The endless cycle of exporting assets, switching to a separate photo editor for a minor tweak, and then re-importing them back into a design file is a familiar and frustrating reality for many creative professionals. This disjointed process, a long-standing bottleneck in digital design, fragments focus and consumes valuable time that could be better spent on creative problem-solving. What if the most common and tedious image manipulation tasks could be handled instantly, without ever leaving the design canvas? Figma’s latest update aims to answer that very question, introducing a suite of artificial intelligence tools that promise to fundamentally reshape the daily routines of designers everywhere.
Beyond the Canvas A First Look at Figma’s New AI Toolkit
Figma has integrated a powerful set of AI-powered image editing features directly into its platform, consolidating them into a single, intuitive contextual toolbar. This new arsenal includes three primary tools: Expand Image, Isolate Object, and Erase Object. These additions are not merely incremental updates; they represent a significant step toward creating a more unified and intelligent design environment. This guide explores how these features work, providing a practical roadmap for integrating them into your existing processes to automate manual tasks, unlock greater creative flexibility, and ultimately transform your daily design workflow.
The core objective here is to demonstrate a tangible shift from a multi-application dependency to a streamlined, in-platform solution. By centralizing these advanced capabilities, Figma addresses a major pain point for designers who regularly work with visual assets. The key takeaway is a newfound efficiency, where adapting visuals for different formats or refining compositions no longer requires interrupting the creative flow. Instead, designers can now perform complex image manipulations with just a few clicks, keeping their focus entirely within the context of their project.
The Evolution of Efficiency Why Figma Invested in AI Image Tools
The integration of artificial intelligence into creative software is an industry-wide trend driven by a clear goal: to streamline complex and repetitive tasks, thereby freeing up professionals to concentrate on higher-level strategic work. Tools that can intelligently automate background removal, object selection, or content generation are becoming standard expectations, and design platforms are racing to meet this demand. Figma’s investment in this area is a direct response to this evolving landscape, acknowledging that modern design workflows require more than just vector editing and prototyping capabilities.
The immense popularity of Figma’s original “Remove Background” feature served as a powerful catalyst for this expansion. Its widespread adoption signaled a clear and urgent user need for more sophisticated, native image manipulation tools. Designers were already using this function extensively to create cohesive visuals across different layouts, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. This behavior provided Figma with invaluable data, confirming that building a more comprehensive suite of AI-powered editing tools would solve significant and recurring user pain points, moving the platform closer to becoming an all-in-one design ecosystem.
These new tools are specifically engineered to eliminate common workflow frustrations. For instance, the constant need to switch between Figma and applications like Adobe Photoshop for minor edits—such as removing a distracting element from a photo or extending a background—creates friction and inefficiency. Furthermore, the time-consuming process of adapting a single image for various platforms, each with its own aspect ratio requirements, can now be drastically reduced. By bringing these solutions directly into the design environment, Figma aims to create a more fluid, intuitive, and productive experience for its users.
Inside the AI Toolbar A Practical Guide to the New Features
Step 1 Expanding Your Horizons with ‘Expand Image’
The “Expand Image” tool offers a sophisticated solution to a common design challenge: fitting an image into dimensions it was not originally shot for. Its core functionality is to intelligently analyze the existing pixels at the edges of an image and generate a seamless extension of its background. This process is executed without stretching, cropping, or distorting the main subject, effectively expanding the canvas while preserving the original composition. The AI generates new content that plausibly continues the textures, patterns, and lighting of the original photo.
Practical Use Case From Square Post to Full Width Banner
Imagine a scenario where a client provides a high-quality, square-formatted product image intended for a social media post, but it now needs to be repurposed for a wide, full-width hero banner on a website. In the past, this would involve extensive manual work in an external photo editor to clone, patch, and blend the background. With the “Expand Image” tool, a designer can simply place the square image on the banner-sized frame and activate the feature. The AI will automatically generate the necessary background on either side, creating negative space that can be used for headlines, call-to-action buttons, or other UI elements, all while keeping the product perfectly framed.
Key Benefit Maintaining Compositional Integrity Across Aspect Ratios
The most significant advantage of this tool is its ability to maintain compositional integrity. Traditional methods like scaling an image up often lead to a loss of quality and awkward cropping that can compromise the visual narrative. Stretching, on the other hand, results in unnatural distortions that are immediately noticeable and unprofessional. “Expand Image” bypasses these issues entirely. By generating new, context-aware background content, it ensures the main subject remains untouched and the overall visual harmony is preserved, allowing a single asset to be adapted for multiple contexts without sacrifice.
Step 2 Gaining Granular Control with ‘Isolate Object’
The “Isolate Object” tool fundamentally changes how designers interact with elements inside a raster image. This feature empowers users to select and edit a specific object within a photo as if it were a separate layer, all without affecting the surrounding background. The AI intelligently identifies the boundaries of the chosen object, creating a precise mask that allows for targeted adjustments. This moves image editing within Figma from broad, canvas-wide changes to a more refined, object-oriented approach.
