Over the past year or so, AI tools have become integrated into many workflows and software products. One benefit of this is that image editing has become exponentially easier! This means better results and more flexibility in the way we can design your website.
Previously, we were pretty limited in what we could do with the photos clients provided. Designs had to be adjusted to work around available images. This was sometimes frustrating as we couldn’t necessarily achieve our vision if photos were not in the right format. For example, we often need quite wide “panorama” style images for a hero section or website banners, and if these image formats were unavailable, there wasn’t much we could do.
Enter Generative AI – it’s a game changer!
Adobe’s Firefly allows you to generate images based on text prompts, for free. I first found out about this when my 9 year old daughter used her new school laptop to get ChatGPT to write a fantasy story about an alien monkey, and then generated images to illustrate her story. Her school laptop came preinstalled with all the latest generative AI tools, and she intuitively uses text prompts such as “make an image of an alien monkey in a forest with bananas and a spaceship” to achieve what she wants. Generating text, images and videos from prompts is already second nature to her as she has never known it to work any other way. It is amazing to watch and learn from her.
Firefly can be a great option to generate images in a specific style if you need to fill any gaps on your website, or even for blogs or social media imagery. It can take a little while to learn how to use the prompts effectively, but it is a powerful tool and can be a great (free!) alternative to using stock photos. Sometimes results can be a little off though, e.g. with unrealistic shadows or 6-finger hands, so it pays to check generated images carefully. Firefly can do much more than generate alien monkeys, for example I needed to create some images in a very soft, subtle style for a wellness website and it came up with this:
Firefly also powers a generative AI engine in Photoshop. This is great as it allows us to edit photos using prompts. It is excellent for removing backgrounds, which would have usually taken a long time fiddling around with the eraser tool and trying to work around strands of hair. Now we simply select the subject and prompt Photoshop to remove a background.
Likewise, it can also remove objects from the foreground, and fill in the missing background section. The other day I used this to remove a car from a forested background. It perfectly filled in the forest and removed the car. Magic!
The tool also allows us to generate additional image background, which is handy for those panorama images where we need more background to the right or left of the subject to achieve a wider image format for a banner or hero image.
It’s not only Adobe that offers image generation tools. These tools are becoming integrated into many software products so they are very accessible. Canva for example has "Magic Media" to generate images. There are also more advanced tools such as Midjourney, however the learning curve is much higher for this tool and it’s perhaps not as user friendly for small businesses.
Small businesses don’t always have the resources to get perfect images for their websites, and these AI tools help us provide better web design results even with less-than-ideal photos!