EDITING WITH AI
Get to know the finest tools Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom has to offer for photo editing in the age of AI. James Paterson is your guide
While many of us are rightly concerned about the impact of AI, not just on photography but on many aspects of modern life, there are plenty of ways in which it can aid our photo editing.
Over the past few years Photoshop and Lightroom have benefitted from a range of new AI-powered tools. Many of these employ machine learning to recognise and isolate objects in our photos like people or skies. As tools these are purely functional, speeding up processes that may have once taken us hours. Then there are the newer generative tools. This is probably the point where photography and AI go their separate ways, as generating new objects or scenes is more about promptography than photography. Still, there’s much fun and many advantages to be had from mastering the various AI-powered tools in Photoshop and Lightroom.
Here, in no particular order, are ten of the best tools…
Generative Fill
Generative Fill is the big one, the first tool Photoshop offers that can generate images in a similar way to MidJourney or Dall-E. But the key difference is that you can work selectively in parts of an image, so you can use the Lasso tool, Quick Selection tool or Object Selection tool to make a rough selection, then simply type a text prompt and choose from three variations. The shape of the selection is important, as it dictates the shape of the object that is generated. Here, for instance, we made a precise selection of the subject’s clothing then typed the prompt ‘Vintage Red Dress’ in the Contextual Toolbar (Window>Contextual Toolbar). Generative FIll is great at some things, like changing a person’s clothes or adding accessories, but less so at other things like adding a completely new object to a scene. Sometimes the results are almost reassuringly bad – so much so, that as a photographer you feel that the day AI usurps photography for image creation is still some way away.
Generative Expand
This could be the one generative AI tool that photographers truly embrace. Have you ever photographed a scene and then, later on, wish that you’d left a little more room around the edges, perhaps for a different crop, or to straighten the horizon, or leave negative space for type? Generative Expand lets you crop outside of the original bounds of the image, and new content is generated to fill in the boundaries. You can either make a tiny adjustment, or experiment with vast expansions. The endless expand game can be fascinating. Simply grab the Crop tool in Photoshop and drag the crop box outside the original image. Set the Fill option to ‘Generative Expand’ at the top, then either choose one of the three variations ge
