If you want to visit a place where danger from the natural world is everywhere and where lunch costs $60, I encourage you to visit Iceland. It’s a beautiful and brutal landscape whose natural wonders (and horrors) make for incredible photographs. I took a bunch on a recent trip to the country. But this is it is possible, as I discovered unfortunately, to make them scary in new ways.
I gave Adobe’s new AI-powered Generative Fill tool a shot on my Iceland vacation photos, with both “legitimate” photo-editing tasks and some funny prompts that resulted in nightmare fuel. Generative Fill is now in beta, and is based on Adobe’s Firefly image generator. It’s not completely new, but having it next to all your usual photo editing sliders is new. You use it by making a selection — lasso, magic wand, whatever you want — and then typing a text prompt. It can remove and add elements to your image, or stretch the image.
After fiddling with it for just a few hours, it looks like an awesome upgrade over the existing Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop. See how each one handles the crowd removal in my Skógafoss photo. This is a very popular place, so my photo is naturally crowded in front of the waterfall — here is the original.
No contest — image Generative Fill is better than Content-Aware. And all I have to do is make an inaccurate selection, type a few words, and wait a few seconds. To be honest, he was a bit scary himself.
But that’s just the beginning — if you really want to do it, you can do it. And oh, the places you go with Generative Fill. Let’s travel from beautiful-yet-deadly waterfalls to a beautiful-yet-deadly glacier. Here’s what the glacier carved into the valley really looks likeand here’s what I got when I asked Generative Fill to make it scarier by adding a thunderstorm.
Pretty convincing, right? How about a waterfall instead?
Oh wow, there goes Generative Fill difficult at the waterfall. It kind of looks fake, but it’s possible, I guess. Now, what if I asked for ponies in the foreground instead?
Sweet Jesus, not like that! Let’s lighten up… how about a lemonade stand out front? Pretty innocent, right?
Cool, the worst lemonade stand in the world. Love it. What if we eased into something that couldn’t possibly conjure horror? How about a rainbow in the sky with unicorns?
Okay, that’s F for that rainbow and a big “No” to the rest. Are you okay, Firefly? Take me back to safety and just try to remove people from this photo of the beautiful-yet-deadly black sand beach.
Eh, maybe it’s okay. The place where the rocks meet the water looks fake and stretched, but really, the whole country looks too good to be true. At least the phallic image in this The image was not created by AI. Seriously, it’s just like that outside. You never know what you will see next in Iceland.
