How to Find and Prepare Images for Photo Manipulation

How to Prepare Images

Whether your assets are stock photography, 3D assets, or Gen AI, the ways in which you edit and composite them are all going to be the same, so let’s jump right into preparing the images.

Although I don’t recommend Generative AI to make any creative decisions, I do use the generative fill tool powered by Adobe Firefly when I need to expand images and remove any unwanted objects.

How to Extend Images With Generative Fill Photoshop

Using this image as an example, let me show you how to use Photoshop generative fill.

1. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool

Click and drag to select the empty portion of the canvas and some of the existing sky. You’ll notice that the floating context bar below the image changes because we have an active selection.

2. Click on Generative Fill

If you want, you can fill in a prompt telling it what to generate. But in this case, all we want to do is fill the gap and expand the sky, so we don’t need to do that.

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Use Photoshop Generative Fill to expand the image

3. Hit “Generate”

Photoshop will use the existing pixels to fill in and generate three variations shown in the Properties panel. Because this is a simple sky, the variations are more or less the same, so just choose one, and voila! The sky is filled in.     

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Extend an image using Generative Fill in Photoshop