Adobe just rolled out a batch of updates to Photoshop, and the headline feature is called Markup. Instead of learning masking tools or hunting through menus, you can now draw an arrow, a rough shape, or a scribble directly on a photo, add a short sentence describing what you want, and the AI fills in that part of the image for you. Point at a bare wall and write "add tiled shelving," and the software builds it in, matched to the lighting and angle of the original shot.
This sits next to a second new tool called Instruct Edit with Masks, which lets you rope off one part of a photo, describe a change like opening someone's closed eyes or adding a hat, and trust that the rest of the picture stays untouched. Adobe has also introduced a separate AI Assisted Editor mode, which strips away Photoshop's famously dense toolbars and replaces them with one text box where you type what you want done. The traditional, complicated version of Photoshop is still there for professionals, but it now sits next to a version built for people who never wanted to learn it in the first place.
There is a practical, non-AI addition too. Photoshop finally gets Lightroom style lighting controls, so basic touch ups like fixing exposure or shadows can happen without switching apps. A new panel also puts Adobe's stock photo library, more than 900 million images, directly inside the editing window.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Adobe's stock has taken a real hit over the past year on worries that its hold on creative software is loosening. Canva has built a simpler, browser based alternative that now reaches hundreds of millions of people a month, many of whom never touch Photoshop at all. Figma has done the same for design teams. And cheap or free AI image tools from Google and OpenAI can now do in one prompt what used to take a trained editor twenty minutes in Photoshop.
Adobe's answer has been to stop trying to out build every AI model on its own. Behind the scenes, Firefly, Adobe's AI engine, now offers access to more than two dozen outside AI models, including ones built by Google and OpenAI, not just Adobe's own. Adobe seems to have concluded that owning the workflow, the place where marketing teams, photographers, and retailers already do their daily work, matters more than owning the single smartest model. That is probably the smarter position to hold, at least for now.
For a business that relies on decent looking product shots, listings, or marketing images, this lowers the skill needed to do basic photo cleanup in house instead of outsourcing it. But it comes at a cost. Adobe has been raising Creative Cloud subscription prices and pushing customers toward pricier plans that bundle in AI credits, so the convenience of typing instead of learning tools is not free. Before leaning on these features for daily work, it is worth checking which plan your team is actually on and what a heavier month of AI editing would cost.