Among all the other artificial intelligence upgrades Apple is rolling out for us this year, you'll find that there's a significant jump forward in Image Playground's AI image generation abilities. Before now, the app's outputs were rather limited in terms of size, style, and possible prompts. It was very much AI images for beginners, with the results mostly basic and generic.

With iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, that's changing. You can try the developer betas now (though you probably shouldn't; the public betas are arriving in July), and Apple says the full releases will appear later in the year (most likely around September). Image generation is something both ChatGPT and Gemini have been steadily improving, to the point where some generations are difficult to distinguish from real photos. So how does Apple's new and improved Image Playground compare?

Here's what Image Playground can do now

Open up Image Playground on the newest versions of iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, and you'll see there are several new capabilities. First, you can ask for photorealistic images in the prompt box, as well as the sketches and illustrations previously possible: Ask for a photo of an English meadow or a towering temple, and Image Playground will oblige.

There's more control over your images, too. You can submit a photo as part of a starting prompt, and you can choose between square, portrait, and landscape orientations for your picture—these options weren't available before. If you want to transport your pet dog to the jungle, that's possible now.

Then there are clever editing tools, similar to those in Google's Nano Banana AI model, that let you change specific parts of a generated image without having to render it entirely again. You can use a follow-up prompt to request changes, and even highlight the part of the picture you want to edit.

You can now change the color of objects, remove objects altogether, change the weather of a scene, whatever you can think of, really. Based on my testing, it all works well, and produces results that look impressive and consistent. I managed to put a cartoon-style cat in a street, and then change the cat's color without affecting the background.

Apple says that everything created through Image Playground will have the same SynthID watermark as generations from Google Gemini and ChatGPT, and we know because of Private Cloud Compute that no user images will be stored or accessed by Apple, or used to train any of its models.

Finally, you can do more with these images too—setting them as Contact Posters or wallpaper for the lock screen, for example. You can find more AI image tools in the Photos app, where you can apply edits similar to those possible in Image Playground to whatever's in your photo library.

Image Playground versus the competition

Image Playground is much better—no doubt thanks to a boost from Gemini—but even still, the images aren't quite up to the very high bar that Gemini and ChatGPT have set now. You can see below how my request for "a photorealistic image of a small, ancient-looking spaceship floating between the stars, with an Earth-like planet behind it" was interpreted by Image Playground (left), Gemini (center), and ChatGPT (right).

Apple does okay, but to my eye, Gemini and ChatGPT generated results that are more immersive and detailed—like something you'd see in an actual science fiction film. There's more detail and more imagination, although to Apple's credit, Image Playground rendered the fastest.

For the next challenge, I tried asking these AI tools to "move my cuddly toy from my floor to a pebbly beach, with the tide lapping at its edges." Again, all these attempts are good, but Gemini (center) and ChatGPT (right) add extra layers of verisimilitude in terms of color, angle, and texture (though Gemini seems to have created two shorelines).

I asked all three models to remove the toy and just leave the beach, and they all managed it more or less perfectly. These are Photoshop-level edits that used to take me hours, but can now be completed in seconds. It's truly impressive. Gemini and ChatGPT still have the edge in terms of quality, but Image Playground comes built into billions of Apple devices. It's now good enough that many users will likely choose not to switch to something else when they need to generate an image with AI, which might make all the difference.