# Best AI image editors - Hands-on comparison & workflows (2025)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Yes I'm a Designer
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg
- **Дата:** 25.11.2025
- **Длительность:** 27:01
- **Просмотры:** 4,646

## Описание

Everyone’s talking about the best AI photo editor, but which one actually fits your workflow? In this video, we’ll test top AI photo editors side by side and show the complete AI image editing workflow from generation to enhancement, resizing and publishing. #adobepartner #adobefirefly 

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Introduction
0:53 Ideation with Firefly Boards
1:35 Editing an image with AI within Firefly Boards
3:11 Creating realistic composites with AI within Photoshop
7:56 Turn a sketch into a photorealistic image with Firefly
8:50 Generative Expand and Generative Upscale in Photoshop
10:31 AI Portrait editing workflow with Firefly and Photoshop
13:30 AI fashion shoot workflow with Firefly and Photoshop
15:09 Colour and tonal corrections with Adobe Lightroom
16:26 AI enhancements with Lightroom Quick Actions
17:34 Distraction removal using AI in Lightroom
18:12 AI Lens Blur in Lightroom
19:36 Product promotional poster workflow with Firefly and Photoshop
22:12 Social media workflow with Adobe Express
25:05 Comparison of AI image editors
25:50 Best AI image editors based on your role
26:22 Conclusion

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg) Introduction

Until recently, Adobe Photoshop was the go-to tool for every image editing task. But Adobe has a lot more to offer beyond Photoshop that depending on your needs and workflow might get you better results and faster. It might be confusing to know when to turn to Firefly, Lightroom, Photoshop, or Adobe Express. Especially since all of these tools offer AI photo editing features. Depending on your role, skill level, and the type of photo you need to edit, you likely have a specific workflow that relies on these tools. I've teamed up with Adobe to test all these top AI photo editors side by side and show the complete AI photo editing workflow from generation to enhancement, retouching, compositing, color correction, upscaling, publishing, and more. I will help you find which workflow fits you best. Whether you are a creator, photographer or marketer. For

### [0:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=53s) Ideation with Firefly Boards

exploration and ideation, I prefer to use Firefly boards where I can display hundreds of generated images side by side and I can quickly reference any of them for creating further iterations. In this case, you can see that I am working on a spring collection and I wanted to use one of these models or perhaps all of them and I wanted to see them in various poses and scenes like lying down in a field of flowers or jumping around in front of mountains or we have the swing made out of flowers. Again, each of them looks slightly different, but they are all quite fun. And I'm going to show you how quickly we can make changes

### [1:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=95s) Editing an image with AI within Firefly Boards

here. So for instance, here we want to change this into a sunflower. All I need to do is to reference the image that I want to work with. So I click here and then sample that image. I can then even crop onto this if I want only certain parts of it. But in this case, I like the whole composition. And I'm just going to type the prompt change this to a sunflower and then press generate. I'm using the nano banana model here. But again, we have the option to choose either the Firefly models or the partner models and we get our generated image. We can drop it here on the canvas. The other great thing about Firefly boards is that you can invite multiple collaborators to work with you and they will all have access to the same generated images including their prompts. So for instance, creative professionals can work side by side with marketers to get the right image for their project before they take it into Photoshop and Lightroom for further refinements. Besides being able to test various poses with these AI models, I can also have all three of them in the same shot. And from the left to the right, you can see the changes that I went through. First adding the bouquet for her to hold in the middle and then changing their dresses. But notice that the hands don't really line up here. So for this, I jumped over into Photoshop where I managed to use the generative fill layer to hide the extra hand. And finally, I used the Firefly upscaler to add more resolution and detail. So if we zoom out a little bit, we can see before and after. In this example, we will

