How to Turn Your Photos Into Works of Art Using Generative Fill In Photoshop

You don't need to spend hours using photo editing methods to turn your photos into art. Photoshop's Generative Fill will do it for you in seconds.

Since the early days of Photoshop, there have been a wide variety of methods shared by Photoshop gurus to transform your photos into works of art. Unfortunately, many of these tutorials are either very complex or simply don't work very well. This tutorial is going to be very different.

In this article, we're going to show you how to easily transform any of your photos into works of art using Photoshop Beta's Generative Fill tool. And the great thing about it is that you get to decide what kind of art you want to create. The workflow is the same no matter what you're trying to achieve.

So if you're an Adobe Photoshop subscriber, open up Photoshop Beta, and let's get started!

Using the Generative Fill tool in Photoshop is easy. To make things interesting, we'll show you how to turn any of your photos into art.

The first step is to instruct Photoshop Beta to select the entire image, which is done by creating a Quick Mask. Then we will use the Color Picker menu to set the gray amount to determine the overall strength of the art effect. The last step is to create a prompt that will transform your image into a work of art.

If you're not happy with the first three variations, just click Generate until you find the best option. If you're finding the effects too strong, you can go back and change the shade of gray. The lesser percentage of gray, the closer the results will be to your original image.

To demonstrate, we'll choose a setting that's at 50% gray and one that's at 15% gray.

At 50%:

You'll notice that at 50% there are few similarities between the original and the three varieties. That's because 50% of the pixels are being replaced by Generative AI. For many images, this percentage would probably be too high.

At 15%:

This is a far more subtle effect. At first glance, you may not even notice a change. For some images, this may work fine, depending on the subject and what kind of art you're trying to emulate. That's why a good starting point for generating art from your photos is around 30% gray.

The percentage of gray isn't the only way to control the results. You can also use layer masks in Photoshop to selectively target pixels to allow more or less of the effect to show. You can also reduce the layer's Opacity to fine-tune the results.

We tested out the following artistic prompts to generate the art effects. Try them out on your own images to see what you can come up with.

The above image is the original photo. Below are the results based on 20% gray.

The oil painting effect is great for nature and landscape images. You can certainly use it for people, but you'll usually need to mask the faces to lessen the effects.

This effect was set to 30% gray with the prompt acrylic painting.

This effect was also set to 30% gray.

There was a bump in exposure for the prompt ink drawing. Set to 30% gray.

The abstract painting prompt was set to 30% gray.

You can also create style prompts to emulate famous artists, such as in the style of Van Gogh. For this image, we set the gray to 35%.

You can also leave the prompt field empty, like in the above example, and leave it up to Photoshop.

In the above example, we used it's been a bad day as the prompt and Photoshop gave us a beautiful, artistic image.

It might appear that random prompts and leaving the text field completely empty produce similar results. But you should see changes in this as you increase the percentage of gray and allow more of the effects to come through.

With a little experimentation, there are plenty of fantastic results you can get by varying the prompts in Generative Fill.

Experience the captivating power of Photoshop's Generative Fill by effortlessly transforming your photos into works of art. The possibilities are endless when you apply this straightforward method to your own images. Go ahead and give it a try!

Craig is an artist who works with mixed media and fine art photography. He's been writing for over 20 years and loves sharing his passion for photography and photo editing with his MUO audience.