Adobe is giving Photoshop users more AI tools for their work belt. A new feature called AI Assisted Editor lets you do a variety of things with your images using merely natural language prompts. It’s not replacing the traditional Pro Editor; it’s just another option.
Adobe also announced several other new features on Thursday — a light adjustment layer for more lighting controls, Instruct Edit with Masks for prompt-based editing, and Markup to let you visually communicate edits by drawing on an image.
Adobe has been busy with new AI wrinkles in the past several months. AI Assistant arrived in March to enable editing with conversational commands, and in June, the company added AI assistants to Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Illustrator and Frame.io. Earlier this month, OpenAI and Adobe teamed up to integrate dozens of photo- and video-editing capabilities into ChatGPT.
AI Assisted Editor is currently being tested in the beta version of Photoshop, which costs $23 per month.
AI Assisted Editor keeps it simple
When you open Photoshop, you will see two editing interface options: AI Assisted and Pro Editor. AI Assisted is the new feature announced Thursday, and Pro Editor is Photoshop’s classic workspace offering manual control over layers, adjustments and editing tools.
Photoshop masters are likely comfortable with Pro Editor, but less-experienced users might gravitate toward AI Assisted for simpler editing.
If you go with AI Assisted, you can use a natural language prompt bar to request edits and changes. A vertical tool bar includes seven functions, including prompt to edit (using natural language prompts), remove background, generative expand (extend image dimensions), generative remove (eliminate unwanted objects), generative fill (add, replace, or remove content), generative upscale (increase image resolution) and AI markup (annotate images).
The Prompt to Edit function could be the biggest game changer. You can change out the image entirely with a natural language prompt. Maybe you’ve got an image of someone sitting on a beach, but want them in the mountains. A prompt of “Put this person on a hiking trail in the mountains” could do the trick.
More new Photoshop features
Adobe also announced three other new options for what the company called “more precise, sharper editing.” The light adjustment layer lets you toggle through several lighting controls — exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks.
With the Instruct Edit with Masks function, you can simply describe the edits you want in the masked areas — have the person smile, put the bird in flight, open the blue door — instead of having to mark every area on the image that you want to edit.
With the markuptool, you can draw on an image to tell the AI your changes. You might circle a building and tell the AI to make it brown, or maybe draw an arrow to where you want a certain object. Adobe says markup is a way of being more precise with the AI to avoid any ambiguity that might occur if you instead used text prompts.
