The important new features in Photoshop 2025
Photoshop has just received a major update. I show you how to use the most important new features.
I will add the written steps soon, right now, this is a transcript of my video, watch the video and see what new.
00:42 Auto remove people
02:49 Auto Remove Wires and Cables
04:17 Firefly 3 in Generative Fill
05:07 Firefly 3 in Generative Expand
06:00 Remove Background , Generate Background
06:49 Batch Generate, Generative Workspace
Adobe has just updated Photoshop to Photoshop 2025. This is the annual big update where all the stuff comes together. I’ve made videos and other tutorials. I’ll link to them on how to do that update and make sure you can find the latest version. Now we’re going to look at the new features right now. And some of these features you might have seen before in beta, and now they’ve moved into the main Photoshop version. There’s going to be some features you have never seen before. They’re brand new. Now, I’m just going to touch I’m going to run everything very quickly in this video so you get an overview, bird’s-eye view, so to speak, of what’s new. And I’m going to be doing separate tutorials on these main new features and really digging into them. So let’s start with remove distraction, which is now in the main Photoshop. So if we go to the remove tool, which you’re going to find over here. If you don’t see the remove tool or you don’t see any tools, by the way, just go click on this little three-dont menu and hold, and then you’ll get customized toolbar.
And you’ll probably see the missing tools are here. And then just hit restore defaults, and then you’re good to go. All right, let’s get rid of these people in the background. So if we choose find distractions, it’s going to have the ability to choose people. So what it will do is it will highlight the people. If you wanted to keep one of these people, you would just paint over it with the minus key or just hold down the alt or the option key as you paint. If you wanted to also remove him, Just paint over him. And then when you’re happy with the people that you want to remove, just hit this little checkmark here. And now it will do the process of removing them using generative fill. Now, notice it wasn’t great. And that’s because we’ve got generative AI turned off. This is another new feature. Now we have the ability to use generative AI in here. So if we turn this on, now we’re going to force it to use generative AI, and we should get a better result. Let’s try it again. And let’s apply it. And as you can see there, now we get a much better result.
Now, you’re not going to get any variations. It’s automatically going to choose the best variation. Another thing to bear in mind is if we set this to auto, that means, generally speaking, when the area selected is larger than 1,000 pixels by 1,000, it’s going to use generative AI all the time. If that area is smaller, it’s not always going to use generative AI, which means that we can remove small distractions very quickly and easily without using generative AI or worrying about using those generative credits. Now, this also works with poles and wires. Now, I’ve done another video on this. We really went crazy and we just did the whole test. So in the other video, we just tested this and pushed it to the extreme. Check that out. I’ll link it. So the best way to use this is to create a new layer first. And then on that new layer, make sure you choose sample all layers. Otherwise, nothing will happen. Then we’re going to choose find distractions. This time we’re going to use wires and cables. Now, I did another video on this where I really went in-depth with this and pushed it hard.
And if you’re wondering what happened about the crack in, yes, you can apply it a second time and it will make it better. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out that video. I’ll add a link to it. And boom, look at that. It does a really good job of getting rid of it. However, we lost some of our subject here. And this is why you would want to use it on a layer. Because if we go in here and And we choose that layer and then we apply a layer mask, we can just grab a brush here, and let’s make it a high edge brush. I’m hitting the left bracket key to make it smaller. Let’s make that brush about the size of the wood there. Make sure we select the layer mask, Opacity, Flow, 100. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to click right there and then just release. Now move to where you want that to end. Hold down that shift key. Make So you do it in exactly this order. Now click. And then what it’s going to do is it’s going to draw a straight line in between the two of these.
The reason that works is because we were just painting with black. And if you’re getting any value out of this video, hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications. You won’t miss any of my videos. All right, another thing that has changed is the generative fill is now using Firefly version 3 model. And yes, this makes a huge difference. Let me demonstrate. So I’m going to grab the Lasso And by the way, this is also in the main shipping version of Photoshop. So I’m just going to make a selection around that path. And maybe I didn’t quite go wide enough. Let’s go wider. And I want cobblestones on here. So why don’t we choose the Generate a Fill, and we’re going to type in cobbled path. And now we’re just going to hit Generate. And if you look at the result here, look at this. This is a massive improvement over what we were getting with the previous model. It’s just much, much nicer looking. Let’s also test it with generative expand, which is also now using Firefly version 3. So we’re going to grab our crop tool, and then we’re going to make sure for Phil that we’re using Generative Expand.
