p.1 #1 · Generative fill has become useless in Photoshop
Is it just me or is Generative Fill now completely useless in Photoshop? It used to be consistent and deliver great, high quality results. Now it's a fever dream mess with objects straight from MS Paint.
Coincidentally Adobe has released the new 2026 Photoshop with partner models such as Google Gemini which you have to pay extra for. Those results are GREAT and much more in line with how it used to work.
It's somewhat bad timing for Adobe that this weird and unexpected AI bug happened now. People are so prone to conspiracy thinking these days.
p.1 #2 · Generative fill has become useless in Photoshop
The AI features produce decidedly mixed results. I suspect that the problem relates to how well the software does (or does not) understand the material it is trying ot extend.
Often it works pretty well, but it may take several tries. But sometimes it just does bizarre stuff. Two examples — though not precisely generative fill.
1. I wanted to remove something from a sky in one photograph a while back. It might have been a bit of a cloud, but I no longer remember. Every time I selected that area and tried to delete it the software put a tiny moon in its place in the sky!!!
2. A few days ago I had a photograph that was tilted, so I rotated it slightly to fix this. Unfortunately, this left an empty spot near the upper right corner, and cropping that out meant that I clipped the top of a tree closer to the upper left that was pretty important to the composition. At the upper right was a cliff face, so I figured I could just use generative fill to extend it a little to fill the now-empty area at the top of the frame. Instead of just filling in a bit more cliff face… it hallucinated an entire top of the cliff with a new ridge and sky beyond it. Yikes! (I ended up using a different manual solution.)
p.1 #3 · Generative fill has become useless in Photoshop
Firefly Image 3 is still working fine for me for things like canvas extension or getting rid of a branch or powerlines. I usually just leave the prompt blank, which is counter to Adobe's best practices, but it works for me.
p.1 #4 · Generative fill has become useless in Photoshop
Often when using generative fill (skies and more, even after multiple attempts), I redo the area using Remove (generative AI) in smaller sections. This produces a result with a tonality and texture much closer to the adjacent parts of the image.
