01 Adobe Firefly in Photoshop
If anyone should be worried about the emergence of generative AI art it’s Adobe, the company that’s had a stranglehold on computer-generated art for the past couple of decades.
Adobe has been dabbling with generative art with Firefly, a beta web service that allows users to create images from text prompts (a poor man’s Midjourney; see no. 5), fill in text with specified textures or recolour vector art images. However, Adobe’s big AI breakthrough has arrived with the inclusion of Firefly in the Photoshop beta. It is nothing short of stunning.
Take the sample picture shown above of the runner, for example. I extended the canvas, drew a selection box around the empty space and told Photoshop to fill it with a “pond with waterlilies”, and within seconds it came back with the larger image. The pond edge looks entirely natural, the lighting is right, and it’s even made a decent stab of capturing the runner and dog’s reflection in the water. The reflection isn’t quite right, but it’s nothing that a short bit of work with Photoshop’s regular cloning tools wouldn’t easily fix.
It can be used for more subtle changes, too. Take the image of the footballer below, where I drew a selection around the player’s hair and asked Firefly to generate a “green mohawk-style haircut”. It’s removed his current hair and put a convincing mohawk in there, but the most impressive thing is the way it accurately reflects the direction of the sunlight in the photo, making the hair lighter on the right side of his head.
Jobs that would previously have taken a fair while and no little amount of skill to pull off convincingly are now performed in
