I Tested Every Photoshop AI Model (Here’s the Best One)

Are you tired of burning through all your generative credits trying to figure out which model you should use? In this video, I'm going to show you exactly which generative model you should use. So out of the eight AI models currently inside of Photoshop, there's only five that we actually want to use. There's two different categories and there's three different providers. So I've burned through lots of generative credits so you don't have to. Let's jump in right now. So there's two different categories of models, generative models and editing models. Let's try out the generating models first, which is generating from scratch. Now, if we go to generate here, you might notice we select the entire thing. You only get to use the Firefly model. You might see that. Well, we can actually easily get around that. We just go under the edit menu here. And if we choose generative fill, you'll also notice we get a larger prompt box to start with when we're working this way. But if you look here, you see that we've got the different models here. We've got the Adobe models. We've got Firefly, which is Adobe. Then we've got two different partners. We've got Gemini, which is Google. And then we've got Black Forest Labs, who make Flux. So when it comes to generating from scratch, if we look at Adobe, there's one model to use here. We can use Firefly Image 5. Then under the partner models, there's two different Fluxes. The one we're going to use is Flux Pro. Flux 0.2 Pro is good for generating. Flux Context Pro, think of this as in context. This is an editing model. And then when we go to Gemini Nano Banana, ignore the other two. Let's just go straight to Banana 2 because it's the only one that's 2K currently inside of Photoshop. And this one is a hybrid model where it can generate and it can edit. So let's just start here. We're going to take a prompt that I've already created here. This is a longer kind of a prompt. And I'll put it in the comments if you want it. I'm not going to, you know, read all the way through it, but we're going to create a lake. And now we're just going to choose generate. All right. And that's using Nano Banana 2. Let's hide that and let's select everything. We can see here it wants to use Generate Image, which we don't want to do. We're going to use Generate a Fill. If Generate a Fill is showing here, just use it. Hopefully they'll fix that at some point, give us that option. But meanwhile, let's go down here. We're going to just use Generate a Fill from the menu. So I'm going to pop it in again. This time we're going to use Flux 2 Pro. We're going to generate. All right. Looking good. Let's do the same thing again. This time we're going to go to Adobe and we're going to use Firefly 5, Image 5. All right. So here's Nano Banana 2. Don't even worry about Nano Banana because the resolution it generates in Photoshop is lower. And as you can see, this does a very good job of creating very stylistic, dynamic kind of imagery. You're going to see very powerful skies and different things like that. Then when we go to Flux, the strength in Flux is realism. Generally speaking, Flux is going to look more realistic, less stylized. And let's have a look at this. Now we're in Firefly Image 5. And when we're using this model, when we do this kind of work, generally it's more kind of a little bit more illustrative and painterly looking. So right there, you've got three options for generating from scratch, at least when we're doing landscapes. Choose the style you want. One is not right. One is not wrong. It depends what kind of style you want. All right. Let's move on to Inpainting. All right. So when we come to a task like Inpainting, now we limit the amount of models that we can use. Now, Inpainting is when we go to insert something into the image with a selection. So we could, you know, just make a selection here and say we want to add a rowboat. So let's make a small selection because if we make a big selection, it's going to make a larger boat because the shape of that selection is going to influence what's generated. So Firefly Fill and Expand is a better option than Firefly Image 5 for this kind of work for three different reasons. One, Firefly Image 5 is only going to give us one variation versus three for Fill and Expand. Number two, Fill and Expand offers the option for a reference image, whereas you can't get that on Firefly Image 5. And then Image 5 is going to cost 10 generative credits versus one for Firefly Fill and Expand. And if you're on a Firefly Plan or Creative Cloud Pro, you get unlimited usage of Fill and Expand. So let's use Fill and Expand for this and we're going to choose Generate. And there we go. And, of course, you know, we can cycle through the variations and we can see what we get. And you can see it's integrated really nicely. It's got a nice reflection. We could use a reference image if we wanted a specific boat that we wanted to generate. OK, let me just load the selection from here so we have the same selection. So I'm going to click on the mask and I'm going to show you why we don't want to use the other models. So let's get a generative fill and we're going to type in Wooden Rowboat. So you're going to get a similar result to these. Flex is actually going to be worse, but let's just use a Nano Banana 2 for this to do a quick comparison. And we're going to generate