Learn about the AI tools available to graphic designers and how they can help you be more productive and take your work in surprising directions.
Like the printing press in the 15th century and the personal computer in the 20th, artificial intelligence is disrupting how people create in the 21st. Though it may take some time to get used to new AI-powered tools, you’ll find that they can eliminate old headaches and open up new possibilities for your work.
Through machine learning, software makers like Adobe have automated the most tedious processes to make design work easier and faster. Before smart selection tools, for example, if you wanted to replace the background of an image in Adobe Photoshop, you had to spend a lot of time carefully outlining the subject. Just tracing a person’s hair could take hours. But thanks to Auto Selection and Select Subject, that process now takes just a few minutes (with a little refining)..
The Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop is another great example of AI we now take for granted. When you want to fill in an area in an image, instead of using trial and error to match the color and tone, you can instantly and seamlessly fill it with content sampled from another part of the image. This is because the app is performing incredibly fast calculations based on the values in surrounding pixels.
Just as these AI-powered features have become indispensable for designers, amazing new generative AI tools are finding their place in the designer’s toolset.
In recent years, computer scientists have developed AI models that have made the wide-scale use of generative AI possible. Trained on millions of data points, these models learn how to generate images based on simple text prompts.
The more data they’re trained on, the better these models get, so that now you can generate impressive images just by typing a few words into a prompt field. You can experiment with new ideas, explore different color palettes, expand images, generate backgrounds for product photos, and more, faster than ever.
Learn more about the impact of generative AI on creative work.
Whether you’re using AI or generative AI, this technology can help make your work easier, faster, and more fun, and it might even help you discover new artistic directions.
With Generative Fill, you can now add or remove content in your images with a simple text prompt. If you want to swap a briefcase for a surfboard, or remove a distracting person from the background, you can do it instantly. You can also expand the canvas or change the aspect ratio with Generative Expand. (Gone are the days of squeezing text into an image that doesn’t have room for it.)
In addition to generative AI tools, Photoshop has other AI tools like Face Aware Liquify that automatically detect faces and facial features in an image. With intelligent controls, you can manipulate facial features accurately and easily. If you need to draw unique curves, the Curvature pen tool uses AI to allow you to create paths intuitively and simply push and pull segments to modify them.
New generative AI features in Illustrator can make it a lot easier to work with scalable images. Now you can transform a simple text prompt into a fully editable vector graphic with Text to Vector Graphic. With Generative Recolor, you can use text prompts to experiment with different color palettes. So just type your inspiration, like “pumpkin spice” or “spring wildflowers” and see what happens. Also, the new Retype feature allows you to select static images or outlined text and quickly identify matching fonts from Adobe Fonts.
Other AI features in Illustrator include a global editing feature that automatically identifies similar vector shapes in a document so you can edit all shapes at once. Puppet Warp lets you make changes to objects without redrawing or modifying each anchor point, so you can create variants faster. And with Content-aware Crop, you provide an image and get AI suggestions on how to crop it.
With the Adobe Firefly web app as your AI image generator, you can create images in any style and in a variety of aspect ratios with a text-based AI graphic design prompt. Use it to try new ideas, get out of creative ruts, or to start a new design when you’re pressed for time. You can also use Firefly to create unique text effects and add or remove objects with Generative Fill. You can also find these features in Adobe Express.
Firefly’s generative AI models are designed to be commercially safe, which means you can create content with confidence knowing that you can use the content in both personal and professional projects.
Add in the final touches to enhance an entire portrait with a single click or tap with Polished Portrait and/or Darken Beard.
