5.1 – AI Image Editing (Photoshop AI and Firefly) Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson introduces you to the powerful world of AI-driven image editing by focusing on Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill and Adobe Firefly. While images generated by tools like Midjourney or DALL·E can be stunning, they rarely come out perfect on the first try. Traditionally, improving or fine-tuning those images required multiple prompts or complex manual edits. Now, AI-powered image editing lets you quickly refine, enhance, or even transform your images—whether they’re created by AI or from your own collection.

Photoshop’s Generative Fill stands out as a major shift from its more technical, skill-intensive past. It brings intuitive, prompt-based editing to everyone, letting you insert objects, erase unwanted details, and extend backgrounds just by describing what you want in plain text. This means even users without years of design experience can achieve impressive results in seconds.

Adobe Firefly builds on this by incorporating additional AI editing options, including direct text-to-image creation and more. These innovations are reshaping how creators, marketers, and educators approach visual projects, squashing the barriers to entry and saving huge amounts of time. If you work with images regularly, these tools promise efficiency, creativity, and precision.

Who This Is For

If you work with images in any capacity, this lesson will help you get more control and flexibility. It is especially useful for:

• Content creators wanting fast, custom visuals
• Designers looking to speed up their workflow
• Marketers seeking to adjust branded graphics quickly
• Educators who need to modify images for teaching materials
• Product teams needing prototype visuals
• Anyone exploring how AI simplifies creative processes

Where This Fits in a Workflow

AI image editing tools like Photoshop’s Generative Fill and Adobe Firefly are most valuable after you have an image—whether generated by AI or created by hand—that needs adjustment. Rather than returning to the AI image generator for endless tweaks, you can open the image in Photoshop, select what needs changing, and use a simple prompt to make edits. For example, if you want to add a product to a marketing photo or remove clutter from an educational graphic, these tools do the job in seconds. In real project workflows, this means moving from draft to final faster, with fewer iterations and less manual labor. The result: more time to focus on creative decision-making, and higher-quality outputs.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Before tools like Generative Fill, editing an image in Photoshop required careful masking, layering, and familiarity with a range of professional features. Each change—like removing a background object or extending a scene—demanded technical skill and could be quite time-consuming. By contrast, AI-powered editing lets you select a part of the image, describe your goal in plain text, and see instant results.

For creative projects where speed and quality are priorities, this approach is a major improvement. A team creating dozens of social media graphics, for instance, can generate variations and fix minor issues on the fly—no need to re-shoot or re-prompt. The AI handles the heavy lifting, filling in gaps and making complex edits look seamless, even for non-experts. This shift isn’t just about convenience; it means more consistent results, a shorter path from concept to completion, and fewer bottlenecks in image production.

Practice Exercise

Take an image you’ve created—either a photo or one generated by an AI tool like DALL·E or Midjourney. Try these steps:

1. Open your image in Adobe Photoshop (with Generative Fill) or Adobe Firefly.
2. Using generative fill or a similar tool, either add an object to the scene (such as placing a cup on a table) or remove something unwanted (like a stray mark or background item).
3. Optionally, use the prompt-based feature to extend the edges of your image and see how AI reconstructs new background.

Compare your edited result to the original. Did the AI create a convincing change? What surprised you about the speed or quality of the result?

Course Context Recap

This lesson launches your journey into hands-on AI image editing with two of the most advanced tools available—Photoshop and Firefly. Previously, the course outlined the potential of AI for generating images, but now you’re moving into editing and enhancing those outputs. Upcoming lessons will cover more detailed features, advanced techniques, and practical applications to help you unlock even more value from AI in your visual projects. Be sure to continue following the course to deepen your creative toolkit with the latest AI technologies.