Adobe Firefly introduces Structure Reference for greater text-to-image control

One of the big issues with using genAi for text-to-image has been the way it will just head off on its own path. Structure Reference looks to corral that impulse.

The annual Adobe Summit kicked off today and the big news from the opening sessions was the introduction of Structure Reference to its Firefly genAI tools.

As a blog post explains, Structure Reference pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin and enables users to apply the structure of an existing image to newly generated images. Adobe Firefly will take the existing image and work within guidelines set in a structural reference template and generate multiple image variations with the same layout. 

“With this,” it writes, “we’ve eliminated the trial and error process of having to write the perfect prompt to get an output that matches your imagination.”

You can see the sort of thing that results in in the gallery below, the fairy illustration iterating but definitely staying within the original parameters rather than growing an extra arm or mutating into a fridge or any of the other stunts that genAI is fond of pulling.

There obviously is some degree of latitude here, even of being able to select the strength of the guardrails, as the next selection of images Adobe provides have a greater differential between them.

There’s more too. By combining Structure Reference with Adobe’s Style Reference — another Firefly capability in the Text to Image module, which takes a style reference image and applies it to your prompt — users can reference both the structure and the style of an image to quickly bring ideas to life.

Adobe reckons over 6.5 billion images have been created with Adobe Firefly to date. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express, Adobe Illustrator and Substance 3D are name checked in the release, and it will be interesting to track when they roll out further. Firefly models are, as ever, trained on licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired. The checks and balances to prevent people simply ripping off existing artwork will be interesting to note.

The New Structure Reference capabilities are available today in the Firefly web application for both free and paid subscribers.