Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool turns vacation photos into nightmares
If you want to visit a place where the danger of nature is omnipresent and where lunch costs $60, I encourage you to visit Iceland. It’s a beautiful and brutal landscape whose natural wonders (and horrors) make for incredible photos. I took a couple on a recent trip to the country. But it is possibly, as I’ve unfortunately discovered, to make them terrifying in entirely new ways.
I applied Adobe’s new AI-powered Generative Fill tool to my Icelandic vacation photos, with both “legitimate” photo-editing tasks and a few ridiculous clues that resulted in nightmare fuel. Generative Fill is now in beta and is based on Adobe’s Firefly image generator. It’s not completely new, but it has it in addition to all your basic photo editing sliders is new. You use it by making a selection – lasso, magic wand, whatever you want – then typing in a text prompt. It can remove and add elements to your photo, or expand the image.
After playing with it for a few hours, it already looks like an impressive upgrade to Photoshop’s existing Content-Aware Fill tool. Look how everyone handled removing people from my Skógafoss photo. It’s a hugely popular place, so naturally my photo has a lot of people in front of the falls — here’s the original.
There’s no contest – the image Generative Fill is much better than Content-Aware. And all I had to do was make an imprecise selection, type in a few words, and wait a few seconds. That’s honestly pretty scary in itself.
But that’s just the beginning: if you really want to go for it, you can go for it. And oh, the places you go with Generative Fill. Let’s take a little journey from beautiful but deadly waterfalls to a beautiful but deadly glacier. This is what the valley has carved out by the glacier actually seemedand this is what I got when I asked Generative Fill to make it even more ominous by adding a thunderstorm.
Pretty convincing, right? How about a waterfall?
Oh wow, Generative Fill goes difficult on the waterfall. It looks kinda fake, but plausible, I guess. What if I ask for front bangs instead?
Dear Jesus, not so! Let’s keep it lighter… how about a lemonade stand in the foreground? Pretty innocent right?
Cool, the world’s gloomiest lemonade stand. Love it. How about cheering up with something that can’t possibly evoke horror? How about a rainbow in the sky with unicorns?
Okay, that’s an F for that rainbow and just a big “No” for the rest. Are you okay, Firefly? Take me back to safety and just try to get the people out this photo on the beautiful but deadly black sand beach.
Um, it’s okay I guess. The area where the rocks meet the water seems fake and vast, but honestly the whole land looks too good to be real. And at least the phallic image in it this photo is not made by AI. Seriously, it just is. You never know what you are going to see in Iceland.