Adobe has decided that they’ve done enough testing with its Generative Fill feature. It was introduced into the Photoshop beta in June of this year. Now, three months later, it’s been added to the stable release of Photoshop CC 2024.
Don’t be so quick to celebrate just yet, though. It is limited in how much it will create for you. And after you hit your limit, speeds are throttled – unless you pay Adobe more money. It’s also still far from perfect.
Over 1 billion AI assets in Photoshop beta
Adobe says that creators produced over 1 billion AI-generated assets using Photoshop beta’s generative fill feature alone. That doesn’t include the number of assets created by users playing around with the Firefly beta.
The Creative Cloud membership now includes a couple of extra applications, including Adobe Express Premium and Adobe Firefly. Firefly is a web-based app. It offers many of the tools available in various Adobe apps powered by the Firefly AI engine. It also brings a couple of unique tools, too.
This includes AI text-to-image and Text Effects features. It also offers various generative features for other applications, including Adobe Illustrator’s Generative Recolor. Some of the features list as coming soon. Adobe says they’ll be coming to Photoshop and other apps as they’re ready.
Adobe Express Premium is an all-in-one app, also web-based. This, too, provides creators with a place to play with Adobe’s AI features. The difference between this and the Firefly interface is that this one specifically gears itself towards social media.
It might cost you extra, though!
With the introduction of generative fill in the stable release of Photoshop, Adobe has laid out how it plans to implement its pricing structure. All paid Adobe Creative Cloud users will receive a number of “fast generative credits” each month that they can use for Firefly-powered features.
We’re starting with images, text effects, and vectors, with Generative Fill and Generative Expand in Adobe Photoshop, Text to Image in Adobe Firefly, Generative Recolor in Adobe Illustrator, Text Effects in Adobe Express, and more. Next, we plan to bring generative AI powered by Firefly to 3D, animation, and video.
Adobe Help website
These fast generative credits allow you to go ahead and use AI feature at full speed. Full speed is still not terribly fast, though, in my experience so far. It still takes a while to create images even at 1920×1080 resolution using Photoshop’s generative fill feature.
And if it doesn’t get it on the first try, you can be sitting there for quite a while – and chewing up those fast generative credits – until you get something you like. How many credits will you get? Well, that depends on your plan. Adobe has released some information on this.
| Plan | Monthly generative credits |
|---|---|
| Creative Cloud All Apps | 1,000 |
| Creative Cloud Single App: Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Animate, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Stock, Photography 1TB | 500 |
| Creative Cloud Single App: Creative Cloud Photography 20GB. Subscribers before November 1, 2023 | 250 |
| Adobe Express Premium plan | 250 |
| Adobe Firefly Premium plan | 100 |
| Creative Cloud Single App: Creative Cloud Photography 20GB. Subscribers after November 1, 2023 | 100 |
| Creative Cloud Single App: Lightroom | 100 |
| Creative Cloud Single App: InCopy, Substance 3D Collection, Substance 3D Texturing, Acrobat Pro | 25 |
| Free users with an Adobe ID: Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud | 25 |
| All other Creative Cloud plans not mentioned above | 25 |
There are other plans with other allowances than those described above, including educational and enterprise accounts. For a full list of all account types and their respective generative credit allowances each month, see the Adobe website.
What happens when you use these credits up? Well, you’ve got two choices. You can keep using the features, albeit at a much slower pace. Generation will take longer. Adobe doesn’t say how much longer, but I expect you’ll go to the back of the queue.
The other option is to pay Adobe more money, and Adobe plans to implement a $4.99 per 100 credits plan from November 1st, 2023.
The good news
Before November 1st, 2023, all paid Creative Cloud accounts will not be subject to the generative credit limit. So, you can go nuts for the next couple of months and generate as much as you like without impacting your account or running out of “fast” generative credits.
Free account users will face a 25 generative credits per month limit. And you’ll have to upgrade to some form of paid account if you want more generative credits.
Generative credits do not roll over from one month to the next. However, if you have multiple Adobe accounts, then your monthly credit allowances for each combine into a single aggregate lump each month.
So, if you get 1,000 credits from your Creative Cloud All Apps package and you have 500 credits from a separate Photography 1TB plan, you’ll get 1,500 credits a month as long as both accounts remain paid up. And you can use those credits for any Firefly-powered feature in any of the apps you use. You’re not limited to using those 500 credits from the photography plan in just Photoshop or Lightroom.
It’s still not perfect, though
When the final version of Photoshop 2024 became available to download, I grabbed it immediately and started playing with it some more. I had experimented with it a little in the beta, but I wanted to see how far it had come in the final release.
It’s definitely improved somewhat from my previous attempts in the beta. However, it’s still not perfect – as if the above image didn’t give that away.
The dinosaur picture in this article, for example, had five legs (three on the back and two “arms”). I had to select around one of the legs and tell it to “erase this leg” to get rid of it, and it replaced it with a baby dino on the ground instead. It was cute, so I kept it.
Side note: The prompt “Delete this leg” popped up a “community standards” warning, or whatever Adobe calls it, to say that this goes against their terms and that if I didn’t agree, I should file a report – which I did. So, you may have to think up some workarounds for some legitimate prompts that don’t actually go against their terms, even if the software thinks it does.
It still doesn’t really generate text well
It seems that Photoshop, like most image-generating AIs, also doesn’t quite understand how to generate text yet. Although, while it got the actual wording a little wrong, it certainly looks prettier than any text I’ve seen form Midjourney.
The prompt for the above image was “Show me a representation of Photoshop 2024 with its new Generative Fill function“, and I’d planned to use it as the feature image for this post.
Needless to say, I went with something else. Although even in the image I did use, you can see that it still mangles hands pretty badly. And as you can also see from the scene of people partying on the beach, faces can look pretty horrific, too.
[Related reading: Photoshop’s generative fill will steal your job…or will it?]
So, again, it’s not perfect, but it’s not terrible, either. With a little work and some manual labour – which you really should be doing anyway – you can get stuff looking pretty close to what you wanted. I’m sure Firefly will improve further over time, though.
When can I get it?
Photoshop 2024 with the new Generative Fill feature is available to download now from within the Adobe Creative Cloud app. You’ve already got your credits (that won’t start running out until November 1st), so go download and have a play!
Read Adobe’s complete blog post about the release of Firefly’s new features, including Photoshop 2024.
Note: All images in this post were generated using Generative Fill in the current stable release of Adobe Photoshop 2024. The lead image at the top of this page is a composite of multiple AI-generated images created in Photoshop 2024.
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