April 23 (Reuters) - Adobe said on Tuesday it

plans to place a tool for full artificial intelligence image

generation in its Photoshop software later this year.

Adobe's image and video editing tools are widely used by

creative professionals, but it faces rising competition from

startups such as Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI, Midjourney

and Stability AI, all of which offer services that can generate

images from text prompts.

Adobe is developing its own image-generation AI system

called Firefly, which is trained on data that Adobe has rights

to, in order to avoid copyright infringement claims against

users.

Adobe previously released image-generation tools in

Photoshop that can fill in or expand parts an existing image. At

a conference in London on Tuesday, the company said full image

generation will come later this year, based on a new AI system

called Firefly Image 3.

Much of Adobe's focus has been on speeding up the work of

professionals who use its software. The new image-generation

tool will have the ability to tap a user's uploaded image as a

reference for the general composition of an image.

For example, a designer could make a quick sketch of a scene

on a napkin, snap a photo of that napkin with a smartphone and

then ask Photoshop to generate fully featured images in a

variety of styles, said Ely Greenfield, chief technology officer

for digital media at Adobe.

"Rather than having to very carefully describe exactly what

goes where and try to make sure that I'm specifying the things I

want things and that I don't, it's borrowing from the reference.

So this is an amazingly powerful capability," Greenfield said.

Adobe said a test "beta" version of the software is

available to some users on Tuesday but did not give a date for

general availability.