By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Adobe said on Tuesday it plans to integrate a full artificial intelligence image generation tool into its Photoshop software later this year.
Adobe’s image and video editing tools are widely used by creative professionals, but they face growing competition from startups such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Midjourney and Stability AI, all of which offer services that can generate images from text prompts.
Adobe is developing its own image generation AI system called Firefly, which is trained on data that Adobe has rights to, in order to avoid copyright infringement claims against users.
Adobe has previously released image generation tools in Photoshop that can fill or enlarge parts of an existing image. At a conference in London on Tuesday, the company announced that full image generation would arrive later this year, based on a new AI system called Firefly Image 3.
Much of Adobe’s focus has been on speeding up the work of professionals who use its software. The new image generation tool will have the ability to leverage a user’s uploaded image as a reference for the general composition of an image.
For example, a designer could make a quick sketch of a scene on a napkin, take a photo of that napkin with a smartphone, then ask Photoshop to generate full images in a variety of styles, said Ely Greenfield, director of technology for digital. media at Adobe.
“Rather than having to very carefully describe exactly what happens where and try to make sure that I specify the things that I want and what I don’t want, I borrow from reference. So it’s about incredibly powerful ability,” Greenfield said. said.
Adobe said a “beta” test version of the software was available Tuesday to some users, but did not give a general availability date.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jamie Freed)
