Midjourney announced the availability of an extension to its image editor for select users. This extension allows users to edit external images within Midjourney for the first time.

This puts Midjourney's tools alongside the best photo editing software like Photoshop and Affinity, in addition to being able to edit generative AI images.

This is ironic, since companies like Adobe have been busy introducing AI tools into legacy software like Photoshop and Lightroom in droves. In addition to the ability to edit external images, Midjourney now also allows re-texturing of materials, surfaces, and lighting within the editor.

How does this work in practice? For example, you can upload an image of your living room and have Midjourney add or remove items, change the texture and color of the walls, and even adjust the lighting to make the image look like it was taken at night.

Midjourney notes that external image editing is only offered to annual members, members who have subscribed for the past 12 months, and members who own more than 10,000 images. Also, this feature is only available in Midjourney 6.1.

“Since this is a very new feature, we want to give the community, human moderators, next generation AI moderation systems, and server clusters all the time they need to use it gently,” the company wrote to Discord Community and X. Users can upload sketches and hand-drawn drawings and use AI to turn them into full-fledged works of art.

And while professional graphic designers and artists may want to use established tools for fine-tuning, Midjourney's efforts cover most of the basics. We are already playing with this editor in Tom's Guide, and once you start using the prompts, it is surprisingly adept at figuring out which regions to change.

As we have written before, the new additions fit seamlessly with the style and shape of existing images. Furthermore, the new UI is responsive and the entire image generation process feels like a Photoshop-style app.

If you are interested in getting to grips with this latest AI tool, check out Midjourney's new AI image editor and 5 tips for getting more out of Midjourney.