Having fun and exploring the power of Photoshop Generative Fill

I gotta admit, being a designer feels a magical lately. There is so much going on with AI that will drastically change the way we design.

With Photoshop Generative fill AI also changes how we find and edit images. Not only can we generate whatever creative weird stuff our minds come up with, but with the introduction of Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill we can alter images now as well!

And let me tell you, is it so much fun to play around with! (No worries, it’s also useful).

I’ll take you on an explorative journey I had last weekend and show you a bit of fun and usefulness.

Is generative fill good enough yet?

Is it only a lot of fun? Or can we make it meaningful and help us improve our work? That’s the main question of today’s blogpost. Just for yourself at the end.

Spoiler alert: yes it’s amazing!

Here’s a little preview from Adobe themselves, for who’s still unfamiliar with Generative Fill.

Exploring the fun side of Generative Fill

Doing the opposite of what everyone else does

We’ve all seen the examples where you can let Photoshop’s Generative Fill, fill out blank areas and as you could call it ‘complete’ your image.

But what if we turn that around? We get a picture. Delete the inner part. And ask photoshop to fill in the blanks. Why? For no good reason other than a good healthy dose of curiosity. Because, that’s where good things start with.

Here’s a few fun examples or what I like to call, reverse generative fill.

On to more fun

How powerful is it in altering images?

Let’s see of adobe’s new feature can help us turn awful stock images into something fun.

Time to get serious: what can Generative fill do for UI design professionals in their day to day job?

While these explorations all look like pure fun, I needed to know if Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature could help me with the following.

Can we change elements in images that get’s them more on-brand with your brand guidelines? Not just in terms of colors, but by adding and removing objects as well.

Can we change colors to get images more on brand or let them match the UI?

Can we remove or add elements, to get images more on-brand?

Can we make stocky images less stocky with Generative Fill?

Getting images on brand by changing colours

Before we look at some before-after examples, do you know what one of my colleagues calls designers? Picture-scrollers. Because we as designers, scroll. A lot. Search for the right picture. The right accent color, composition, light, and the exact art direction we’re aiming for.

It’s exactly this tedious job that Photoshop AI can help us with.

I think it’s pretty amazing—especially the first image above. The yellow sweater, the dog, and the changed painting on the wall make the image less stocky and more fun & energetic.

Actually using generative fill to… fill.

You know what else makes designers scroll for hours and hours? The way an image is cropped wrong. This especially sucks for backgrounds.

Example. I was looking for a bowl of fruit for a UI design. I found this image.

What I don’t like about this image is the lack of whitespace around the bowl.

I need space to put a title and other UI elements.

I used Photoshop to cut out the bowl, and ‘ask’ for several different backgrounds.

This enabled me to actually use the entire image as a background, rather than a cut-out bowl.

Final words & conclusion

I was actually tempted to say it’s extremely useful for designers. Especially for the use-cases we spoke about above: changing a color, adding some details, removing some details, all to get images to look more on-brand or less stocky.

But… if we zoom in we notice elements look a little shitty often.

It doesn’t look like it nearly as far as Midjourney.

But nevertheless: Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill is very valuable. Sometimes you get shitty results, but sometimes it looks like magic.

It requires a bit of fooling around, but its definitely worth it.

A final use-case

We’ve established that designers scroll to find images. The perfect image. And sometimes, when you’ve finally found the perfect image, you need a few more to have a nice set.