And let’s just drag it out a little bit and see how well it does with this cat. I just hit the Enter key, by the way. Well, that might be a little weird. There we go. A two-headed cat, just what we were looking for. Or if we grab that third variation, saved by the bell, that one works quite well. The other two, well, that’s interesting. I’m definitely going to say interesting. Maybe it’s two cats, but yeah, this is looking pretty good. One of the things you’ll notice, too, is there’s a bigger difference now between the variations with the Model 3 versus before. Previously, the variations were very similar. So here’s another one that’s interested, and that’s Generate Background. So what we’re going to do is we’re just going to choose Remove Background. And notice the background is now gone. We can go into the mask and we can clean it up. It does need some cleanup, but that’s a tutorial for another day, and we’re going to choose Generate Background. So let’s generate something else. Like maybe we want to be at the beach. Okay. So it’s generating some interesting-looking backgrounds. And once again, notice the variety of results we’re getting.
I think this is definitely the coolest one. And if we are worried about areas like here where we did lose a little bit of her shirt, we can just grab that mask. We’re going to grab a white brush and then just do some good old fashioned masking and we can just paint that back. All right, now I’m going to show something really cool. This one is brand new, and this particular one is just in the beta version at the moment. But if we go under the Edit menu, we have this generative workspace. Now this is brand new. And the generative workspace is really cool because what I can do is I can just type in a prompt, but we can do so much more than that. Let’s try a rock drummer in a band on stage in front of an audience. And we’re going to hit Generate. But the nice thing about this is while it’s generating, we can actually generate more than one at a time. So maybe we wanted to do something like a rock guitarist. And now I can hit Generate. And what it’s doing is it’s batch processing It’s actually stacking these up and doing one at a time.
So notice that we hit the rock drum that was actually at the bottom. There’s our drum, there’s our guitarists. And we can go through these and we can check them all out. That’s a lot of drumsticks. Now, these are not looking incredibly great, right? And I’ll tell you why. The reason is we’re actually in fast mode so we can quickly generate. So what you can do is you can try out your prompts, and then when you find something that’s working for you, we can change And if we’re going to change this from the fast mode to the normal, then we’re going to hit Generate. It’s going to take a little bit longer. Let’s go back into our list view. This time it’s going to take a little longer, but we’re going to get better quality. So that fast mode is a great way to just compound a bunch of different prompts to test it. And let’s have a look at this. And as you can see here, the quality of these are better than what we were getting. But the cool thing about this is we can actually do variables now. Let’s say a woman in a red T-shirt at the mall.
Let’s go back into the fast mode and we’re just going to hit Generate. Okay, so here we go. Now we’ve got a woman here in a red T-shirt at the mall. But what if we wanted to try maybe different colored shirts or maybe we wanted to try different locations? This is where we can use variables. So say right now we’re doing a red T-shirt. I can click on Add variable. Well, let’s do red. We’re going to do a comma, white, black, and say green. So now this is going to generate different variables, and it’s going to generate versions with the red shirt, a white shirt, black shirt, green shirt. And notice it also got some other settings here that we can change here. We can change the aspect ratio. So if we wanted more square, we could grab it there. We can use a reference image here. With this, we can go into effects here. So we want photo or art. We’re going to choose photo. And you’ve We’ve seen some of these before. Maybe we’ll do something cinematic. And now we’re going to hit Generate, and now it’s going to generate 16 different images, but they’re going to happen quickly because it’s in the fast mode.
But notice this. This saves you time when you’re experimenting, you’re trying some different things. And as we can see here, we got some red shirts, some white shirts. That’s not a T-shirt, but that’s all right. We got black, green. And as you can see now, we’re getting a bunch of variations in there We’re using these variables. And this can just save a whole ton of time. Now, I could have a woman in the mall. I could create another variable, a man. I could change the mole. I could do another variable. Let’s do this. And this is I’m going to do it manually. Let’s do Beach. And I’m just going to do one variation so it doesn’t get too nuts. And let’s just get rid of the… Well, we’ll do red and white just to speed up so we don’t get too many variables because otherwise it will generate all of these, but it’s going to take a while. So now we’re getting 16. So now we’re going to get the woman with the red shirt at the beach and at the mall. And we’re going to get a woman with a white shirt at the beach and at the mall.
And here we go. There she is with the white shirt. She’s at the mall. Now she is at the white shirt. She’s at the beach. Red shirt at the mall, red shirt at the beach. And so I think you get the general idea of how this can save us time. And I’ll do a a dedicated tutorial on this when we dig into a lot more of the options more in-depth. So I hope you enjoyed this video to give you an introduction to the new features. Keep your eyes open for more in-depth videos from me on some of these features and drop a comment. Let me know what is your favorite new feature, and what features would you love to see me dig more in-depth and just really dig into them and go deep with them. And by the way, if you’re new, welcome to the cafe. This is Photoshop Cafe. I’m Colin. Welcome. Hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, and you won’t miss any of my tutorials. And until next time, I’ll see you at the cafe.
