be aware most of us posting here are users who don’t work for Adobe. If someone does, they’re labeled as an Adobe employee.
One aspect of this is the value that Adobe would assign to the idea vs what you think it’s worth. What I mean by that is, there is already a long list of really great ideas that Photoshop should do. (Just look at the number of feature requests in the Ideas section here.) And a fair number of those really good ideas are considered “absolutely must add, too valuable to ignore, total game changer, will save me thousands of hours/dollars” features by the person who submitted them.
The problem is each one of those people has different legitimate needs, and because of that they don’t think the other people’s ideas are as important as theirs.
So any really excellent idea is competing with hundreds of others. Adobe is not going to hand out cash to all of them. Partly because, Adobe has their ideas too. Like any software company, whether they decide make a change to the software will depend on factors like how the feature aligns with the current code, marketing priorities, and near future goals on the existing roadmap. All of which are out of your control.
So in a lot of cases, a feature we really care about ends up moving down the list because current development priorities favor other features on the list. So the prioritization of which features to do next is usually not aligned with the vote counts on the Ideas page or the priorities of any individual user. That fluidity and uncertainty is a big reason software companies don’t pay for ideas.
It's just that with the advent of AI and the ongoing problem of dealing with payment collection issues from clients as designers add this feature…
By @joem76294518
If your idea touches the realm of payments and other legal-related issues, that is a big reason that legal advice from an intellectual property lawyer is a first step. Those professionals understand how to advance your idea in a way that Adobe might be convinced to pay for it, and also help protect your idea in a way that you actually get paid. Also because, if it did turn out that they get interested in paying, the first thing any large software company is going to do is call their army of lawyers to make sure their end of the deal is watertight, so having your lawyers ready too is a step you do not want to skip.
Having a lawyer is also needed simply because, per the Terms, they are not obligated to pay for any ideas sent to them, so if you want more than that, you’ll need to make it happen in a legally binding way.
Also, because you mentioned AI and designers, check which angles of your idea Adobe might already be covering through the Content Credentials set of features already in development. Content Credentials is based on the industry-wide Content Authenticity Initiative of tamper-evident metadata that is supposed to help us more easily identify altered or AI-generated digital art, and help identify who actually made components used in a digital artwork (to help preserve credit due to a designer).
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