Photographers Can Now Tell Photoshop How to Edit Their Images

Adobe has brought its promised agentic AI assistant to Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat.

The initial release is limited in scope, available now as a public beta in Photoshop across web and mobile, but not desktop, and it shows Adobe’s broader agentic AI plans for its Creative Cloud applications.

“Using AI Assistant in Photoshop is as simple as describing the edits you want — like removing distractions, changing backgrounds, refining lighting, or adjusting color,” Adobe explains. Users can then decide if they want the AI Assistant to automatically make the requested edits, or instead show the user a step-by-step guide to achieve the desired results. This second option, if executed well, could have extensive educational benefits, as Photoshop has a fairly steep learning curve. Users can converse with the AI via text or, in the Photoshop mobile app, via voice.

Specifically in the Photoshop web, a new AI Markup tool, powered by AI Assistant, lets users draw directly on their photos and add prompts for what they want to change and where.

“For example, you can mark up an area of an image, then type in a prompt to add flowers or mountains. Within seconds Photoshop will generate amazing results,” Adobe explains.

The company offers other examples of how to use the AI Assistant in Photoshop, including removing unwanted people or objects, changing colors and lighting, refining portraits, tweaking lighting, cropping images for particular use cases, and much more.

There are also photo-relevant changes to Adobe Firefly. Beyond Adobe’s general Firefly application, there are also many Firefly-powered tools inside Photoshop. For example, Generative Fill, Generative Remove, Generative Expand, Generative Upscale, and Remove Background all use Firefly. These are now all available in the dedicated Firefly Image Editor.

It is worth noting that Firefly works with an ever-expanding list of non-Adobe AI models. Firefly now supports over 25 other models, including Google’s Nano Banana 2, OpenAI Image Generation, Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 [pro], and many more.

Adobe’s new AI Assistant is now available in public beta in Photoshop for web and mobile (iOS and Android). Firefly’s new image editing tools are available now.

Image credits: Adobe