Adobe's AI Assistant for Photoshop is here to help edit your images

Image: Adobe

Adobe has announced that its "AI Assistant" for Photoshop is now available in public beta. It's designed to let you describe how you want your image changed to a chatbot, and either have the program carry out the edits for you or tell you how to do them. And, if you're willing to use generative AI, you can even draw on your image to have it add new elements or remove existing ones.

When you open a picture in Photoshop for web or mobile and activate the assistant, it analyzes the image to come up with some suggested edits: things like brightening the foreground or cropping in on the subject. The suggestions come in two categories: do it for me, or show me how. If you have your own edits in mind, you can also type what you want done into the box, and it will either go off and do it or tell you what you should do, sometimes complete with links to the tools you'll need.

The company has been working on the feature behind closed doors for a while now, teasing it early last year before finally announcing it at its Max conference in October. When I spoke to a Photoshop product manager at Adobe's Max conference last year, it was clear that the company is thinking of the AI assistant as an automation tool first, and a learning tool second. However, in the little bit I played around with it, the current version seemed to be at its best when instructing, rather than executing.

This is exactly the kind of edit a beginner might need help with, and I think the answer it came up with is pretty decent for that audience, especially since it gives you links to open the tools.

As an example, I asked it how I could brighten the shadows in an image without also raising the highlights. It came up with a genuinely good answer: add a curves adjustment layer, and drag the shadow adjustment point upwards. It even gave me a link that opened up the Curve tool. However, it also told me it could do it for me, so I told it to give it a shot.

Instead of taking the steps it described, the assistant added a brightness/contrast adjustment layer and just raised the brightness of the entire image, blowing out the highlights. The bot then said: "Shadows are now brighter! 🕶️✨ The adjustment layer focused on lifting the dark areas (like faces and clothing), while the highlights stayed crisp and untouched-no blown-out windows here!" (Especially ironic since the chat box was covering most of the image except for the now blown-out window.)

The tool is at its best when using the tools that Adobe's already been working on automating, such as subject masking and adjustment, and removing objects.

Theoretically, this approach would've worked had it created a layer mask, an edit it was happy to do in other situations, but for whatever reason, it didn't decide to do that. Some other issues I ran into: when I asked it to brighten the foreground of an image, its initial selection was completely incorrect, including patches of the sky, resulting in an oddly splotchy result (though, in fairness, at the end the bot realized things hadn't gone to plan). On another photo, one of the suggested edits was to "enhance the colors for a more vibrant look," which would've been a reasonable suggestion had it not been a black and white photo.

The tool showed me the selection as it was making it, and I thought, "Well, that's not going to go well." And, indeed, it did not.*

There were some successes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given all the work Adobe has put into distraction removal, the model did a decent job when I asked it to remove extraneous objects from a photo. It's also worth noting that the AI assistant's edits are broken down in the edit history pane, so if it fell over at the last step, you can just undo that and take control yourself. It also shows the tools being used on screen as it (slowly) runs through each step, potentially making it easier to do it yourself next time.

Adobe has also introduced a tool called AI Markup, which lets you sketch something onto your photo and have generative AI add it in for you. AI image generation in Photoshop is nothing new, but this should make it that bit easier to make sure the elements you're trying to add end up where you want them to.

I'm tired of every tool I use showing me endless pop-ups about their AI assistants, but...

I'm tired of every tool I use showing me endless pop-ups about their AI assistants, but I think there's definitely a place for something like this in a program as complicated as Photoshop. As long as it's not too insistent that you use it, it could wind up being a useful teaching tool for those getting into photo editing, or for more obscure edits that you don't quite remember how to do (not everyone will have memorized CollegeHumor's Photoshop tutorial rap for redeye removal). It seems like Adobe has a bit of work to do before the tool can reliably automate tiresome tasks, but the bones for that system are clearly here.

The AI Assistant is available in Photoshop for the web and mobile, and AI Markup is available in the web version. Adobe says Creative Cloud subscribers will have unlimited image generation with the tool until April 9th; after that, it'll presumably fall back to using however many credits are included in your plan. If you're a free Photoshop for web user, you'll get 20 image generations.

* - In fairness, giving it a JPEG with such high contrast wasn't really setting it up for success, but I at least expected it to select the black part of the image and try to brighten it. I would've tried it with the Raw, but Photoshop for web couldn't open it.