By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Adobe said on Tuesday it plans to put a full artificial intelligence imaging tool into its Photoshop software later this year.
Adobe’s image and video editing tools are widely used by creative professionals, but it faces growing competition from startups like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Midjourney and Stability AI, which offer services that can generate images from text prompts.
Adobe is developing its own image-generating AI system called Firefly, which is trained on data that Adobe has rights to, in order to prevent copyright infringement claims against users.
Adobe previously released imaging tools in Photoshop that can fill or expand parts of an existing image. At a conference in London on Tuesday, the company said full imaging will take place later this year, based on a new AI system called Firefly Image 3.
Much of Adobe’s focus has been on streamlining the work of professionals who use its software. The new image generation tool will have the ability to tap on the user-uploaded image as a reference for the overall composition of an image.
For example, a designer could quickly sketch a scene on a napkin, take a photo of that napkin with a smartphone, and then ask Photoshop to generate completed images in various styles, said Ely Greenfield, director of digital technology. media at Adobe.
“Instead of having to very carefully describe exactly what goes where and trying to make sure I’m specifying what I want and what I don’t want, it’s borrowing from reference. So this is an incredibly powerful capability,” Greenfield he said.
Adobe said a “beta” test version of the software will be available to some users on Tuesday, but did not provide a date for general availability.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jamie Freed)
