The words “generative AI” are on everyone’s lips at the moment. These technologies can create text, images, or video clips from simple prompts, and could change the media landscape as we know it. Adobe certainly thinks generative AI is worth further investigation, and is putting its marketing muscle behind Generative Fill, a new Photoshop feature that allows you to edit or manipulate your images in entirely new ways.

You can see for yourself how it works in the image below: drag the slider left and right to see the before and after. The blank areas were filled in–which is to say, extrapolated from what’s in the rest of the image–by Photoshop’s artificial intelligence. Thanks to technologies like this it has never been easier to transform images in portrait format into landscape format.

Generative Fill is still officially in beta. We’ve been using the Photoshop beta for several weeks now, and continue to be surprised by it on an almost daily basis. Some of the results are incredibly realistic. Others are so inaccurate they’re funny.

Installing and using the Photoshop beta

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If you’d like to install the Photoshop beta, you’ll need a valid license for Adobe Creative Cloud and an active internet connection, as the Generative Fill feature requires cloud processing. Once you’ve got a license, open Creative Cloud and select Beta Apps in the lefthand tab. Select this and you can then install the Photoshop beta and start using it straight away.

Save 30% on Adobe Creative Cloud

Photoshop Generative Fill: Limitations

With great power comes great responsibility. Fortunately, Adobe knows that you can do great damage with AI, so there are many rules to maintain “the high quality of creative content.” Anyone who does not follow the Adobe Generative AI beta user guidelines risks having their account blocked.

Adobe prohibits the use of generative AI for certain purposes:

• Pornographic material or explicit nudity
• Hateful or highly offensive content that attacks or dehumanizes a group based on ethnicity, national origin, religion, serious disease or disability, gender, age or sexual orientation
• Graphic violence or gore
• The promotion, glorification, or threats of violence
• Illegal activities or goods
• Self-harm or the promotion of self-harm
• Depictions of nude minors or minors in a sexual manner
• Promotion of terrorism or violent extremism
• Disseminating misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive content that could lead to real-world harm
• Personal or private information of others (like full name, home address, phone number, email address, government-issued IDs, or any other information relating to an identifiable individual)

Photoshop Generative Fill: How to get started

The Generative Fill AI saves time. A lot of time. It retouches unwanted picture elements, enables new perspectives, and creates new things, all via text command. The possibilities are limitless. You simply select the area, using the appropriate selection tool (shortcut: M), in which the AI is to do its work.

Simon Lohmann

To fill in the rest of an image, you’ll want to leave the search field blank to let Adobe’s AI scan the image and fill in the blank area. Photoshop then creates three different variants for you to choose from.

Simon Lohmann

You can cycle between the different options. If you don’t like any of the options, you can try the process again or add some descriptive words to the search box.

Photoshop Generative Fill: False realities and extraordinary landscapes

At first glance, this appears to be a normal picture. At a second glance, you notice minor inconsistencies, such as the door handles and the house’s windows in the background. Things aren’t quite right.

Photographed Neuschwanstein Castle in portrait orientation, but want something more panoramic? No problem, Photoshop will fill in the rest.

Of course, the results have nothing to do with reality. Anyone familiar with the surroundings of Neuschwanstein Castle will recognize that the content created by the AI is artificial. It’s an image manipulation. But to the untrained eye, it’s pretty spectacular.

Photoshop still has big problems with people and animals. While the dog in the image below looks quite realistic, it’s immediately obvious that something is wrong with the man’s face.

Hands also pose a problem for Photoshop’s AI. The fingers are often distorted and look unnatural and occasionally have extra digits.

Amanda Frank

Realistic textures and large-scale AI content can also be problematic. It depends entirely on the subject. While AI can handle images from nature well, architecture is evidently more of a challenge.

Lukas Souza

AI manipulation is easiest to spot if you know the original image, of course, but large-scale changes can also be obvious. Small changes are the key to success. Would you even notice if we only extended the image by a few pixels? The AI proves particularly handy in cases where, for example, you want to turn a 3:2 image into a 16:9 one.

In another test, we took an image of a church tower (left), cropped it (center), and then set Photoshop to reconstruct the tower (right). Other than the church clock, the result is quite respectable.

Simon Lohmann

This article originally appeared on Macwelt and was translated and edited by David Price.

Professional Software

One of the joys of Touch ID on a Mac laptop is using Apple Pay without needing an iPhone or iPad at hand to validate a secure credit or debit card transaction. This was extended to M-series Macs with the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, which allows a Mac mini, iMac, or Mac Studio to add Touch ID through a special wireless connection to an M-series Mac’s Secure Enclave module.

But some readers have found Apple Pay disabled. In  > System Preferences/Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay, macOS offers the explanation “Apple Pay has been disabled because the security settings of this Mac were modified.” Several different causes could be the root, and Apple omits one for M-series Macs in the document linked via a Learn More button in the pane–the company says it doesn’t apply, though I found in testing that it does.

Full Security on an Intel or M-Series Mac

To ensure Apple Pay works, system security must be set to Full Security on both Intel and M-series Macs. This requires restarting or starting up in recoveryOS and then using the Startup Security Utility to reset system security.

You may have downgraded security on an Intel Mac to boot off an external volume or to install some low-level drivers for third-party software. With an M-series Mac, the most likely reason is you enabled its Reduced Security mode to install a kernel extension required by some software that taps into low-level drivers, such as MacFuse or SAT SMART for drive monitoring.

With a reduced-security macOS startup, Apple may be unable to create the level of integrity it and the credit-card system requires for mobile payments that match the degree offered by a point-of-sale system accepting a chip on a card. If so, Apple Pay is disabled on the Mac. (Apple explains in technical detail how this relates to the M-series boot security policy process in this platform security document.)

There are separate paths on how to re-enable Full Security by Mac architecture type. Apple offers a full page walkthrough on reverting to Full Security with an Intel Mac with a T2 Security Chip. For an M-series Mac, look at the “Change the security policy” heading in this support document.

Other causes

Apple also suggests other causes:

• If you have a laptop, its lid must be open. This makes sense because how would you otherwise use the Touch ID sensor? There’s an exception: you can still use the sensor on a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID with an M-series Mac with the lid closed. (Apple doesn’t list this exception; I tested it, and it works.)
• A necessary security update may not have been installed. In the Software Update preference pane, click Advanced: the “Install system data files and security updates” box should be checked for automatic installation.
• Apple also notes more ambiguously that macOS disables Apple Pay “when it detects third-party software or malware that affects its ability to keep your payment information secure.”

You might wonder why Safari continues to allow you to fill in stored credit and debits cards from Safari > Preferences > Autofill if Apple Pay is disabled? Safari doesn’t perform a mobile payment transaction when it auto-fills card information—it just drops the information in without additional typing. If you’ve stored the Card Verification Code (CVC, also known as CVV and by the names), Safari will fill that in, too.

Credit-card processors that manage transactions for online retailers treat form-entered cards as among the most potentially fraudulent transactions; they don’t differentiate—nor do they have a way to—between browser auto-filled card details or those entered manually. Apple Pay mobile payments are among the least likely to be fraudulent because of the way the transaction is created and validated and are scored for risk accordingly.

Ask Mac 911

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