### [3:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=191s) Creating realistic composites with AI within Photoshop

start off with this stock photo and we need to fill up the space on the left side because currently it feels a little bit too empty for which I already have another Adobe stock photo which I prepared here. So this is a nice chair. I think it would suit this composition. But first we have to mask this out. Now luckily we don't have to worry about masking anymore. We can just click on remove background in the contextual taskbar which is going to make a selection based on the subject identified in the layer and then is going to turn that into a mask and it did a really good job. However, it still doesn't feel like this chair is in this environment because the lighting and the colors don't match and also there is no reflection or cast shadow. Now, in the past, if you wanted to achieve all of that, and you wanted to get a really good realistic result, you would have to be really good at Photoshop, and you would also need a good amount of time to do it. But now, we can just click on the harmonize option here in the contextual taskbar, which is going to generate a new layer for us. This is going to be exactly the same object, but it's going to take care of all of those things that we talked about. And it even gives us three options to choose from. So, this is the first one. This is the second one and this is the third one. So again, this was without the harmonized layer and this is with it. And I feel like out of the three, probably my favorite one is this second one. Let's take a look without and with. Yeah, the lighting is matching because the light comes from the left side of the image. So if we zoom out, we can see this together with the rest of the objects. Once again, before and after. Yeah, I love how realistic the reflection looks. These are the things that I would normally overdo if I did manually. And I also like how there is a subtle cast shadow around this area here in the middle. But again, the chair is blocking the light from the additional furniture in the center. So, this is looking great, but maybe instead of this chair, we are looking for something more exciting. Maybe a transparent chair. Maybe something like this. So, I'm over in Adobe Firefly and I used the prompt that you can see here at the bottom to generate a few chairs. And by the way, we can generate more of these just to see how it works. So, I used the word 3D render because in this case, I feel like it just creates or generates better results. And each time we would get unique results. However, I feel like this one right here is my favorite. So, I'm just going to download this and drop it into Photoshop. Now, I intentionally generated this image with a very colorful background because I wanted to show you what you can do in case you have a complex image like this. But not only we have to remove the background like before. I'm using the contextual taskbar for this, but we also have an object that should be translucent or see-through and it shouldn't have any of those colors that we got from the environment in the original generated image. So this should feel like a colorless glass chair. So instead of using harmonize, in this case, what I'm going to do is to make a selection based on this layer. That's command or control-click on the layers thumbnail. And then I'm going to use generative fill and type in my prompt to make the chair look see-through and colorless. Before we hit generate, we can just click on this icon here where we can choose the image model. And normally what I would go for is the Firefly fill and expand or the Gemini 2. 5 Nano Banana partner model. In this case, that's what I'm going to use. And then hit generate. And not only it's going to achieve exactly what we asked for, but notice how it kept exactly the same shape. So the chair didn't change at all, but now it has its reflections. It's colorless. It's like glass see-through. And all the rest of the details stay the same. So we can decide whether we want to use this chair or the other chair that we created earlier. I feel like this one looks even more interesting. And just to bring everything together and make this image a little bit more interesting, I added an additional generative layer here on the right with a main cat sleeping. You can see my prompt up here in the properties panel. That's a great thing about Photoshop that you have a record of all the prompts that you used for each generated result and also the image models that were used for them. So comparing the original and the final image here, you can see how much we were able to enhance this photo with AI.

### [7:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=476s) Turn a sketch into a photorealistic image with Firefly

Here's another interesting example where again I started off from a sketch that I created. So this time for an ad I needed a composition where a female surfer is standing in front of a tropical environment in the sunset with the sea behind her and I created this little sketch and using Fireflyy's AI image editor I just simply used the prompt turn this sketch into a photo. So that was before and after. Now, when you are not specific enough with your prompt, you won't get the exact results you are after. So, in my next attempt, I actually said it needs to be a setting sun and some islands and clouds in the background. So, once again, that's before and that's after. Same composition, but more refined. And we have a couple of additional variations here. I am just iterating on this and testing different things out. But I ended up using this one and I moved this

