Erasing a utility pole from a photo, widening a tightly framed landscape, putting a vase on a table. With Photoshop's Generative Fill, that's a few clicks. But when the subscription price goes up, it's a burden for people who only edit photos now and then.
Add OpenFill to the free editor GIMP, and you can replace a good chunk of this kind of generative editing.
So how much did Adobe's subscription prices go up, in Korea and in the US, and how did users react?
How Much Did the Price Go Up?
✦ Adobe Prices in Korea, One Week Apart
Includes VAT, annual commitment billed monthly. Oct 26 recorded price vs. Nov 2 official page
Citing exchange rate changes, Adobe has been adjusting Creative Cloud and Document Cloud prices in 9 countries, including Korea, in stages starting in August 2026.
The nine are Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Korea, Kuwait, the Philippines and Turkey, so the US isn't affected. For annual-commitment customers, the new price kicks in when the commitment ends.
Monthly customers get it from their next billing date.
Let's start with Korea. Compare the price recorded on Adobe's Korean page on October 26 with the official plan page as of November 2, and the gap shows. All prices include VAT and are for an annual commitment billed monthly.
In Korea, the extra cost per year comes to 49,200 won for Photoshop, 46,800 won for the Photography plan and 117,600 won for All Apps.
The first-year promo of 65,300 won a month for All Apps is for new subscribers only, and from the second year the 87,900 won list price is the baseline.
The increase percentages above come from comparing the Korean list prices published on those two dates.
Pretty steep, right? In Korean online communities, users who got a renewal notice saying "your All Apps price is changing from 39,050 won to 87,900 won a month" caught attention with their shocked reactions. So why did this happen?
✦ How 39,050 Won Became 87,900 Won
A discount ending and a list price adjustment landed together
In November 2025, Adobe offered new customers in Korea 39,050 won a month, 50% off, during both Singles' Day (November 3-13) and Black Friday (November 14-28).
It's likely that the users rattled by the price hike now are the ones who signed up back when Adobe was running those discounts.
The US picture is different, and the numbers are in dollars. The US wasn't part of the August 2026 adjustment.
The most recent US increase I could find was on June 17, 2025, when Adobe renamed the All Apps plan Creative Cloud Pro and raised its annual, billed-monthly price from $59.99 to $69.99 a month, about 16.7%, applied at each subscriber's next renewal.
That works out to $120 more a year.
✦ Adobe US List Prices, in Dollars
Annual plan billed monthly, before sales tax
As of October 2026, the US list prices I found are $22.99 a month for the Photoshop single app, $19.99 for the Photography plan (1TB), $54.99 for Creative Cloud Standard and $69.99 for Creative Cloud Pro.
All of them are annual plans billed monthly, before sales tax.
Notice that in the US, the Photography plan is actually cheaper than Photoshop alone, $19.99 against $22.99. I didn't find any sign of a recent US change to the Photoshop single app or Photography plan prices, so the one-week comparison above is a Korea story.
Still, Adobe's price hike has clearly been a burden for users. In Korean online communities, some said the renewal price looked like it more than doubled, and others shared that their company told them to remove Adobe from work PCs.
✦ Online Community Reactions
Renewal prices felt like a spike, and people weighed alternatives
On Reddit, some users said they wanted to depend less on Adobe, and there were comments naming GIMP, Krita, Affinity and others as alternatives.
But plenty of people said they'd keep using Adobe despite the hike. For people who only use Photoshop, some said the Photography plan is the more economical choice than juggling a bunch of other apps.
Others said they're reluctant to switch because they're used to their current way of working.
If you're a longtime Photoshop user, it's certainly a tough call. But if most of your work has been basic image editing or thumbnail making, nothing all that professional, the GIMP and OpenFill combo is a perfectly reasonable option to compare.
Adding Generative Editing to GIMP
✦ OpenFill's Four Features
Open the OpenFill window from Filters > OpenFill and pick the one you want
GIMP is a free, open-source editor with cropping, color correction, healing brushes, text and layer compositing. The latest stable version is 3.2.6, and 3.2 also brought link layers, vector layers and non-destructive filters.
Add OpenFill, and you can do AI fill, object removal and canvas expansion one after another inside GIMP.
OpenFill is a plugin that connects GIMP and ComfyUI. Think of it this way: you can use ComfyUI's image generation features right from GIMP's editing screen, without touching ComfyUI's complicated node graphs.
Of course, compared to a pro program like Photoshop, GIMP's interface feels a bit dated, and it clearly has that free open-source feel.
If you've used Photoshop for years and suddenly switch to GIMP, it'll probably feel short on features, and you might think, "Huh? It can't even do this?" But Photoshop's subscription price doesn't look like it's coming down anytime soon.
