A new optional mode collapses Photoshop's generative tools behind one natural-language bar, and a Light Adjustment Layer brings Camera Raw exposure controls into the layers stack. Announced August 27, 2026.
2026-08-27 · by Moe Ameen
Adobe added an optional "AI Assisted Editor" mode to Photoshop in an update announced August 27, 2026. It is a simplified, prompt-first interface that sits on top of the full app: you toggle it from the menu bar (and can hide it again in Settings), and instead of hunting through panels you describe an edit in a natural-language bar. The mode is in beta; the individual tools it exposes are generally available.
What the mode does is group Photoshop's AI editing tools into one place — Prompt to Edit, Remove Background, Generative Expand, the Remove tool, Generative Fill, Generative Upscale, and AI Markup (draw or circle on the canvas to point the edit at a spot, then type "add more clouds here"). The underlying generation is Firefly-powered, and Prompt to Edit keeps the model choice Adobe rolled out earlier in 2026: you can run the edit on Adobe's own model or partner engines including Black Forest Labs' FLUX, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's image model. The pitch is fewer steps and a lower skill floor for edits that used to require masks and adjustment layers.
The same release ships a feature photographers have wanted in Photoshop for years: a Light Adjustment Layer. It is a non-destructive layer carrying Camera Raw's core tone controls — Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks — so you can grade an image "Camera Raw-level" without round-tripping out to Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. Adobe also extended Dynamic Text to flow along custom shapes and paths, and surfaced Adobe Stock's library directly inside a panel in the app.
This is still an in-app image editor. The AI Assisted Editor makes editing one image faster and easier; it does not write a caption, build a carousel, hold a brand voice across a campaign, or publish anything. Model availability, beta status, and credit terms are a 2026 snapshot — confirm current details on Adobe's site.
The interesting move here is consolidation: Adobe took a scatter of separate AI tools and put them behind a single surface so you stop app-hopping to finish one image. That is the same idea Kompozy applies one layer out — to the whole content week instead of the single edit. Where the AI Assisted Editor collapses editing into one prompt bar, Kompozy collapses production and distribution into one queue: feed it your finished hero and it generates the surrounding set — a Carousel and Photo Post with brand-exact captions through HyperFrames, a Quote Graphic, text posts and a thread in your own voice via the Persona Brief, plus a blog and newsletter — then reframes each per destination and schedules it across the eight social platforms plus blog and email, with autopilot and a per-post review gate. Adobe unified the edit; Kompozy unifies everything after it.
The Light Adjustment Layer is a good on-ramp to that. Grade your hero shot in-app to a consistent look, then hand it to Kompozy so the whole campaign inherits it — the graded image becomes the anchor for a week of variations that read as one brand, not thirty one-off exports. And the news itself is a content unit: drop "Photoshop now edits from a prompt bar" into Kompozy as a source and it fans your take into a captioned explainer clip, a carousel breaking down the new mode, a blog post, and platform-native posts, generated and scheduled in a single pass.
It is an optional, prompt-first editing mode Adobe announced on August 27, 2026. It groups Photoshop's AI tools — Prompt to Edit, Remove Background, Generative Expand, Remove, Generative Fill, Generative Upscale, and AI Markup — behind a single natural-language bar. You toggle it from the menu bar, and it is in beta.
The conversational assistant (public beta in March 2026) added plain-language editing to Photoshop. The AI Assisted Editor is a dedicated mode that consolidates the app's generative tools into one simplified prompt-based interface you can switch on or off, rather than a chat panel alongside the normal workspace.
A new non-destructive adjustment layer that brings Adobe Camera Raw's core tone controls — Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks — into Photoshop, so you can grade an image without leaving the layers workflow for Camera Raw or Lightroom.
Prompt to Edit is Firefly-powered and keeps the model choice Adobe rolled out across 2026: Adobe's own model plus partner engines including Black Forest Labs' FLUX, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's image model. Availability and credit terms change, so check Adobe's current details.