### [8:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=530s) Generative Expand and Generative Upscale in Photoshop

into Photoshop. Well, first of all, I needed more space horizontally for the ad. So, I used generative expand. So, we can see before and after. I pretty much doubled the width of this photo. And then next, I used the generative upscale feature, which we can find here in the image menu. Generative upscale. This is a great feature for increasing the resolution and detail level of images. And you can use three models at the moment. We have the Adobe Firefly Upscaler and we have the two partner models, Topaz, Gigapixel and Bloom. Bloom can add more creative details while Gigapixel is trying to preserve the original details as much as possible. And if you take a look at my layers panel, we can see I used Topaz Bloom and I doubled the resolution. So if I zoom a little bit closer here, maybe on this section, we can see before and after. And we can see that it adds some details that we don't necessarily need, like the surfing outfit turns more into something like a casual shorts there. But these are things that we can refine later. But in general, if you look at maybe the palm leaves as well, we can see the low resolution image looks so much better now. And then with the simple generative fill layer, I actually changed the pants that she's wearing and also refined a little bit her feet, which I wasn't 100% happy with. And now we got the final result which once again started off from a simple sketch and retained exactly the same proportions that I had in mind. But instead of a drawing now I have a highresolution photorealistic generated

### [10:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=631s) AI Portrait editing workflow with Firefly and Photoshop

image. Here's another example where I started off from a sketch and I wanted to create a photorealistic version of this composition. Now you can see the prompt that I used here. Turning this into a realistic photo using tropical, floral, wooden, abstract and geometric elements in the background. And with a couple of further refinements, I could make this even more interesting. So once again, this was my sketch. This is what I ended up with a couple of iterations within Firefly. Then I placed this image into Photoshop and I used the amazing AI image enhancement feature called generative upscale. First I doubled the resolution with the Topaz Bloom partner model. Then doubled it again with the Adobe Firefly model. Topaz Bloom allows some creative detailing while the Firefly model preserves the existing details as much as possible. So pay attention to details in the background as well. We get a lot of extra details there and of course on her face too. But I didn't stop here because I wanted to add some additional interest in the image. And instead of including all of these in my original sketch, I just remembered that I wanted to have some animals here like this little hummingbird on the right. You can see my prompt that I used here. And you can see the area that I selected. And this is before and after. I also wanted to have a gecko here on the left side and I got just that after a couple of experimentation. You can see my prompt here and you can see that it doesn't always work well. So, some of these don't look as realistic, especially this one with the two tails. But I am very happy with the result that I got here. And I also have one more thing, the butterfly that I wanted to make it look like it just landed on her head. And I actually used a very specific type of butterfly that I specified here in my prompt. And one last little detail was the tattoo that I wanted to have on her chin. This is inspired by the Polynesian tattoos. So that's before and after. And this is actually still not the final resolution because I ran one additional Firefly upscaler at the end to achieve this resolution. So again, I'm going to zoom a little bit even closer and turn it off and back on. Again, before and after. Let's see her eyes again. Before and after. I think this is looking great. Let's look at the gecko before and after. So, the image size that we have here is over 6,000 by 6,000 pixels. It all started with a sketch which I refined further using Firefly and Photoshop together to edit with AI.

### [13:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=810s) AI fashion shoot workflow with Firefly and Photoshop

Here's another interesting example to demonstrate that you can achieve high resolution results even when you're starting out with a generated image. So this is the starting image that I generated in Firefly using the Firefly image 5 model which once opened up in Photoshop reveals that the actual dimensions are quite high already. So it's around 2300 pixels by 1,800. And although I like this composition, I wanted to do some changes to it. So I went into edit image and using the prompts below and nano banana. After a couple of attempts, I achieved the pose that I was after. So, this is the pose before and after. And then on this, I used the topas gigapixel to add more detail, the generative upscale feature here in Photoshop. And I continued the composition with generative expand and further generative f layers to make changes like I decided to have short hair instead of long hair on the model on the left. And I have a portrait format image instead of the original square format. Now if I open all the layers that I have here, you will see that these generative fill layers are used for things like changing where her gaze is. So I wanted that woman to also look at the camera. I wanted a little bit more detail around the hair to make it more realistic. And sometimes I use generative fill just to add more detail. like in this case on certain areas like here I felt like the waist area and the pocket needed a little bit more realism and we can see before and after it did a brilliant job. Normally when you are

