Adobe Photoshop Just Got Generative AI Fills

Adobe rolls out Firefly functionality in Photoshop for generative fills. Its really easy, powerful—and not perfect.

Adobe Photoshop Beta is now available here.

Adobe’s new Photoshop (Beta) available on Creative Cloud has a new feature—Generative Fill. Harvested from Adobe Firefly’s capabilities, this single feature puts a lot of what Photoshop designers want, where they want it.

What Works Well

• Speed. Generative Fill is a powerful, and blazingly fast feature. For most of my images, it was at least 4 times faster than Midjourney.
• Fine grain control. I really like how I can isolate the area within my existing image that it will manipulate, which makes it much more useful for modifying specific images or using real people in images I want to alter.
• Easy to use. Prompting seems to be more intuitive, with more natural language capabilities and less weight on the order of terms. I suspect Adobe is rightly setting a gold standard for training its models. As long as your selection is right, it was very easy to nail the image I wanted each time.
• Non-destructive. I also love that this is a non-destructive way to edit the image. You can revert in history, and generate fills in layers.

What Doesn’t Work

• Subject selection is clunky. Selecting the subject image with their auto-tools is problematic, but reverting to standard tools for selection and inversion works.
• Blending is still rough when objects are close. Many of the images blend light weirdly when objects are too close, and it does not handle layering of objects well—it wants a clear background to fill.
• No support for illustrations. I also noticed that it does not handle illustrations at all. So, all fills will be photographic.
• Image variations and refinement. Finally, while it does present several image variations, you have to scroll through them. It is not easy to compare, or refine the generations.

I’m sure I will notice more as I use the tool more, but these are the first impressions. Please share your observations in the responses below!