Adobe doubles down on AI with latest Photoshop update – makes editing even more easy

Photoshop has been the professional tool of choice for image editors for many years and has been progressively integrating AI features to aid those working on images.

The latest additions to Photoshop feel like a bigger step, taking the AI tools and adding a more seamless feel. There's a big control change in the AI options available, making them work with markup rather than relying on text prompts, which will add a degree of certainty when working with generative results.

Adobe highlights that the Instruct Edit with Masks feature will allow creators greater precision with generative edits. With Adobe Firefly providing the generative elements, the whole image can be understood, including the areas that AI isn't allowed to touch, like branding elements or the people in the image.

While the Pro Editor gets enhancements, the AI Assisted Editor (in beta) gives access to generative tools using prompts without the requiring the manual editing that Photoshop is traditionally known for.

This might help fend off the threat from lightweight Gen AI image tools that are quick and simple, with Photoshop appealing to a wider range of users. The AI Assisted Editor includes a full range of functions including natural language editing prompts, background removal, generative expand, object removal, generative fill, generative upscale and the AI markup mentioned above.

In the Pro Editor, generative AI changes sit in a dedicated layer, so nothing is destructive and you can easily remove or hide those layers so it should be really easy to create, edit and change your mind or switch image content, something that Photoshop has always been known for.

That's not the only thing that Photoshop is adding however, with a new Light Adjustment Layer. This will give you exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, all adjusted in a layer. Adobe describes this as RAW-level control from within the Photoshop workflow.

That might mean that you don't have to jump back the RAW editor to tweak the image before moving it into Photoshop and it looks like it will conveniently group those light controls so they can be easily adjusted from a jpeg image.

While many tools offer these sorts of changes in Photoshop already, being able to easily adjust an image as though tweaking in RAW could be a really smooth process.