Generating images using Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly is a generative AI tool that enables you to create and edit images, apply text effects, recolor images, and create vector graphics based on text prompts and reference images, with additional tools and features to help you refine generated images to match your desired look and feel. Firefly connects to Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Express so you can use the images you generate in other projects.

NOTE: Adobe Firefly has a monthly generative credit limit, and most features of Firefly cost one credit to use for generating content. As part of Indiana University’s agreement with Adobe, everyone at IU has a monthly generative credit limit of 1000 credits. In comparison, a free Adobe Firefly account has a monthly limit of only 25 credits, so you’ll want to make sure you log into Adobe Firefly with your IU account in order to have access to the higher generative credit limit.

Logging in and navigating to Adobe Firefly

To start generating images using Firefly, you’ll need to log into your Adobe account and navigate to Adobe Firefly. We’ll start out by going to the Adobe at IU page to accomplish this.

The Adobe Firefly homepage will load, and will look similar to the following image:

Across the top of the screen is the navigation bar, which allows you to view images generated by other Firefly users, view images you’ve marked as favorites, learn more about Firefly, and get help with using Firefly. Underneath the navigation is the prompt bar, which shows examples of artwork generated using specific prompts. (We can also use this to generate images using our own text.) Below the prompt bar, there are many different options available for generating artwork, including text to image, generative fill, text effects, and more.

Generating images

Generating an image using Adobe Firefly is as simple as typing up a description of what you’d like Firefly to create an image of. When you’re creating your text prompt, it’s important to be descriptive – the more details you include in your prompt, the better your results will be. For example, if you want to generate images of a cat camping in the forest at sunset with a campfire and a tent, the prompt “cat with a tent by a campfire in the forest at sunset” will give you results that are closer to what you’re looking for than just “cat camping out”.

For more help with creating prompts, view the Adobe Help document Writing effective prompts.

Let’s practice generating images. If you have an idea of what you want to generate, substitute the example prompts in the following instructions with a prompt that’s related to what you want to make. Otherwise, feel free to follow along using the example prompts. 

Once Firefly has generated some images for us to use, we may find that we want them to be created using a different style, or with a different color palette. We can easily make refinements to the images we've generated, if desired.

Refining a prompt’s generated results

Once the images have been generated, you can make refinements to the prompt’s results using the Control panel on the right side of the screen, then have Firefly generate a new set of images with the added refinements. You can adjust the following attributes:

• The aspect ratio of generated image
• Whether the content of your image is more photo-realistic or artistic, and the intensity of the details in the image
• Add effects to an image, such as making the image look as if it was constructed from paper or applying a bokeh effect
• The color, lighting, and composition of the generated images

Adjusting the attributes of an image is relatively straightforward; however, the changes we make won’t immediately be applied – instead, we’ll choose the attributes we want to adjust, and those attributes will be added to the prompt.

Let’s see how to adjust the results of the cat with laptop prompt to look like art instead of like a photo. We’ll also apply an effect to make the image look like it was constructed from layered paper, and we’ll change the color and tone to use pastel colors. Once we’ve selected the attributes we want to adjust, we’ll generate new images based on the prompt.

Feel free to experiment with the options available in the Control panel to achieve different results from your image generation prompts.

Saving a generated image

Once you’ve generated an image you like, you’ll want to save it to your computer or to your Adobe Creative Cloud library in order to use it in other projects.

When we point to one of the images Firefly generated, we see the following options appear at the top and bottom of the image:

In the upper left corner, we see the Edit menu. This gives us options for viewing similar results, using the image as a reference image in Firefly, and editing the image further in Adobe Express.

In the upper right corner, we see the More options and Save to Favorites buttons. The More options menu provides options for saving the generated image to our computer, copying a link to the image, copying the image to your clipboard, and saving the image to your Creative Cloud library. The Save to Favorites button saves the generated images displayed to your favorites collection, which you can access from the Favorites menu option on the Firefly home page.

NOTE: The Save to Favorites option saves the images in the specific web browser you’re using on a specific device. This means that any images saved as a favorite will only be accessible from the specific browser/computer you’re using, and are not saved to your Adobe account.

Let’s practice saving an image to our computer.

The chosen image will be downloaded to your computer. Now you can upload the image for use in an Adobe Express web page or edit it in another program.