Adobe's New Photoshop Beta Lets You Draw on Images to Guide AI Edits

Adobe is rolling out an AI-heavy update for Photoshop that includes a new optional interface, called the "AI Assisted Editor" view, currently launching in beta. The view pulls all of Photoshop's AI features into a single toolbar, including the prompt-based image editor, background remover, and AI image extender (The Verge).

The centerpiece of the update is a new markup feature. Users can draw directly on an image to tell the AI assistant what to change, without typing a text prompt. The markup tool lets them select areas to recolor, sketch arrows to indicate position, or brush in rough shapes to suggest new elements. For users who still prefer describing changes in words, Adobe is also updating its "Instruct Edit with Masks" feature, which lets users edit a mask — a selected region of an image that controls where edits apply — using plain-language prompts.

Underlying these interface changes is an upgrade to Adobe's Firefly Image 5 model, the AI system that generates and modifies images inside Photoshop. The model now understands the entire context of an image, according to Adobe, eliminating the need for users to manually mark every area they want edited. That contextual awareness is what makes the markup feature viable: a user can sketch a rough annotation and trust the model to infer intent from the surrounding image content rather than requiring a precise mask for every operation.

The AI Assisted Editor arrives after a year of incremental expansion of Adobe's AI tooling within Photoshop. At Adobe MAX in October 2025, the company announced that a Photoshop AI Assistant would be available through a private beta waitlist (Adobe). By March 2026, Adobe had moved the AI Assistant into public beta for Photoshop on web and mobile, where it could be used to remove distractions and change backgrounds (Adobe Blog; The Verge). In April 2026, Adobe confirmed that the Firefly AI Assistant, powered by its creative agent, remained in public beta (Adobe Blog). By June 2026, Adobe had extended bespoke AI Assistants across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, and Lightroom as part of a public beta (The Verge). The Photoshop Beta had also previously expanded Generative Fill with additional AI models for more creative choice (Adobe Blog).

What distinguishes the AI Assisted Editor view from those earlier releases is the interface commitment. Until now, Adobe's AI features in Photoshop have been distributed across the existing toolbar and panel structure, accessible but not consolidated. The new view places them behind a single, opt-in layout, which signals a bet that a meaningful subset of users will want to work in a mode where AI operations are the primary interaction model rather than an occasional tool call.

The markup feature is the more technically interesting addition. Adobe has been steadily reducing the friction between a user's intent and the model's execution. The progression runs from text prompts to mask-based editing to, now, freeform visual annotation. A user can brush a rough shape to suggest a new element or sketch an arrow to reposition one, and the model infers the operation from the drawing and the image context together. That is a meaningful shift in the input modality. Text prompts require users to translate a visual idea into language; mask-based editing requires precision. Markup lowers the barrier to something closer to a designer's natural instinct: point at the thing, sketch what you mean, let the system work out the rest.

The dependency on Firefly Image 5's contextual understanding is worth flagging. The markup feature's usefulness depends on how accurately the model interprets a rough annotation in the context of the full image. If the model misreads a brushed shape or an arrow, the user is back to manual masking. Adobe's claim that the model now processes entire-image context is doing heavy lifting here, and its real-world reliability will determine whether the markup tool becomes a default workflow or a novelty.

All of these features are currently in beta. Adobe has not announced a general availability date for the AI Assisted Editor view.

The broader trajectory is clear enough. Adobe has spent the past year moving AI from an add-on layer to a structural part of the Photoshop interface. The AI Assisted Editor view, the markup tool, and the context-aware Firefly Image 5 model together push toward a workflow where the boundary between manual editing and AI-assisted editing narrows further. Whether that workflow becomes the default for professional users is a separate question, and one that will depend on the precision these tools deliver outside of controlled demonstrations.