Editing Capabilities Refining Your Subject with Precision
Once an object is isolated, a range of editing capabilities becomes available. Designers can modify its properties independently, adjusting its brightness, contrast, saturation, or color balance to make it stand out. It is also possible to apply effects such as blurs to create a depth-of-field effect, or add drop shadows to give the object a sense of dimension and lift it from the background. This level of granular control is crucial for fine-tuning visual hierarchy and directing the viewer’s attention to the most important part of an image.
Real World Application Making Products Pop in E-commerce Imagery
A compelling use case for this tool is in the realm of e-commerce. A designer working on a product page might have a lifestyle photo of a watch on a person’s wrist, surrounded by a busy background. Using “Isolate Object,” the designer can select the watch and slightly increase its brightness and sharpness to draw the eye. Simultaneously, they could apply a subtle de-saturation or blur to the background, muting any distracting details without removing them completely. This technique helps the product pop, creating a professional, high-impact visual that can improve user engagement and conversion rates.
Step 3 Decluttering Your Canvas with ‘Erase Object’ and ‘Remove Background’
To further refine compositions, Figma introduces the “Erase Object” tool, a content-aware feature designed to cleanly remove unwanted elements from an image. Whether it is a stray object in the background, a photobomber, or an unwanted logo on a product, this tool allows designers to simply select the area and let the AI intelligently fill in the space with plausible background texture. This eliminates the need for complex cloning or patching in an external program, enabling quick cleanups directly on the canvas.
Alongside this new addition, the popular “Remove Background” feature has been given enhanced accessibility. Instead of being a standalone function, it is now integrated into the same unified AI toolbar as the other image editing tools. This consolidation creates a more logical and cohesive user experience, ensuring that all key image manipulation features are available from a single, easy-to-access contextual menu. This simple change streamlines the workflow by reducing clicks and keeping related tools grouped together.
The Unified Advantage A Cohesive Toolkit for Cleaner Compositions
The true power of this update lies in the consolidation of these tools. Having “Expand Image,” “Isolate Object,” “Erase Object,” and “Remove Background” all living in one place creates a powerful, self-contained editing suite within Figma. A designer can now take a raw photo, remove a distracting element, isolate the main subject to enhance it, and then expand the background to fit a new layout, all in a single, fluid sequence. This unified advantage allows for image refinement at scale, making it easier than ever to maintain visual consistency and quality across an entire project.
Your New AI Powered Workflow at a Glance
- Expand Image: Seamlessly adapt visuals to any aspect ratio by intelligently extending the background.
- Isolate Object: Select and edit a specific element within an image without affecting the rest of the composition.
- Erase Object: Completely remove distracting or unwanted elements to clean up photos.
- Unified Toolbar: Access all AI image tools, including the classic “Remove Background,” from one convenient location.
The Bigger Picture How AI is Reshaping the Designer’s Role
The automation of tedious image manipulation tasks represents more than just a gain in efficiency; it signals a fundamental shift in the designer’s role. By offloading repetitive, technical work to artificial intelligence, these tools free up designers to focus on higher-level responsibilities. This includes strategic thinking, user experience design, complex problem-solving, and pure creativity. The designer’s value is increasingly found not in their technical proficiency with a tool, but in their ability to conceptualize and execute a compelling vision.
Moreover, this update reinforces the trend of design platforms like Figma evolving into all-in-one ecosystems. The goal is to create a seamless environment where a project can go from initial brainstorming to final developer handoff without the need for external software. By integrating powerful image editing capabilities, Figma reduces the reliance on other applications in the creative suite, which simplifies workflows, lowers software costs, and enhances collaboration by keeping all assets and edits within a single source of truth.
Looking ahead, this is likely just the beginning. The continued development of AI-driven features has the potential to further blur the lines between design, content creation, and even development. Future advancements could include AI-assisted layout generation, automated design system consistency checks, or even the ability to generate entire visual assets from a simple text prompt. As these technologies mature, they will continue to augment the designer’s capabilities, enabling faster iteration and more sophisticated outcomes.
The Verdict Is It Time to Revolutionize Your Workflow
The integration of these new AI tools offered a clear and compelling set of benefits: a dramatic increase in efficiency, a greater degree of creative control directly within the design file, and a more streamlined, integrated process from start to finish. The ability to perform tasks that once required a separate, specialized application without ever leaving the canvas was a significant leap forward in workflow optimization.
For designers who regularly worked with image assets in their projects, these features represented a transformative opportunity. The tools directly addressed long-standing pain points and automated some of the most time-consuming aspects of visual design. Ultimately, the adoption of this AI-powered toolbar provided a clear path to not only saving time but also elevating the quality and consistency of creative output. The most effective way to understand their impact was to experiment with the new AI toolbar, applying its capabilities to a real project to experience the benefits firsthand.
