Understanding AI image generation with Adobe Firefly, DALL-E and Midjourney
Image generation AI tools have rapidly advanced in recent years, ushering in a new era of creative expression for digital artists, designers, photographers and other creative professionals. The benefits of AI-based image generation are numerous. By transforming textual descriptions into tangible creations, it streamlines the creative process, saving time and effort in the process of content creation. It pushes the boundaries of creativity by transforming a thought into artistic expression on the fly. It also encourages experimentation, allowing creators to explore new styles, techniques and possibilities with immediate results.
Three of the leading platforms in this emerging space are Adobe Firefly, DALL-E from OpenAI and Midjourney. While all three utilise artificial intelligence to generate images from text prompts, they have distinct strengths, weaknesses and target audiences. We profile all three below.
Adobe Firefly
As part of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, Firefly aims to integrate seamlessly into the workflows of professional designers, photographers and other creatives. Adobe Firefly enables users to use their own words, photographs, audio, vectors, movies and 3D elements, together with creative tools such as brushes, colour gradients and video transformations, to create new content that is consistent with their vision. Firefly's user-friendly interface makes it easy and quick to both create and modify content, allowing for endless iterations that stay true to an original idea, while maintaining concept consistency. A key strength of Firefly is its integration with Photoshop, which allows users to bring AI-generated images directly into the Photoshop workspace to refine and composite with other elements. For creatives already familiar with Photoshop - most in other words - this provides a comfortable and cohesive workflow. Firefly also leverages Adobe's Sensei AI framework to produce high-fidelity, print-ready image generation.

OpenAI DALL-E 3
Developed by OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, DALL-E generates extremely high-quality images from text prompts. The AI has been trained on vast datasets of image-text pairs, allowing it to handle diverse concepts and creative ideas. A major advantage of DALL-E is the realism it can achieve. It is is renowned for its accuracy in generating images that are often indistinguishable from real photographs. It also offers impressive image fidelity and crisp detail. Specific strengths include a strong sense of lighting, perspective and accurate object shapes. DALL-E can also seamlessly blend disparate concepts in surreal combinations, making it popular for those who want to explore ideas and compositing elements that don't exist in the real world. The latest incarnation, DALL-E 3, was released in September 2023 is generally available for free in Microsoft’s Bing Chat or with the Bing Image Generator and is also now integrated with ChatGPT, although you need to be a ChatGPT Plus subscriber for this. This allows users to enlist the help of ChatGPT to craft a more effective prompt. (DALL-E works better with longer input descriptions). As a leading-edge AI model from a major research lab, DALL-E 3 represents the state-of-the-art in image generation.

Midjourney
Midjourney is probably the most powerful AI image generator available right now but also the least simple to use. You can control parameters such as the aspect ratio of your images, how varied they are, what seed to start with and even whether you want to create repeating tiles for seamless patterns. It distinguishes itself through its Discord-based community and lower technical barrier to entry. After connecting their Discord account, users can immediately start generating images by entering text prompts in the chat interface. Rather than writing long descriptions, users report that it is more effective to give Midjourney a series of key words to use. Although Midjourney is still in beta, a key advantage already is its constantly-improving image generation through continuous learning. As users rate the quality of outputs, this user feedback is incorporated into enhancing the AI model. The Discord community also allows users to swap tips and ideas for creating better prompts. However, image quality remains a step below DALL-E, with less realism and sometimes distorted elements. The chat interface can also feel restrictive compared to direct image editing software integration. Nonetheless, Midjourney is regularly rated best-in-class for prompting and editing options and its accessibility and collaborative community provides an easy entry point for creatives to explore AI image generation.

In Summary
Adobe Firefly, DALL-E and Midjourney each have unique strengths in image fidelity, creative flexibility and accessibility. Firefly integrates tightly with Adobe's ecosystem, DALL-E produces state-of-the-art photorealism and Midjourney's Discord community provides easy onboarding for new users. In these AI tools, both professional and hobbyist creatives have gained new powers to endlessly experiment with image generation. As the technology continues advancing rapidly, image generation AIs seem poised to become an integral part of the creative process alongside more traditional techniques.
Related Training Courses
Midjourney
DALL-E
Useful Resources
- Adobe Firefly The official Firefly homepage
- Midjourney The official Midjourney homepage
- DALL E The official DALL E homepage
- Dall-E 3 vs Midjourney: A Side-by-Side AI Image Comparison Writesonic blog post comparing Dall-E and Midjourney
- Midjourney vs. Dall-E 2: AI Image Generators Comparison Another parallel review, this time from TechRepublic
- Adobe Firefly vs. Midjourney: Which is Better? Comparative review from SkimAI
- DALL·E 3 vs. Adobe Firefly 2 vs. Midjourney v5.2 Three way review from Medium
- Adobe Firefly 2 vs DALL·E 2: Which Generative AI Tool Wins? MSPowerUser tech news and reviews
- AI Image Generator: Create images from text Read all about Adobe’s Text to image AI tool