4 Examples of how AI can be used in Photoshop

AI has arrived in Photoshop Beta. It’s called Adobe Firefly and it offers content generation via a prompt. Like Midjourney, you can generate an image from a white layer, or make changes to an existing photo.

I haven’t tested AI via the Adobe Firefly website; the examples you’ll find below were created using the Photoshop Beta application.

1. Full image generation

Exemple

In Photoshop Beta:

1. Go to File and click on New;
2. Specify the dimensions of the image you want to create;
3. Select the selection rectangle tool;
4. Select your entire layer (CTRL + A on Windows, CMD + A on OSX);
5. The contextual Toolbar then displays a field to enter the prompt. When I tested MidJourney, the first image generation I suggested was a cityscape of Paris at night with whales flying in the sky. Let’s try the same here:

Add cityscape of Paris by sunset, add whales flying in the sky. Miyazaki style.

A new layer and three content suggestions are generated.

In the sidebar, the Generative layer settings block displays the prompt field and thumbnails of the three proposals. You can indicate whether the content created is of good or poor quality. You can also send Adobe a more detailed report.

Here are the three suggestions:

As I wasn’t completely satisfied, I asked Firefly again to suggest three interpretations of my prompt. In the end, I think I prefer the version below.

So what do you think? Well, it’s not quite there yet, but a prompt can be refined. It’s up to you!

2. Adding content to a photo

You may have seen composites on the Internet made from photographs altered by adding elements using Adobe Firefly. So I gave it a try. And you’ll see, I didn’t take any risks to ensure that the result was acceptable on the universal scale of good taste.

Exemple

I pulled out a photo I’d taken during a storm in Biarritz. I had the idea of adding an element to the background, a secondary subject that would echo the waves.

You can download the photo to test at home:

1. Go to the toolbar and choose Lasso tool;
2. Select a fairly wide band selection including the horizon and a part of thesky.
   
   Enter the following prompt:

Add dark and mysterious shape of an island in the background

Here is the most relevant result of the first proposals:

3. Help with photo retouching

As far as I’m concerned, the most frequent use of Adobe Firefly’s artificial intelligence will deal with photographic retouching.
Everyone have dozens or even hundreds of photographs where the composition has been disrupted by an undesirable element. Until now, to remove a background element or a person from your images, you had to use a combination of tools such as the magic wand or the duplication stamp. With time and practice, of course, you could achieve very decent results.

Exemple

Here’s a photo of horses I captured during a trip to Iceland this winter.

In the background you can make out roads and human constructions. I want to erase them to add a more raw and natural atmosphere.

To do this, I proceed in small successive stages, working on one element at a time. For example, below, I’m only concerned with the road, which takes up a significant part of the photo.

In Photoshop Beta :

1. Import your photo;
2. Go to the toolbar and choose Lasso tool;
3. Draw the outline of the area you want to erase. To make things easier for the Firefly AI, try not to combine different types of element;
4. Go to the field to enter the prompt in English, be simple and precise. Here, we want to delete the road:

Remove the road on the background

Repeat points 3 and 4 as many times as necessary, adapting the prompt of course.

And here are the results after a few iterations and adjustments on the Lightroom side.

4. Completing a panorama

Are you a familiar with of panoramas or brenizers ¹ ?

When you take a series of shots to create a panorama, you often end up with areas that you haven’t photographed. These can ruin the composition you’d hoped for, or to a lesser extent, force you to crop and leave areas with great potential untouched.

Exemple

I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised by the result of the example that follows.

During a hike on the Moucherotte, I wanted to create a panorama to immerse my companions for the day in the heart of the three massifs surrounding Grenoble. Below you can see a collage of 96 shots showing the Chartreuse Massif and a section of the Belledonne Massif from the Vercors. As a bonus, you can see the majestic Mont-Blanc rising in the distance.

All the white spaces represent areas where shots are missing.

When I first considered using Photoshop AI to complete the panorama, I had some reservations, particularly about its ability to manage the foreground. Indeed, depth of field is a major aspect that adds to the difficulty of generating set elements.

But then the magic happened.

The number of iterations required here was three, so I just roughly selected the three main areas of missing content in succession. And here’s the same prompt used for each area:

Fill the part of the picture in white

Notes :

(1) brenizer: a brenizer is a technique also known as Bokeh Panorama or Bokehrama. It is named after Ryan Brenizer, who is associated with the process of creating very high resolution portraits using several images taken with a long focal length lens.