The greatest tool for faking images in history is undoubtedly Photoshop. There was anticipation of what this program would be capable of when Adobe added generative artificial intelligence to it. That moment has already arrived with the launch of Adobe Firefly, although it is still in the beta phase of development. From what we have been able to verify after putting it to the test, there is still a lot of room for improvement, at least to carry out certain professional tasks.
The internet has been abuzz with articles and videos that incite astonishment showing what the artificial intelligence of Photoshop is capable of. But when the magnifying glass is removed we see that it is not so amazing. Of course, it allows us to save some work. But we cannot blindly trust her.
It seems like a good idea that Adobe didn’t incorporate Firefly into its final version of Photoshop. To test it, you have to download the Beta version of Photoshop from the Creative Cloud app. And at the moment it is not possible to use it on phones or tablets, only in the version for computers.
First of all, it should be clear that the main advantage that Firefly brings to Photoshop is its integration with the content fill tool. This tool is long before the appearance of this AI. Until now it was one of the most spectacular functions of Photoshop, since it allowed selecting an area and after analyzing the visual content of the adjacent areas, removing objects. With more or less luck.
What the tool now offers is to generate visual content to modify the images by creating new elements according to what we request in writing (in English). We can start by selecting a figure or a background, with a tool that has been active for a few months now.
Or we can select an area of ​​the image with any tool. Once we do it, we only have to write what we want and after a few seconds the results appear. Normally we are given several alternatives and we can choose the one that suits us best.
It is also possible, for example, to make a horizontal photo become vertical, but not by cropping it. We can ask you to insert content or complete it, for example by adding the feet of a person photographed from the waist up. It is also possible to select an area of ​​the image and ask it to remove the people that appear in it.
All this excites at first glance when we do not enlarge the image. But when we take out the Photoshop magnifying glass we find some very bad news. One of Firefly’s biggest problems is that it doesn’t do well with high-resolution photos.
When we talk about high resolution, we don’t mean anything exaggerated, but 12-megapixel photos like many current phones do. At least if we want to alter a large area of ​​the image. In this sense, Firefly has a long way to go to generate images with a definition that make it an interesting tool.
With the resolution that Firefly works at, we doubt we’ll be able to convincingly alter an image to achieve anything more than a photo to transfer via WhatsApp or post to Instagram. Which on the other hand is not little. Another thing is to reduce the level of iconicity. If we work with illustrations things are simpler.
But there are many other problems to solve, such as the scale of the images. It doesn’t make sense to replace a person with a dog and have the dog be the same size as the person. Although it is also true that we should give you precise instructions. The problem with the current limitations of Photoshop’s AI is that its training is being carried out, among other things, with images published in Adobe Stock, Adobe’s image bank where there are all kinds of creations.
Is Adobe limiting Firefly’s resolution to avoid running into lawsuits? It’s possible. Although according to Adobe, people who publish images on Adobe Stock consent to these being used for things like training their AI. Apparently the company is studying a way to compensate these creators with whom its AI is trained.
Another thing that we have found is that Firefly does not allow us to do anything. Try asking it to insert an explosion into a photo of a city and it will tell you that it violates the terms of use. And that is why it does seem to us that Adobe is on the right track.
