Adobe to bring full AI image generation to Photoshop this year

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) -Adobe said on Tuesday it plans to place a tool for full artificial intelligence image generation in its Photoshop software later this year.

Adobe's image and video editing tools are widely used by creative professionals, but it faces rising 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 previously released image-generation tools in Photoshop that can fill in or expand parts an existing image. At a conference in London on Tuesday, the company said full image generation will come 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 tap 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, snap a photo of that napkin with a smartphone and then ask Photoshop to generate fully featured images in a variety of styles, said Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer for digital media at Adobe.

"Rather than having to very carefully describe exactly what goes where and try to make sure that I'm specifying the things I want things and that I don't, it's borrowing from the reference. So this is an amazingly powerful capability," Greenfield said.

Adobe said a test "beta" version of the software is available to some users on Tuesday but did not give a date for general availability.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Franciso; Editing by Jamie Freed)