The Future of Design: AI Image Generation Integration Coming to Photoshop

Adobe said Tuesday that it will add a full-fledged AI Image Generation tool to its Photoshop program later in the year.

Professionals widely use Adobe’s video and image editing software. However, it faces increasing competition from startups like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Midjourney, and Stability AI. All of these offer services that can create images from text.

Adobe developed its AI Image Generation system, called Firefly. This AI is trained using data Adobe holds rights over, to prevent copyright claims being made against users.

Adobe has released tools that allow you to fill in and expand existing images. The company announced at a London conference on Tuesday that full image creation will be available later this year based on Firefly Image 3, a new AI-based system.

Adobe has focused on speeding up the work of its users. Adobe’s new tool for image generation will be able to use an uploaded picture as a guideline when creating an image.

Ely Greenfield is the chief technology officer at Adobe for digital media. She explained that a designer can make a sketch on a piece of paper, take a picture of it with their smartphone, and ask Photoshop to create a fully-featured image in different styles.

It’s easier to borrow from the references than to describe everything in detail and make sure I specify what I want and don’t want. Greenfield stated that this was a very powerful tool.

Adobe announced that a “beta-test” version was available for some users Tuesday, but didn’t give an exact date of general availability.