AI art tools arrive in Adobe Photoshop, Express

Editor’s Note: Adobe has added the Adobe Firefly generative AI art tools to Adobe Express as of August 16, as well as in Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Express is part of most Creative Cloud plans, and is a content creation tool for social media, flyers, logos and more.

The original story, dated May 23, described how Firefly was being added to Photoshop. That story follows.

An Adobe Photoshop beta with AI art tools from Adobe Firefly has begun shipping, with the general release scheduled for the second half of 2023, Adobe said. The magic word? “Generative Fill,” the feature that will tap Firefly for creating backgrounds and other digital objects via AI.

For decades, Adobe Photoshop has been synonymous with creating images that don’t correspond to real life. Adobe tip-toed further into this realm earlier this year with Firefly, a superb AI art generator that was then a standalone project. Adobe characterized Firefly as one of its most successful beta launches, with users creating hundreds of millions of digital images.

Eventually, Firefly and the Generative Fill function will be incorporated across Adobe’s Creative Cloud product portfolio, the company said. Adobe characterized Firefly and Generative Fill as a “creative copilot,” the name also given to Microsoft’s AI assistants like the new Windows Copilot, too. For now, you can download the Photoshop beta from Adobe’s website.

There’s something else that Microsoft and Adobe will share, too: a digital watermark, which will identify the resulting image as AI-generated. Adobe calls this “Content Credentials,” but it’s the same principle that Microsoft is using with its own AI digital watermarking scheme.

Here’s how the new Generative Fill tool for Photoshop will work:

Essentially, the new Generative Fill feature looks very similar to what other AI art generators do: Designers can highlight the subject of an image, for example, and then place it in an AI-constructed background. The tool also allows “outpainting,” where you can highlight a region outside of the original image (such as an image of a seascape, for example) and Generative Fill will “extend” the image beyond its original limits, filling in the details using AI. Photoshop can also use AI to add a detail within a given region of the image using the Magic Lasso, such as a sign hanging on a wall.

All of these features are enabled via a text prompt. Firefly allows you to select a particular style, then choose a representative image that you liked best. Photoshop will presumably do the same.

The Firefly beta was excellent, generating images that had been trained on Adobe stock imagery. Photoshop looks like it could presumably carry that even further.