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.

» Generative AI is also tied to the Properties palette on the right of the interface, from where you can choose between variations of the generated imagery, and the Options palette that’s at the top, too. Adobe calls the floating bar the Contextual Task Bar, but we’ll call it the floating toolbar so it doesn’t get confused with the Windows Taskbar. While attempting to take screenshots for this tutorial, the floating toolbar vanished, and could only be brought back by unchecking and rechecking the Contextual Task Bar option on the Window menu. To avoid this, you can pin the bar in place by clicking the three-dot menu on its right, drag it around by clicking on its left-hand end when it inevitably obscures an important part of your project, or make it go away completely by choosing Hide.