Clean hair cutouts in Photoshop now cost money

Adobe has released Photoshop 27.11. The headline feature of the update is Enhance Edge: it removes the color fringe along the edges of a mask created with the Remove Background tool, and charges 20 generative credits for each use.

Remove Background itself requires no generative credits. What you pay for is the edge refinement — the areas that usually take the most work: hair, fur, semi-transparent materials.

What Enhance Edge does to the mask and what it costs

The feature refines the mask produced by Remove Background. According to CG Channel's description, it is built on diffusion across the RGBA channels, which eliminates the color fringe along the mask's edge — improving the result when the background is removed behind hair or semi-transparent materials. Enhance Edge is invoked from the contextual task bar.

Credits are spent on every use — 20 at a time. For a one-off cutout that is tolerable; in a production stream the cost adds up fast: fifty frames, a thousand credits. With regular use you will probably need a separate Firefly subscription.

GPT Image 2 inside Photoshop

The second part of the update concerns third-party models. Text-prompt generation in Generate Image and image editing via Prompt to edit, introduced in version 27.10, can now be run on the GPT Image 2 model.

The list of third-party models across Adobe products has grown to 33. Photoshop users have access to the Gemini and FLUX families, as well as models from Topaz Labs — a company Adobe bought last month.

The practical point for an artist is simple: the model for the task is chosen inside the familiar document, with no export to outside web services.

Performance on Windows

Adobe is using data on real-world workflows — from users who have not opted out of data collection — to improve Photoshop's performance on Windows. The release notes speak of a "measurable performance improvement in common scenarios," but the company gave no specific figures.

What else changed and what it costs

Among the small but useful fixes: in the New Document dialog, entries on the Recents tab can now be renamed and deleted.

Photoshop 27.11 is listed in the documentation as the September 2026 release. Windows 10 and newer are supported, as well as macOS 14.0 and newer. The program is distributed by subscription only: photography plans with access to Photoshop cost $29.99 per month or $239.88 per year, and a standalone Photoshop subscription is $34.49 per month or $263.88 per year. The full list of changes is published in the release notes on Adobe's site.

Why routine operations are being put on a meter

Adobe is buying up specialist teams — Topaz Labs was the latest — and expanding the list of third-party models inside its applications. Against that backdrop, generative features increasingly work as a revenue source in their own right.

Hence the logic of credits: the subscription remains, but more and more individual operations are billed per use. This is probably tied to the economics of compute: the models run on rented capacity, some of them are licensed from third-party developers, and such variable costs are hard to spread evenly across a fixed subscription fee.

For studios this changes planning. On top of the cost of a cutout in hours comes the per-operation credit spend, which has to be budgeted and tracked. The winners will probably be those processing a small number of frames with high demands on the edge; harder times are ahead for production-line processes — product photography for catalogs, bulk asset preparation.

If the trend continues, the line between a built-in feature and a paid operation inside Photoshop will keep shifting, and the ability to cut an object out cleanly by hand will retain its practical value — one that can now be converted into credits saved.

Are you ready to pay 20 credits for every hair cutout instead of cleaning up the fringe by hand? Or is it simpler to stick with the old method?