Adobe Photoshop

A wedding photographer's shadow fell across the stone floor in the only clean frame of the ring exchange. Previously that meant 25 minutes of careful clone stamping across a complex patterned surface. Using Photoshop 2025's Remove Tool with "Find Distractions," the shadow is detected automatically, overlaid in pink alongside the photographer's arm, and removed in one operation. The generated floor replacement requires one retry and minor Clone Stamp touch-up. Total time: under five minutes. That is the honest case for Photoshop's AI in April 2026, transformative for specific tasks, with documented ceiling conditions that professionals need to understand before depending on it.

What Photoshop's AI actually does well (and what it doesn't)

Generative Fill is the flagship AI tool. Draw any selection, type a prompt or leave it blank for context-fill, and Photoshop generates three variations placed on a non-destructive Generative Layer. The default engine. Firefly Image 4, outputs at up to 2K resolution with improved edge blending around hair and foliage. The Reference Image feature (Photoshop 2026) lets you drag a reference photo into the dialog; the model uses it as a composite guide matching scale, rotation, lighting, and perspective. This directly addresses what was Generative Fill's most significant weakness for product photography consistency.

Generative Expand extends canvases beyond their original borders: a 4:5 product image to 16:9 for a web banner in a single click. Distraction Removal's "Find Distractions" mode scans automatically for background wires, cables, and people, highlights them in pink, and removes them in one click, changing the economics of high-volume event and documentary photography delivery.

What the AI does not do well: Firefly's generation quality trails Midjourney and Flux visibly for complex lighting, fine detail, and stylized aesthetics. Firefly trends toward a stock-photo cleanliness, defensible for brand production work, less useful for cinematic or artistic generation. The content moderation system disproportionately blocks legitimate retouching on images of women. Retouchers report generic "content policy" rejections on female subjects where identical operations on male subjects succeed.

"GenFill community guidelines instantly deny any single photo involving a woman. I can barely work on their images anymore. Never happens to pictures of men.". Professional photographer, Adobe Community forum, community.adobe.com, 2025

As of April 2026, no opt-out for this filter exists and no fix has been published.

A real design workflow, start to finish

A real estate photographer delivers 22 shots of a residential property on a 24-hour turnaround. Six have grey overcast skies. Four exterior shots have a contractor's van in frame. Three interior shots have power cords on the floor. Sky Replacement handles the six sky shots on-device, no internet, no credits, roughly 10 minutes total. Distraction Removal with Generative AI handles the van and cord cleanup across 11 images. Realistic iteration requires roughly 22–26 Generative Fill operations. This is where the credit system becomes the constraint: a new Single App subscriber after June 2025 gets 25 generative credits per month. This batch exhausts the monthly allocation in one morning. A grandfathered subscriber from before June 17, 2025 gets 500 credits, same plan name, functionally a different tool.

For final exposure and color grading, the "Edit in Photoshop" roundtrip from Lightroom preserves develop settings as a smart object and writes changes back to the catalog. This roundtrip has no equivalent in any competing tool, it is the core production workflow for photographers who do primary culling in Lightroom and detailed retouching in Photoshop.

Output quality: when it looks AI-generated, when it doesn't

Generative Expand on a white studio background is nearly invisible. Blank or minimally-textured fills, sky extensions, studio backgrounds, simple surfaces, produce results that pass scrutiny in production. Documented professional testimony confirms this:

"Generative Fill got it 99% there, even recreating the pattern and natural wrinkles in the shirt perfectly. I needed only minor exposure and color adjustments after.". Alex Cooke, Fstoppers, documenting a headshot canvas extension where Generative Fill reconstructed a client's patterned shirt, fstoppers.com, 2024

The AI degrades visibly on complex repeating-pattern surfaces, scenes where a removed subject's shadow falls into a high-detail area, and portrait work where skin tones meet complex backgrounds. General portrait and environmental fills still require human review and spot correction.

The October 2024 Generative Fill regression, when Photoshop 26.0.0 launched at Adobe MAX 2024, is the most documented AI failure in Photoshop's recent history. Professional users reported success rates collapsing from around 90% to 5–10% within 48 hours. Failure modes included extra limbs in portraits, birds appearing in indoor scenes, and smeared textures that did not match surrounding pixels. Rollback to version 25.12 was the only workaround. A fix arrived in subsequent minor releases, but the incident exposed a structural gap: Photoshop has no update deferral mechanism, so production users on client deadlines must work with a broken tool or perform a manual rollback.

"The generative fill is absolutely useless [after the 2025 update]. My success rate dropped to maybe 5–10%, compared to 90–95% before. Textures appear smudged and I'm getting nonsensical fills like birds randomly appearing in hair.". Adobe Community forum, community.adobe.com, 2025

Credits, exports, and the mid-project paywall

As of June 17, 2025, Adobe reduced generative credit allocations for new Single App subscribers from 500 per month to 25 per month. Existing subscribers were grandfathered. The change received minimal advance notice and was widely criticised as a bait-and-switch. At 25 credits monthly, a product photographer iterating through two or three Generative Fill passes per shot will exhaust the allocation in a single morning. The next meaningful tier is Creative Cloud All Apps at $69.99/month, a 3x price jump for photographers who have no use for Illustrator or Premiere.