It'll probably keep climbing. So if you're torn, it's worth trying at least once.
Generative Fill: Turn a Selection Into the Scene You Want
✦ How Generative Fill Works
From a selection to a new layer
The feature that'll feel most familiar is Generative Fill. Select the area of the photo you want to change and type a prompt.
For example, select the empty space on a café table and type “a small white ceramic vase with yellow tulips,” and the model draws something into the selection that fits the surrounding lighting and colors.
If the vase's position looks a bit off, just tweak the mask and keep only the version you like. You can also use it to swap one object for another, add a picture frame to a wall, or add clouds to an empty patch of sky.
Remove Object: Erase Things Without a Prompt
When you want to get rid of eyesores like power lines, a trash can, or a passerby at the edge of a photo, use Remove Object. Select the object and press Remove, and it's gone, no need to type a prompt telling it to delete anything.
The default model, LaMa, fills the selection to match the surrounding colors and textures. It works well on photos where the surrounding pattern continues, like walls, sky or floors.
Windows Photos, the built-in Windows photo editor, also has a simple Generative Erase feature, right? If you use it a lot and felt something was missing, give OpenFill a try.
Some online image editing sites also slap a watermark on your image, so you try to erase an object and end up with a watermark instead. That happens pretty often, right? Being able to do generative erase locally is a really convenient feature.
Generative Expand: Widen the Frame
Sometimes after you take a photo, the framing feels too tight. Maybe there's not enough room above a person's head, or you want to turn a landscape shot into a wide banner but the left and right sides are too short.
Generative Expand lets you drag the canvas edges outward or pick the aspect ratio you want to create new area.
The new border is generated to match the existing photo's colors and composition, and if you need to, you can also specify the scene it generates with a prompt.
For example, widen a beach photo on the left and right and you can create space where the waves and sand continue. When you turn a vertical photo into a wide banner, you can leave the person as is and fill in the background on both sides.
Unlike forcibly stretching an existing photo, the key point is that the model draws the empty canvas area from scratch. It's a common feature in cloud image generation services, but there haven't been many usable models for running it locally, right?
In that sense, it matters.
Create: Make a New Layer From a Prompt
Create makes a new image from a prompt, or adds a new layer to your current document. If you have a selection, you can generate to fit its size.
You generate things like props for a product photo or decorative elements for a thumbnail as separate layers, then set their size and position.
You used to have to make images on an image generation site or in ComfyUI, then slot them in, right? With OpenFill, you can generate the image you need right inside your photo editor, which is convenient.
Picking a Model That Fits Your PC
After launching GIMP, open the Models tab under Filters > OpenFill > Generative Fill... and you can open the model manager from there.
✦ OpenFill Models for Your PC
Download size, VRAM and license
Check each model's name, download size, VRAM and license, then pick and download the ones that fit your PC.
LaMa is light and made for object removal, while DreamShaper and RealVisXL are said to work well for prompt-based fill, expansion and new image generation.
FLUX and Qwen are advanced editing models that demand more memory.
The latest version of the plugin for GIMP is 2.0.0-beta.6, published on October 26. It works with GIMP 3.2 or later, and on Windows it can automatically download ComfyUI on first run (about 2GB to download, about 7GB once unpacked).
On macOS and Linux, you apparently have to set up ComfyUI yourself.
ComfyUI runs in the background, and it shuts down when you close the editor. You don't need to know how to use ComfyUI. OpenFill just uses it as a tool when it does its work.
Is GIMP + OpenFill Right for You?
✦ Who Is This For?
What the combo covers, and where it differs from Photoshop
If you regularly add generative editing to everyday photo touch-ups and thumbnail making, this combo clearly has its uses.
You can erase distracting objects from a travel photo, widen a vertical photo into a wide banner, and add props to a product photo, all in the same editor.
And since the AI edits stay on separate layers, it's easy to compare them with the original image or fix just part of an edit.
GIMP supports PSD export, and you can handle RAW files together with darktable and RawTherapee.
Some PSD blend modes and professional CMYK print work differ from an existing Photoshop setup.
But if your work centers on personal photos, blog images, social media content and simple product edits, GIMP and OpenFill are a practical alternative that can cut your subscription costs.
For people who use several Adobe apps every day, the value of their existing workflow is big.
But if you only use Photoshop, and your work is mostly photo touch-ups, thumbnails and the occasional generative edit, you should be able to keep getting what you need done with GIMP and OpenFill.
That's all for this post. See you next time.
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🌐 Korean version: 포토샵 구독료 인상... 차라리 무료 GIMP에 AI 이미지 편집 기능을 추가하는 OpenFill을 써볼까?
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