Why Adobe Firefly is a great, free AI art generator for beginners

You’re working on a project and can imagine the perfect image to accompany it. You know that AI can help you generate that image, but you’ve never done it before, have no idea where to start and don’t want to spend money doing it. This is the perfect time to use Adobe Firefly.

Firefly not only allows you to generate images (and other content) for free, it also provides lots of support and tools that help beginners speed past the initial learning curve and get that perfect image out of your head into a file you can download and use anywhere you need it.

Firefly is a generative AI platform that runs in your web browser, built by the same company responsible for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Premiere Pro, so you know it’s designed to support great creative work. Firefly is incredibly versatile — you can use it to create or edit an image, generate a video, create a graphic or even to generate a sound effect. But let’s focus on making images, since that’s where many people begin their generative AI creative journey.

Getting started

Getting started for free with AI-powered image generation isn’t as easy as it may seem. There are many AI models to choose from, and you may not know where to start. That’s another reason Adobe Firefly is a great place to start. The Adobe Firefly tool has both Firefly and partner AI models like Google (including the latest Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model), OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Runway, Pika, Ideogram, Luma AI, Moonvalley, and more to choose from within a single platform.

And while generating images with AI may seem easy — describe what you want in a text prompt, push a button and voila! — getting the results you want can be tricky. Unfortunately, many free AI engines don’t offer a lot of support. That’s where Firefly is different. Firefly will help you write a more effective text prompt, help you get the exact visual style you want in your image, and even help you make sure the image is structured so you have room to include text promoting your business or your latest video.

Firefly helps you create great images

Here are a few of the ways that Firefly supports you in generating great images:

Prompt Enhancement: If a text prompt fails to generate a great image, it’s often because that prompt is too short — it doesn’t include enough detail to really describe what’s in an image.

Many AI beginners will write a prompt like “A dog running through a field with a ball in its mouth.” That may describe what’s in your mind’s eye, but it also leaves a lot out — What breed of dog? What color is the ball? What’s in the background? What should the lighting be like? What’s the emotion of the scene?

As someone new to the craft of writing prompts, you may struggle to anticipate all the details that make a good prompt. That’s what makes Prompt Enhancement invaluable. When you turn on Prompt Enhancement in Firefly, it transforms a prompt like “A dog running through a field with a ball in its mouth” to

“A small, energetic terrier is running through a lush, green field, its mouth wide open with a bright, red ball gripped tightly. The dog's fur is tousled and shiny, and its tail is wagging enthusiastically. The background features a mix of tall grass and wildflowers in shades of purple and yellow, with a clear blue sky above. The lighting is soft and warm, casting gentle shadows and highlighting the dog's playful expression. The scene is dynamic and joyful, capturing the essence of a carefree moment in nature.”

That enhanced prompt may generate exactly the image you’re looking for. If it doesn’t, you can easily tweak it to get what you want, by changing “terrier” to “golden retriever” or describing the sky as “cloudy” instead of “clear.” Prompt Enhancement helps you jump over the learning curve of crafting prompts to quickly get to just what you want.

Style Reference: Another important aspect of an image is its look — Do you want something that looks like a hyperrealistic photograph or an oil painting? Or like some modern style that you admire, but don’t even know the name of?

For many of us, describing a visual style is difficult. It’s much easier to pick an existing image whose style you want to emulate. And that’s what you can do with Firefly’s Style Reference. Just upload an image that you like (or choose from a selection of images Firefly provides) and Firefly will create an image that matches both the content of your prompt and the style of the image you chose.

Structure Reference: When you’re generating an image, you often have a very practical use for it. It’ll be on the cover page of a report, part of a social media post or a thumbnail for your latest video. And that means you may need the image to be structured in a certain way, perhaps with the subject on the left, so you can overlay some text to the right.

Structure Reference helps you home in on the exact composition you need. Upload an image that has the structure you want — or find one in the Firefly Gallery — and Firefly will reproduce that composition in your new image.

Other controls: Firefly features many other tools that help you get exactly the image you want. If you’d like your image to look like a comic, a pen-and-ink drawing, a grainy film photo, steampunk art or any of dozens of other styles, you can choose them from the Firefly library of Effects. You can also choose colors and tones, like specifying a black-and-white image or one that uses pastel colors. You can choose a certain kind of light, like the “golden hour” light of sunset or the kind of perfect lighting you see in studio shots. And you can choose the angle from which you want to see your subject, whether that’s floating above it or an extreme close-up.

Starting out free

Getting started with Firefly is free. The first time you visit, you’ll be asked to set up a free Adobe account. After that, you can enter as many as 10 prompts for free — each time you enter a prompt, you’ll get four similar images to choose from. Each month, you’ll get another 10 free prompts to work with. If you need more, a $9.99 per month subscription lets you generate as many images as you want and gives you 2,000 credits to use for premium features like creating video.

Firefly can do a lot more than just create images from text prompts. This list includes both free and paid capabilities:

• Generative Fill: Remove an object from an image or add a new one.
• Generative Expand: Expand an image, for instance from a square to a rectangle.
• Text Effects: Use a prompt to create uniquely styled and textured text.
• Generate Template: Generate editable templates for projects like a newsletter or poster.
• Generate Video: Generate a video clip from a text description or starting with an image.
• Translate: Translate an existing video or an audio track into a new language.
• Text to Avatar: Generate a video with a virtual avatar based on your script.
• Text to Sound Effects: Generate sound effects from a text prompt or a recording of your voice.
• Text to Vector: Generate an infinitely scalable vector image from a text prompt.
• Generative Recolor: Change the colors in a vector image with just a click.

A platform you can feel good about using

Firefly is also an AI platform you can feel good about using. Unlike many other AI engines that are trained on data scraped from all over the web, Firefly is trained only on content that Adobe has rights to use. That also means that content you create in Firefly won’t infringe on the rights of other artists or companies. And nothing you create in Firefly will be used to train Adobe’s tools.

If you’ve been curious about the AI art revolution, Firefly is a great place to start. So jump in!