### [15:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=909s) Colour and tonal corrections with Adobe Lightroom

ready with a composition in Photoshop it's worth jumping over into Adobe Lightroom to make adjustments and final refinements. So for instance you can see with this image I could achieve the look that you see on my screen now. So once again, that was before and after. And we can also zoom a little bit closer. We can see before and after. I even added some noise, but we can of course see all the changes that I've done here. So I went through and adjusted the light settings, color settings, a little bit of color grading as well, and then some effects like texture, vignette, and grain. And once again, we can see the before and after. And since we are in Lightroom, let's just take a look at one of our previous examples, the surfer girl. If I just click on auto in the edit settings, we can see how quickly we can refine the exposure. So that was before and this is after. Of course, with generated images, you can't expect to have the same amount of tonal range as with a camera raw file for instance. But with the limited range we have here, I think it did a really good job. And for the color, we can increase the temperature if we want to make it feel more warm, or we can go for a more cooler tone like this. And

### [16:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=986s) AI enhancements with Lightroom Quick Actions

switching over to quick actions tab, we can also access some further AI enhancements like these one-click presets or making the subject pop a bit more. So, if I increase this, you can see how it finds the subject. And we can see before and after how she gets more visible. And I think that really helps this composition. And further down here, we can see Lightroom analyzed the image and found this person. So we can do quick changes to her like smooth her hair, enhance her clothes, soften the skin. We can also make changes specifically to the sky, like adding more emphasis on that. I think looks quite cool. And pretty much every detail within this landscape is showing up here. So we have the mountains, vegetation, water, and natural ground. I also like the fact that Lightroom has a separate section for listing all the AI edits that we've done to this image. In this case, it's just saying masking because we only used it for selecting certain areas to add emphasis on like the sky and also the subject. Here's a

### [17:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1054s) Distraction removal using AI in Lightroom

few more thing that AI can help you to refine and edit your images in Lightroom. One of my favorite is when it comes to removing distractions like in this case all these people in the foreground. So if I go to remove distraction removal and click on people, it's going to identify all the people in the image and highlight them first. Then we can just click on remove all. And he has done a pretty good job. So that was before and after. Even the stairs are nicely aligned here. There's a few more details that I would have to manually retouch here, but it still saves a lot of time. Another thing that I love to

### [18:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1092s) AI Lens Blur in Lightroom

use is lens blur, which again relies on AI to analyze your photograph and identify the depth in the photo. So once it activates, we will be able to see the focus range here. And we can actually shift the focus from the foreground and the person standing there to the midground in this case. If I zoom closer, we can see it's these details here. But this is the only area that's in focus now. So the background and the foreground are both blurred. Or we can again drag the focus range and have the focus on the back. We can even extend the focus range or make it even more shallow depth of field which can really create like a tilt shift effect. Once again we are focusing on these people here in the middle or again we can drag it back to our person in the foreground. Once you decided on your ideal focus range, you can increase the blur amount if you want the background to be even more blurry. And you can even boost the bokeh effect, which you will see these little circles showing up here. We can also change the type of bokeh that we want. And the great thing, of course, about all of these changes in Lightroom, everything is completely non-destructive. So, you can come back and make further changes or revert back to the original details whenever you

### [19:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1176s) Product promotional poster workflow with Firefly and Photoshop

