Adobe Photoshop AI Assistant public beta: Firefly Image Editor updated with new tools

Adobe's AI Assistant for Photoshop moves to public beta, while Firefly gets a unified image editing workspace and expanded third-party model support across both platforms.

Adobe has launched a public beta of AI Assistant in Photoshop for web and mobile, alongside an update to the Firefly Image Editor that consolidates generative editing tools into a single workspace.

One workspace to rule them all

As far as the new Firefly tools go, the Image Editor now bundles Generative Fill, Generative Remove, Generative Expand, Generative Upscale, and Remove Background into one workspace, applicable to both AI-generated and uploaded images. Firefly also now supports a choice of what Adobe reckons is over 25 AI models, ranging from Adobe's own commercially trained models to Google's Nano Banana 2, OpenAI's Image Generation, Runway's Gen-4.5, and Black Forest Labs' Flux.2 [pro].

New Photoshop tools

AI Assistant oves from private to public beta and lets users describe edits such as removing distractions, swapping backgrounds, or refining lighting in plain language, as well as providing the option to have changes applied automatically or walked through step by step. The mobile Photoshop app adds voice input for hands-free editing requests.

A companion feature, AI Markup (also in public beta), is available in Photoshop web via the contextual task bar. Users can draw directly on an image to define areas for change, then add a text prompt, such as marking up a patch of sky to add mountains for spatially targeted generation.

Both products are currently offering unlimited generations. Firefly subscribers get unlimited access now though to March 16, while paid Photoshop web and mobile subscribers get the same through April 9. Free-tier Photoshop users can access 20 generations to get started. More details here.

Expanded Microsoft features

Elsewhere in the Adobe ecosystem, the company has announced that it is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to bring Adobe Express and Acrobat into Microsoft 365 Copilot, with both apps set to appear in the Microsoft 365 Agent Store within the coming weeks.

The integration will allow enterprise users to access Express's template library directly within Copilot chat, adjusting text, swapping images, adding animation, and iterating on designs through plain-language prompts, without leaving Microsoft 365. When deeper editing is needed, work transfers seamlessly into the full Express app.

The company has already integrated some of its apps within ChatGPT, so this is a further push into what will eventually become fully-fledged agentic AI territory. Video is harder, but we would imagine that it won't be long before Firefly tools or even Premiere follow the same route.