Adobe is adding more AI to Photoshop
Adobe is introducing a beta “AI Assisted Editor” view for Photoshop, bringing its AI-powered tools together in one optional interface. The update is intended to make image editing more accessible by allowing users to direct changes with simple visual annotations as well as written prompts.
The new markup feature lets users indicate edits by drawing on an image, such as selecting areas to recolour, sketching arrows for placement, or roughly outlining new elements. Adobe is also updating “Instruct Edit with Masks”; it says the Firefly Image 5 model can understand an image’s wider context, enabling requests such as opening closed eyes or adding a hat without manually selecting every affected area.
- Photoshop is gaining an optional AI-focused editor.
- Users can guide edits with sketches and markings.
- Firefly Image 5 aims to reduce manual masking.
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Photoshop is Adobe’s image-editing software, used by photographers, designers and others to change or create pictures. Adobe has been adding generative AI tools through Firefly, its family of models that can produce or alter image content from instructions.
AI editing can make some changes easier, but it can also be hard to describe exactly where or how an edit should appear. Tools that accept drawn marks as well as written prompts aim to give users another way to show what they want, while Adobe’s choices may shape how AI editing is used in creative work.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Adobe's AI tools democratise professional image editing by making sophisticated results achievable for non-specialists, lowering barriers to creative participation. The optional interface respects user choice—existing workflows remain unchanged—whilst contextual AI actually augments human creativity by handling tedious technical tasks, freeing editors to focus on artistic vision rather than pixel-level precision.
The case against
Serious questions remain about the training data behind Firefly: if it was trained on copyrighted images without consent or compensation, Adobe risks distributing a tool built on artists' unpaid labour. More broadly, automating image editing threatens professional retouchers' livelihoods whilst simultaneously making it trivial to create convincing manipulated content at scale, all whilst Adobe's subscription model concentrates creative power in corporate hands rather than genuinely democratising it.