want. Here's another interesting example where I started off with the sketch for a promotional poster for a perfume advert which ended up looking like this. So once again from the sketch to the final result. Let me show you how I got here. I start out in Adobe Firefly. Go to edit an image option and I drag and drop an image that I created using Adobe Illustrator's revolve feature. So it's a very simple 3D model. This is what we are going to use together with a prompt. Here at the bottom, we can choose between the models. So, we can first try Firefly image 5. And after a few attempts refining my prompt, I ended up creating something like this. Once again, it sticks to the outline and silhouette of my original bottle design quite closely. And you can see my prompt right there. Now, the good thing about using the edit feature within Firefly is that we can continue iterating on this. So, if we want to make changes again, we can use either of these models, but I'm just going to switch to nano banana and maybe add more details and decoration on the glass. And we can see that the AI is taking care of the changes and we will be able to go back and forth between the before and after here at the bottom. So, it's like a history and we can exactly see what we asked in this stage. So that's the more details and that's the one without the details. You can even add text on your product mockups. Like here I used this prompt and you can see before and after. Now the decoration ends a little bit abruptly here but that's something that we could easily take care of later in Photoshop. The design I ended up using for the poster is this which as you can see exactly matches the outline of the original shape that I was using. For the rest of the poster, I also had to generate the background for which I used again my sketch to start out with. And then this used as a structural reference within Firefly. I just had to combine the results here in Photoshop and build up the layers. And you can see if we zoom closer, I also use the Firefly upscaler to add more details on everything, which has done a brilliant job. Once again, closeup before and after. And I also had to use generative expand to increase the height of this composition because it started off being a square format. But I needed more space. And you can see Photoshop again has done a brilliant job completing the rest of the image here on the top. Now

### [22:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1332s) Social media workflow with Adobe Express

instead of adding the text directly here in Photoshop on this poster, it would actually be smarter to take this into Adobe Express where first we can choose a template. And in this case, I'm going for something luxurious and elegant like this one here. Looks quite nice. So once we customize this template, we will be able to see that it already has some animation applied and all these details that we can see on top of the image. And of course, we can just change the background. So out of all the layers at the bottom, we find the background layer. And we can just click here on replace and replace with upload. And there is our image placed in. Now if you come to the left side, we can see that the opacity was reduced here. So we can decide whether we want to increase it or not. I think for the text to be legible, we can keep it somewhere around here. And we can test that animation that we had originally. It's still there. And of course, everything here can be adjusted. So we can change the text. logos that are used here on the top. And you can also very quickly resize this if you need a different size. So for instance, for social media ads, we might want to have a square format of this. So if we say duplicate and resize, it automatically extended the image using generative AI and we actually got three results. So we can check which one works best. This one looks quite nice. So if I keep this now we will have the original design and the new square format. And if I double click on this we can see that the animation is still there. Now in case you decide to create an alternative version you can even start of compositing images here directly within Adobe Express by selecting any image you can just oneclick remove its background. Let's do it with this other image as well. Then we can change the background color to gray for instance or it could also be a gradient. One of these nice subtle gradients might work well. We can of course also add additional generated images by going to add content generative AI and choose generate image. In this case I'm going to go for a square format and I'm just going to type in Sakura tree in full blossom and then generate. So we got these results we can choose from. And just like before, we can quickly remove the background from them and start using them in our composition. So I can just send this to the back. Increase the size. Place it maybe somewhere here at the bottom. And if you feel like it's a bit too distracting, we can just reduce its opacity or even use blend modes to blend it with the backdrop better. Maybe multiply in this case works quite nicely. So after seeing all these

### [25:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1505s) Comparison of AI image editors

various examples, I hope you have a better idea which tool is best suited for your workflow or what combination of tools is best for you. And without displaying all the information, here are the most important comparisons between the four tools that we've seen in this video. So, Adobe Photoshop is definitely the best tool for complex photo editing projects where you need ultimate precision, while Firefly is great at generating new images, either just relying on a written prompt or reference photos. Lightroom is great at finessing and finalizing photos, and Adobe Express is great to turn your photos into social posts that you can easily animate, share, and schedule anywhere. Finally, I

### [25:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1550s) Best AI image editors based on your role

wanted to give a very simple visual comparison on the importance of the tools depending on your role. So, as a creator, you would mainly rely on Photoshop and Firefly, while as a photographer, Lightroom. And as a marketer, your main tools would be Firefly and Adobe Express. But as you've seen with all my examples, you will get the best results when you learn how to combine all of these tools together and turn them into a seamless workflow that best suits your projects. I hope this

### [26:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knta-FcfEJg&t=1582s) Conclusion

helps you choose the best combination of tools for your next photo project. Try these powerful AI photo editing tools and see which one works best for your projects. Also, don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to see more videos like this one. Have fun creating and I will see you in the next one.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/18358*