Nearly a year after adding AI-powered generative editing capabilities to Photoshop, Adobe is upgrading its flagship product with even more AI. On Tuesday, the company announced that Photoshop is gaining the ability to generate images with simple text prompts directly in the app. There are also new features that allow AI to take inspiration from reference images to create new ones and generate backgrounds more easily. The tools will make Photoshop easier to use for both professionals and casual enthusiasts for whom the app’s learning curve may be steep, Adobe believes.
“A big, blank canvas can sometimes be the biggest obstacle,” Photoshop senior marketing director Erin Boyce said in an interview with Engadget. “This shortens the time to creation significantly. The idea of bringing something from your head to the canvas has never been easier.” The new feature is simply called “Generate Image” and will be available as an option in Photoshop right alongside the traditional option that lets you import images into the app can.
An existing AI-powered feature called Generative Fill, which previously allowed you to add, expand or remove specific parts of an image, has also been updated. It now allows users to add AI-generated images to an existing image that blend seamlessly with the original. For example, in a demo shown to Engadget, an Adobe executive could circle an image of an empty salad bowl and ask Photoshop to fill it with an image of AI-generated tomatoes. She was also able to create variations of the tomatoes and choose one of them as part of the final image. In another example, the executive replaced an acoustic guitar held by an AI-generated bear with multiple versions of electric guitars, simply using text prompts and not having to resort to Photoshop’s complex tools or brushes.
These updates are based on Firefly Image 3, the latest version of Adobe’s family of generative AI models, which the company also announced today. Adobe says Firefly 3 produces higher quality images than previous models, offers more variation and understands your prompts better. The company says Firefly has generated more than 7 billion images to date.
Adobe is far from the only company incorporating generative AI capabilities into its products. Over the last year, companies large and small have revamped their products and services with AI. For example, both Google and Microsoft have upgraded their cash cows Search and Office with AI capabilities. More recently, Meta has started integrating its own AI chatbot into Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. While it’s still unclear how these bets will play out, Adobe’s Photoshop updates appear to be significantly more useful for developers. The company said Photoshop’s new AI features led to a 30 percent increase in Photoshop subscriptions.
Meanwhile, generative AI is in the crosshairs of artists, authors and other creative professionals who say the fundamental models that power the technology were trained on copyrighted media without consent or compensation. Generative AI companies are currently battling lawsuits from dozens of artists and authors. Adobe says Firefly was trained on licensed media from Adobe Stock because it was designed to create content for commercial use, unlike competitors like Midjourney, whose models are trained in part by illegally scraping images from the Internet. But a recent report from Bloomberg showed that Firefly was also partially trained on AI-generated images from the same competitors, including Midjourney (an Adobe spokesperson said). Bloomberg that less than 5 percent of the images in its training data came from other AI competitors).
To address concerns about the use of generative AI to create disinformation, Adobe said that all images created in Photoshop using generative AI tools automatically include tamper-proof “content credentials,” which act like digital “nutrition labels” and indicate that an image was created with AI, in the file’s metadata. However, it is still not a perfect protection against image misuse, as there are several ways to bypass metadata and watermarks.
The new features will be available in beta in Photoshop starting today and will be available to everyone later this year. You can now play Firefly 3 for free on Adobe’s website.