In this tutorial, How to Find and Prepare Images for Photo Manipulation, we'll examine the basics of finding images and preparing them using Photoshop's generative fill tool.
If you prefer video tutorials, check out the complete Photo Manipulation for Beginners course from the Tuts+ YouTube channel, and if you want to know more about photo editing in Photoshop, check out Adobe Photoshop for Beginners.
To follow along, you can download the items used in the course from this collection:
How to Find Images
Your first step in this process is to find high-quality images and assets. For this, we recommend Envato, the largest unlimited creative subscription in the world.
For the project we're using in our example here, a fruit smoothie advertisement, you can download a number of terrific strawberry images, along with bananas, milk splashes, and a couple of glass bottles from Envato. You won't be using all the images you download, but downloading loads of different images will give you a good pool of photos to choose from when you start building up your composition.
Envato also has some very cool 3D assets that let you spin and adjust the angle, and they would work really well in this project.
If you have a subscription to Photoshop, you also have access to Adobe Firefly, which is Adobe's generative AI tool. It's easy to use, and you can type in a prompt and get your images. However, I do not endorse or use AI-generated stock images at the moment as they are currently a copyright, environmental, and general ethical nightmare.
Also, be mindful that if you use Firefly to generate your stock images, you need to use a separate AI to upscale them to an appropriate resolution because you're going to need nice big images for your project.
How to Prepare Images
Whether your assets are stock photography, 3D assets, or Gen AI, the ways in which you edit and composite them are all going to be the same, so let's jump right into preparing the images.
Although I don't recommend Generative AI to make any creative decisions, I do use the generative fill tool powered by Adobe Firefly when I need to expand images and remove any unwanted objects.
How to Extend Images With Generative Fill Photoshop
Using this image as an example, let me show you how to use Photoshop generative fill.
1. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool
Click and drag to select the empty portion of the canvas and some of the existing sky. You'll notice that the floating context bar below the image changes because we have an active selection.
2. Click on Generative Fill
If you want, you can fill in a prompt telling it what to generate. But in this case, all we want to do is fill the gap and expand the sky, so we don't need to do that.
Use Photoshop Generative Fill to expand the image
3. Hit "Generate"
Photoshop will use the existing pixels to fill in and generate three variations shown in the Properties panel. Because this is a simple sky, the variations are more or less the same, so just choose one, and voila! The sky is filled in.
Extend an image using Generative Fill in Photoshop
How to Remove Objects With Generative Fill
Now let's look at removing objects using generative fill.
Step 1
Let's say you want to remove the flowers in the grass in the same image we used previously. The process of removing objects is very similar to expanding an image. You just need to switch to the Lasso Tool to select the flowers. Make a quick and sloppy selection around each flower—nothing too exact.
Step 2
Next, hit Generate with no prompt. When you don't use a prompt, Photoshop will assume you just want to remove or fill in the area selected using the surrounding pixels as a reference, and you will be offered three variations with the flowers removed.
If you don't like what Photoshop generated, you can always hit Generate in the Properties panel once again to get three new variations. Here's the result with the flowers removed.
Discover More Photoshop Resources and Tutorials
In this tutorial, we covered the basics of finding images and preparing them using Photoshop's Generative Fill tool. To learn more about how to enhance your work with AI or find more tutorials on Photoshop techniques like how to manipulate a photo, head over to Envato Tuts+ and the Envato blog. And for premium digital resources to cover all your creative needs, be sure to visit Envato.
Here are some great resources to get you started:
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