Adobe Photoshop (Firefly)
While Adobe Photoshop has been building AI tools into its apps for more than 15 years, it wasn’t until this year that the company released a text-to-image generator—at least in beta. You can try it out on the web for free or through Adobe Express, but it’s at its best in the latest Photoshop beta, which you need to be a Creative Cloud subscriber to check out.
Adobe’s AI model, called Firefly, has a few tricks up its sleeve. In addition to being capable of generating new images from a detailed text description, it can create text effects from a written prompt (think, the word “TOAST” written with letters that look like they’re made from toast), recolor vector artwork, or add AI-generated elements to your images. You can test all these out through the web app, but it’s that last feature where Firefly stands out.
Taken purely as a text-to-image generator,
Adobe Photoshop Firefly’s results can be pretty hit and miss. It can match or beat DALL·E or Stable Diffusion for some prompts, but for others. I question what it was aiming to do. On the other hand, its integration with Photoshop, the industry standard image editor, is next level.
The particular feature is called Generative Fill. The idea is that you use Photoshop’s regular tools to select an area of your image, and then, just by clicking a button and typing a prompt, you can replace it with something else. Crucially, Generative Fill understands the context of your image. In the screenshot above, you can see that Photoshop has matched the depth-of-field blur and colors for the castle I added using Generative Fill. It looks cohesive.
As much as DALL·E and Stable Diffusion have started the conversation about image-generating AIs. Adobe’s Firefly is the first implementation of an AI photo generator that really hints at what’s to come. It isn’t a party trick. A tool that will soon be available to the millions of professionals who use Adobe apps every day.
It’s worth noting that while Firefly is in beta. The images it generates aren’t supposed to be used for commercial purposes.
Firefly pricing: Free beta online; Photoshop is available from $19.99/month as part of the Creative Cloud Photography Plan.
