Photoshop adds AI assistant and new Firefly editing tools

On Tuesday, Adobe announced that its AI assistant for Photoshop is becoming available to users in beta on the web and in mobile apps. The creative tooling company first announced the AI assistant for Photoshop during its MAX event in October. The feature, which is now rolling out to users, allows them to remove objects or people from images, change colors, or adjust lighting through prompts. Users can also use natural language to instruct the AI assistant to perform tasks such as adding a soft glow, cropping in a specific format, enhancing shadows, or transforming backgrounds to give a different look to an image.

Under the rollout’s usage tiers, paid Photoshop users will receive unlimited generations with the AI assistant through April 9, while free users will receive 20 generations to start with. Alongside these tiers, Adobe is introducing a new feature called AI markup in public beta. This tool allows users to draw markers on the screen and use the AI assistant to transform those specific objects, such as drawing a flower or marking an object to remove to modify the background.

Adobe is also adding new image-editing tools to Firefly, its tool for media generation and editing. Firefly is gaining Generative Fill—a feature for replacing or adding objects and modifying backgrounds that has been present in Photoshop for a few years—as well as a generative remove feature for object removal, generative expand for increasing image size using AI, and generative upscale features. Additionally, the company is adding a one-click tool to remove the background from images.

These updates follow Adobe’s announcement in February that it is allowing unlimited generations for Firefly subscribers to encourage increased usage. Over time, the company has expanded the Firefly ecosystem to integrate more than 25 third-party video and image-generation models. These external models include:

• Google’s Nano Banana 2
• OpenAI’s Image Generation
• Runway’s Gen-4.5
• Black Forest Labs’ Flux.2 Pro

Why it matters

Adobe is integrating third-party AI models into its core creative suite, signaling a shift toward a platform-agnostic approach where users can access diverse generative tools directly within their existing workflows.