and you'll see the problem. The partner models do not integrate into the photo as well with selections. Notice the edges are not very good. All right, we've just looked at the generative models. Why don't we quickly jump into the editing models? But before I do, I want to offer you this printable cheat sheet that you can download. So click the link underneath and it covers all eight models and it shows you the advantages and disadvantages of each model, along with a description of what that model actually does. And you can print that out, put it by your computer. All right, so let's look at something like an edit. So we're going to make this really simple. We'll go to the top of Select or Ctrl A and now we're going to change the mood of this. So let's go in and we're going to change the mood to Overcast Stormy Day with Rain. I'm just going to copy that prompt so we can use it again. So why don't we start with what we were already looking at here? We're going to do Nano Banana 2. Remember, this is a hybrid model. It works for editing as well as generating from scratch. Great. Let's go ahead now and we're going to do the same thing. This time we're going to use Flux. So we go into the partner model and the Flux model we want to use now is we want to use Context Pro. This is an editing model versus the generating model in Flux 2 Pro. So when you're editing, use Context. Same prompt. All right, we'll come back to this. So we will examine these in a second. Right now, I just want to generate them all. All right, now we're going to go to the Adobe and this is where we're going to use Firefly Image 5. This is where this stands out. In fact, Adobe never had a editing model before. Firefly Image 5 is now the editing model and it can do a lot of what Nano Banana can do, sometimes even better. All right, so let's quickly examine these and then I've got a little bit more information I'm going to give you. By the way, if you want to see how much a model is going to cost, you select the model here and then when you roll over the it's going to tell us. So it's 10 credits for that. It's going to be one credit for that unless you have a plan that gives you unlimited access. I'm glad they added that now. But when we look under the partner models, we look Flux Context, 10 credits. Flux Pro, two, 20 credits. These are tokens. Adobe calls them credits and we look at Nano Banana 2, between 10 and 40. So it uses 10 to generate, it uses 40 to edit. Editing is more intensive and it also can take up to eight reference images. All right, so we're not going to look at the rest of them. So I generated into a 1920 by 1080 space, which is HD, but it's looking half that size because my BenQ monitor works on double resolution. All right, so we can see it's done a very stormy sky, just like Nano Banana does. We've got the rain looking very dramatic. We've got the water. It's looking really cool. Very dramatic and a little bit stylized in the sense that you would get from Nano Banana. I like that the boat's kind of flooded. It's kind of interesting. All right, so that's Nano Banana 2. Then when we go into Flux Context. So generally speaking, Flux gives you a more photorealistic result with less kind of stylization. In this case, I don't think it's done tremendously well for this particular task compared to what it usually does. And then the one that might surprise you, yeah, this is Firefly. Look how good it's gotten. I mean, we've got these interesting splashes. The rain looks really good. It's not a dramatic sky as we got here in the Nano Banana, but I think it looks more realistic than Nano Banana does. And once again, it just depends on the style that you're looking for. One isn't necessarily right. Another one isn't necessarily wrong. But we've got the two sets of models. We've got the editing models and then we've got the generating model. So make sure you choose the right one. Of course, you should grab that free cheat sheet and the links underneath. But I also want to let you know that that's just one page from my 52 page guide on generative models, which is part of my new course, The Complete Guide to AI in Photoshop, where we go beyond just generative fill and cover all the other AI removal tools, the neural filters and more. Learn how to write prompts correctly. Discover the three common mistakes that people make that cause bad AI results. An in-depth guide on which models to use, working with multiple reference images and a whole lot more. This is an almost four hour comprehensive course on everything you need to know about working with AI in Photoshop. I'm really excited about it. Comes with all the lesson images as well as three PDF guides. So if you're feeling a little left behind, don't worry. Check out my course. It's going to get you up to speed on all the latest AI very, very quickly inside of Photoshop. So check it out underneath for this week only. It's 25 percent off. Then it goes back to a full price at the end of that. So drop a comment underneath and let me know if this video was helpful for you. And if you want to know more about all the new features that came out in Photoshop, check out this video right here. I dropped it last week. And also, if you're new, welcome to the cafe. And whether you're new or you've been around for a while, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any of my weekly tutorials. And until next time, I'll see you at the cafe.