As a pro photographer, I listened to Adobe’s announcement that Photoshop would be available free inside ChatGPT with a note of trepidation. But when I opened ChatGPT to try out the new integration for myself, the results weren’t at all what I expected – and that’s both good and bad.
This week, Adobe announced that some Photoshop tools would be available directly inside ChatGPT. Admittedly, I was expecting the chatbot to churn out a fully AI-generated image – but that’s not at all what’s happening here. ChatGPT is now able to help users apply select Photoshop effects, including colors and brightness, to photographs.
On the one hand, I took these photos in June and still haven’t found the time to edit them; I’m always looking for ways to speed up photo editing. But on the other hand, I’m a bit wary of AI. Here’s what I found when I tested Photoshop inside ChatGPT.
Photoshop inside ChatGPT is not generative AI
The Photoshop-ChatGPT collab is Agentic AI, where a chatbot does something for you, but it is not generative AI, where an AI creates something completely new. That means the resulting image applies edits, but does not generate new pixels. It also means that Adobe doesn’t apply Content Credentials to the image.
This is an important distinction. I don’t have an issue with AI that can help me quickly mask out a subject (provided that AI is trained on licensed content that pays the original creators). But I don’t want an AI to create for me – and that’s not what the ChatGPT Photoshop integration is doing.
Photoshop inside ChatGPT is meant to be a learning tool…
If a chatbot can handle all the editing for me, is there any reason to learn photo editing techniques? Admittedly, I was also expecting the Agentic AI to remove the learning process entirely, but I was relieved to see that that is not at all the case here.
When ChatGPT adjusted the colors of this photograph for me, the chatbot explained a bit of the difference between the saturation and vibrance sliders, for example.
I think this tool could potentially be a boost for new photographers learning the jargon of the photo editing industry, as the chatbot doesn’t just handle the edit without explanation and doesn’t entirely remove specific photographer terms either.
Another important distinction is that ChatGPT gives the user sliders to control how much (or how little) of the effect to apply.
… but ChatGPT can use the wrong terms
I got pretty excited when ChatGPT said it could apply a Kodachrome look to my photo. Imagine my disappointment, then, when ChatGPT instead delivered a slider for the tritone effect.
Kodachrome is a popular film stock; trione is an editing process that maps the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows to three different colors. The two things are not at all similar.
That, I think, is one of the downsides to trusting an agentic AI to teach the ins and outs of photography and photo editing: AI can be wrong, and mistakes aren’t exactly rare.
ChatGPT’s Photoshop is a very lite version of the photo editor
The initial launch inside ChatGPT contains only a few Photoshop features. Users can adjust color, brightness and contrast. It can apply a few special effects, like tritone and halftone dots, but that’s pretty much it, offering a very small taste of the longstanding pro photo editor.
The Photoshop ChatGPT app feels more like Photoshop Elements – and even that isn’t exactly correct, as Photoshop Elements can still do things like crop and retouch acne, while the ChatGPT collab cannot (at least not yet).
It's also important to note that while Photoshop is free, it's subject to the same limitations as the ChatGPT payment tiers. I don’t have a paid account, so I was only able to upload one image a day, and I ran out of thinking space towards the end.
Photo editing with ChatGPT wasn’t faster than doing it myself
Here’s my biggest sticking point: I tweaked the photo's colors in Lightroom far faster than ChatGPT edited the photo for me. Of course, as a pro photographer, I’m not the intended audience for this tool, but it’s a distinction worth noting.
It took some time to upload the image to ChatGPT, some time for the AI to think. And it probably took me a bit longer because there were a few things that I couldn’t figure out. I still haven’t, for example, found the ability to export a full-resolution file of the edit, though Adobe previously indicated that it was possible.
Part of this is that the feature still feels a bit glitchy. ChatGPT told me on a few occasions that the Photoshop tools were temporarily offline.
Will Agentic AI be part of the future of photo editing?
Many software brands have gone all-in on AI, but I think some AI is more ethical than others – and AI is better suited for some tasks over others.
After trying out the ChatGPT-Photoshop integration, where I see Agentic AI fitting in the industry the best is to carry out tedious, non-creative tasks. I feel like agentic AI could eventually replace things like Photoshop’s batch editing and Actions tools.
I also think Agentic AI could perhaps be an updated form of in-app help, though this is still subject to some AI inaccuracies.
Photoshop’s integration into ChatGPT isn’t going to replace pro editing – it’s not even close. But it could give new users a taste – and may indicate where future sedition automation and in-app learning may be headed. (And I’m so very glad that its not generative AI.)
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