Adobe adds generative AI features to Photoshop software

Adobe Inc on Tuesday said it is adding artificial intelligence (AI) technology for generating imagery into Photoshop, its flagship software for editing images.

The San Jose, California-based company said it was the start of a major push to add such AI technologies to its suite of programs aimed at creative professionals.

While programs such as OpenAI's Dall-E have captured the public imagination by transforming text prompts into images, they have not yet seen wide use by big corporations because of legal questions around the data used to develop the systems.

Adobe has sought to address those concerns with a core technology system it calls Firefly, which was specifically created with legal-to-use image data and which Adobe says can be used in commercial settings.

Adobe has been testing the system for about six weeks on a standalone website and on Tuesday said it will add features based on it to Photoshop, perhaps the company's best known product.

One new feature will be called "Generative Fill" and it will allow users to extend an original image that was cropped in too closely with computer-generated content, or add features based on a text description.

The feature can, for example, take a picture of a single flower and turn it into a field of flowers with a mountain range behind it.

Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer for digital media at Adobe, said that the intention of the tool is not to replace graphic artists but to make it faster for them to create new images out of multiple ideas. In the past, they would have had to spend valuable hours searching photo archives and stitching together pieces of existing images by hand.

"This just dramatically accelerates that production work," Greenfield said.