About a year later adds Adding generative AI-powered editing capabilities to Photoshop makes Adobe’s flagship product even more AI-enriched. On Tuesday, the company announced that Photoshop is getting the ability to create images with simple text instructions directly within the app. There are also new features that allow the AI to take inspiration from reference images to create new ones and create backgrounds more easily. Adobe believes the tools will make Photoshop easier to use for both professionals and casual enthusiasts who find the program’s learning curve steep.
“A big, blank canvas can sometimes be the biggest obstacle,” Erin Boyce, Photoshop’s chief marketing officer, told Engadget. “It really speeds up the build time. The idea of getting something from your brain to canvas has never been so easy.” The new feature is simply called “Create Image” and will be available as an option in Photoshop alongside the traditional option to import images into the app.
An existing AI-powered feature called Generative Fill, which previously allowed you to add, expand or delete certain parts of an image, has also been improved. It now allows users to add AI-generated images to an existing image that blends perfectly with the original. In a demo shown to Engadget, an Adobe executive was able to flip an image of an empty salad bowl, for example, and ask Photoshop to fill it with an AI-generated image of tomatoes. He was also able to create variations of tomatoes and select one of them to be part of the final image. In another example, the executive replaced the acoustic guitar in the hand of an AI-generated bear with multiple versions of electric guitars using just text prompts, without resorting to Photoshop’s sophisticated tools or brushes.
These updates are supported by Adobe’s latest version, Firefly Image 3 family generative AI models that the company still offers today. Firefly 3 produces higher-quality images, offers more variation and understands your cues better than previous models, Adobe said. The company claims that more than 7 billion images have been created through Firefly so far.
Adobe is far from the only company incorporating generative AI features into its products. Over the past year, companies large and small have enhanced their products and services with AI. For example, both Google and Microsoft have boosted their cash cows with Search and Office AI features, respectively. Recently, Meta started deploying its AI chatbot on Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. But while it’s still unclear how those bets will pan out, Adobe’s updates to Photoshop appear to be more beneficial for creators. The company said Photoshop’s new artificial intelligence features led to a 30 percent increase in Photoshop subscribers.
Meanwhile, generative artificial intelligence has been the focus of artists, authors and other creative professionals who say the underlying models powering the technology are taught in copyrighted media without consent or compensation. Generative AI companies is currently struggling lawsuits by 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 purposes, unlike competitors whose models such as Midjourney are trained by illegally scraping images from the Internet. But a final report from Bloomberg It also showed that Firefly was trained in part on AI-generated images from the same competitors, including Midjourney (an Adobe spokesperson said Bloomberg less than 5 percent of images in the training data come from other AI competitors).
To address concerns about the use of generative artificial intelligence to create disinformation, Adobe said that all images created in Photoshop using generative artificial intelligence tools will be automatically tamper-proof.Content Credentials,” act as digital “food tags” in the file’s metadata that indicate whether the image was generated by AI. However, this is still not a perfect defense against image abuse, with several ways to circumvent it metadata and watermarks.
The new features will be available in beta in Photoshop starting today and will be available to everyone later this year. In the meantime, you can play with Firefly 3 on Adobe website for free.