Third-party AI models inside Generative Fill. Gemini 3, FLUX.2 Pro, consume more credits per generation than the Firefly default and carry no IP indemnification. Exact per-use deductions are shown in the interface at generation time but not documented on Adobe's public pricing pages.

Generative Fill, Generative Expand, Distraction Removal with AI, the AI Assistant, and Generative Upscale all process on Adobe's servers and require an active internet connection. Adobe community forums document regular connectivity errors even with active connections. NDA-bound client work that cannot be sent to cloud servers and studio environments with restricted internet are the professional use cases most blocked by this constraint. Features that run fully on-device: Neural Filters, Sky Replacement, Select Subject, Object Selection, and traditional Content-Aware Fill.

Ownership, licensing, and the training-data question

Adobe Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock content (licensed), public domain material, and content explicitly submitted to the Stock marketplace for AI training. Adobe provides IP indemnification for enterprise customers using Firefly-generated content. This indemnification applies only to Firefly-model content, not to the Gemini or FLUX outputs available via multi-model Generative Fill.

The June 2024 Terms of Service controversy is the defining trust event in Photoshop's recent history. Adobe updated its General Terms on February 17, 2024, but the changes went unnoticed until June 2024, when Adobe pushed a mandatory re-acceptance popup to all Creative Cloud users. A clause stating Adobe "may access your content through both automated and manual methods" using "techniques such as machine learning" went viral, a single tweet received over 5 million views, the #DeleteAdobe hashtag circulated, and legal experts discussed class-action possibilities. Adobe published clarifying blog posts on June 6 and June 10, 2024, then published revised terms on June 18 explicitly stating: "Adobe will not use your Local or Cloud Content to train generative AI", with the sole exception of content voluntarily submitted to Adobe Stock. The clarification was technically adequate, but trust damage among professional illustrators and concept artists handling confidential client work has persisted through 2025 and 2026 in r/Adobe and r/photoshop.

A documented complication: by 2024, Adobe Stock contained significant volumes of AI-generated content created using Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, models whose training provenance is unclear. Whether Firefly trained partly on that material affects the commercially safe claim has not been addressed publicly. Adobe's Content Credentials (C2PA) embeds a cryptographically signed manifest in all Firefly-generated exports, recording model, creation time, and edit history. Third-party model outputs inside multi-model Generative Fill do not embed C2PA data.

Where Photoshop's AI hits a ceiling

The credit cliff is the most immediate ceiling for new subscribers. The Photography Plan discontinuation in January 2025 removed the affordable middle-tier for photographers: Adobe stopped offering the Photography Plan ($9.99–$19.99/month for Photoshop + Lightroom) to new subscribers on January 15, 2025. New subscribers now choose between $22.99/month Single App (25 credits) or $69.99/month All Apps (1,000 credits). The middle ground no longer exists. Annual plans carry an early cancellation fee equivalent to 50% of remaining months, the mechanism that prompted a concurrent DOJ investigation alongside the June 2024 ToS controversy. Users who feel locked in rather than enthusiastic describe a pattern:

"Adobe's shady business practices of using grey and dark patterns on their subscriptions and respective UI to trick people into their subscriptions and then making it as hard as possible to leave.". Reddit user, cited in The Phoblographer, thephoblographer.com, 2026

The content moderation false-positive problem for female subjects remains unresolved. The update-roulette problem, major releases breaking Generative Fill quality with no deferral mechanism, has not been architecturally addressed. The internet dependency for all cloud AI features cannot be designed around for NDA-restricted workflows.

Photoshop vs. Affinity by Canva vs. Topaz Photo AI

Affinity by Canva is the most credible exit path from Photoshop's subscription. In October 2025, Canva released Affinity V3 as a free application, non-destructive layered editing, CMYK and 16-bit color, raw file processing, and PSD import/export, covering roughly 90% of Photoshop's photo editing use cases. How to Geek ran the headline "This newly-free Photoshop alternative convinced me to cancel Adobe." What Affinity lacks: Generative Fill (AI features require Canva Pro at $15/month), Photoshop's plugin ecosystem depth, and the Lightroom roundtrip. If Generative Fill is central to a workflow, Affinity does not substitute.

Topaz Photo AI does one thing: AI enhancement of existing images. Its noise reduction, sharpening, and upscaling consistently outperform Photoshop's built-in equivalents, which is why Adobe integrated Topaz Labs' Gigapixel model into Photoshop 2026's Generative Upscale, an acknowledgment of the quality gap. The common workflow is sequential: Photoshop handles compositing and retouching, images pass through Topaz for noise and sharpness, the result returns to Photoshop. Topaz moved from a one-time purchase (historically $199) to a subscription in September 2025, generating the same backlash as Photoshop's pricing, the combined workflow now involves two subscription-fatigued tools.

Photoshop is required when Generative Fill, the Lightroom roundtrip, or PSD format compatibility are central. Affinity removes subscription cost for editing-only workflows. Topaz improves enhancement quality beyond Photoshop's built-in tools. Most professionals use two or three in combination.