Use Photoshop's new AI features

YOU'LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP CC 25.5 OR LATER

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ADOBE HAS DONE a lot of work to integrate generative AI—a system it calls Firefly—into Photoshop over the past year. The technology has made the jump from the beta version of the app to the mainline release you’ll find on Creative Cloud, as well as the web and iPad versions.

The image-editing app’s AI capabilities now cover much more than producing uncanny images of people with six fingers and an uncountable number of teeth, but then, that was never Adobe’s approach to the tech. It has always taken the position of seeing what neural networks can do for Photoshop without allowing them to become Photoshop, and while the current buzz on social media might be about models such as Sora creating entire videos from scratch, in Photoshop you’re expected to use it to enhance an existing image, saving time and effort, but not compromising on your creativity.

As such, while it’s possible to open a blank document and generate an image of a PC-strewn office or enormous cup of coffee, AI in Photoshop is better used for things like expanding backgrounds, removing power lines, or adding and moving objects. Some of it is less than intuitive, however, as we shall see. –IAN EVENDEN

1 THE TOOLBAR

Generative AI in Photoshop is accessed via a floating toolbar that always seems to be either missing or in the way. It’s clunky, but while it’s possible to imagine many worse ways of doing it, a more elegant solution seems elusive. We’re using version 25.6 of the app, so it’s possible things will be refined. You’ll need 25.5 or later to use some of the tools in this tutorial.