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Here Are the Creative Design AI Features Actually Worth Your Time
When I attempt this, it is obvious that the image has been composited. “Our goal is to empower all creative professionals to realize their creative visions,” said Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe Creative Cloud’s vice president of product marketing. The company remains committed to using generative AI to support and enhance creative expression rather than replace it. Photoshop has been my go-to for years, and even with all that time, I’m still discovering new features.
Compositing Is Broken: Adobe Aims To Fix It.
Posted: Tue, 15 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Generative Fill is part of the new Adobe Photoshop hotness coming as a result of Adobe’s Firefly and Sensei artificial intelligence (AI) efforts. The company has released Photoshop with generative AI (gen AI) features, available to anyone with a Creative Cloud subscription. When Adobe is pushing AI as the biggest value proposition in its updates, it can’t be this unreliable. It might be enough to fool shareholders into buying more stock but it’s not going to make actual users — you know, the ones directly contributing to the quarterly profit margins — feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. Editors don’t want something replaced with an object akin to what they select to remove, they want it replaced with what is around it.
Generative AI is still a nascent technology and, clearly, not one that exclusively improves with time. Sometimes it gets worse, and for those with an AI-reliant workflow, that’s a problem that undercuts the utility of generative AI tools altogether. “The success rate has dropped to maybe 5-10% (or less!),” the photographer says. “Before the update, it was more like 90-95%.” Even when they add a prompt to improve the results, they say they get “absurd” results.
This is a repeat of the problem I showcased last fall when I pitted Apple’s Clean Up tool against Adobe Generative tools. Multiple times, Adobe’s tool wanted to add things into a shot and did so even if an entire subject was selected — which runs counter to the instructions Adobe pointed me to in the Lightroom Queen article. Enhance Detail is a more conventional image-enhancement option, albeit an AI-based one, improving the “sharpness and clarity” of the content generated.
It could revolutionize creative workflows, blending advanced technology with user-friendly tools. AI may not be fully here yet for high resolution images, as you state. There is every reason to believe that this technology will be undectable in 2-3 years.
While a one-step backward, two-step-forward situation is foreign to most photo editing applications, reality has changed in the age of AI. Photoshop’s Firefly-powered AI is a solid choice for those seeking ease of use and integration with other Adobe products. Collaboration and learning are easy when the software is the industry standard.
I’d rather see them make these simple improvements to the user experience before getting an update with a new feature added. Using Photoshop, you can create photo composites, make light or heavy edits to images, use the ever-expanding Adobe AI tools integrated into the software, or even just crop and straighten images. Photoshop is designed primarily for photo editing, but you can also animate GIFs in Photoshop for creating short videos, illustrate, or do web design. Photoshop goes hand-in-hand with Adobe Lightroom as a photographer’s best toolset. Photoshop relies on a single proprietary model, but Stable Diffusion’s open-weight design has a diversity of fine-tuned checkpoints. Beyond Stability AI’s models, options like Hunyuan-DiT, FLUX, and PONY each have unique strengths, with countless fine-tuned variations developed by the community.
Click on the top-most layer in the Layers panel before using generative fill. Photoshop’s AI analyzes the area around your selection as well as the entire image. You may get bad results if the context is unclear, or perhaps a guideline violation warning if it’s something Adobe decided is problematic. It’s important to know that Adobe’s AI is heavily biased against women in images.
Labrecque has authored a number of books and video course publications on design and development technologies, tools, and concepts through publishers which include LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com), Peachpit Press, and Adobe. He has spoken at large design and technology conferences such as Adobe MAX and for a variety of smaller creative communities. He is also the founder of Fractured Vision Media, LLC; a digital media production studio and distribution vehicle for a variety of creative works.
Much like Adobe Firefly enables users to create something from scratch, turning a blank page into a rich canvas, Photoshop’s new Generate Image offers the same option. Adobe’s new Firefly Image 3 Foundation Model is now available natively within Photoshop, where it powers Generative Fill, Generative Expand, and, of course, Generate Image. Generative Fill has been massively popular for Photoshop, quickly becoming one of its most used features.
Since the update, generative fill adds objects to a person, including a rabbit and letters on a person’s face. In a separate Adobe Community post, a professional photographer says they use generative fill “thousands of times per day” to “repair” their images. ComfyUI thrives in scenarios like this, enabling users to create multi-layered workflows by combining different nodes, models, and techniques. Photoshop is also rolling out a new generative workspace in beta that creators can use to help ideate and brainstorm — it will also give creators access to a fast generation mode. Substance 3D viewer is also coming to Photoshop in beta, making it easier to edit 3D elements within a 2D design. Firefly’s AI video model is also being integrated into Premiere Pro, where it powers a new feature called generative extend.
Generative Fill, when used in this manner to expand an image, works best by selecting portions to expand bit by bit rather than all the expanded areas at once. It is also beneficial to select parts of the original image you want to expand from. If you would like to provide even more guidance, you can modify the prompt and even add specific color swatches you’d like to see included in the recolored artwork. I’ve written “northern lights green and vivid neon” as my prompt that describes colors I’d like to see. There are also sample prompts you can click on below the prompt input box. Generative Fill takes seconds to implement, and Photoshop provides multiple variations for the results.
For Illustrator, Adobe is bringing a beta version of Project Neo into the program. Project Neo is a web app that was first teased at last year’s Max, and it’s meant to help designers and illustrators work and edit 3D designs. Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of product marketing for Creative Cloud, told CNET that Project Neo has been in a private beta with around 60,000 users and has been incorporating the group’s feedback. While I’m not adverse to a snarky comment when one is due I feel in this instance you were rather harsh. I get the feeling the comment may have been driven by ignorance of the problem when it comes to colour matching in composite images. Older methods such as those using helper layers are both time consuming and pretty tedious and it’s not all about making ‘fake’ anything it’s about creating original artwork or images.
Generative extend lets users add on an extra two seconds of video clip (up to 10 seconds for audio) to help creators when they need a few extra frames, want to smooth out a transition or hold onto a shot for longer. I’ve found that Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill can create a variety of convincing artwork styles, in addition to replacing elements and creating entirely new ones. This seems to work best when there’s a central subject, rather than an entire scene, so I’d suggest working with portraits and still-life images where the subject is isolated.
The final straw for me was when AI-generated images of the war in Gaza were found being sold on Adobe Stock. They were labelled, but in a way that was easy to miss, and several of the images had been bought and used by publications where the staff were probably not aware that they were fake. Once the story broke, Adobe removed the images, but that was when I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. So I cancelled – I ate the early cancellation fee, a disgustingly predatory practice we’ve all just become inured to – and I did not look back. Filmmakers, video editors and animators, meanwhile, woke up the other day to the news that this year’s Coca-Cola Christmas ad was made using generative AI.
Adobe continues to expand its AI capabilities, with recent hires for generative AI research roles in India. Despite some backlash from creative professionals concerned about job automation, Adobe emphasizes that its AI tools aim to amplify human creativity. The company has also responded to ethical concerns, such as removing AI imitations following a complaint from the Ansel Adams estate. Photoshop provides frequent updates and advanced features but can overwhelm beginners with its complex interface. In contrast, Luminar Neo’s AI-powered sliders and presets streamline the editing process, making it more suitable for those looking for professional results without extensive experience.
But, somehow, Adobe’s AI just isn’t coded to understand this and it repeatedly generates the weirdest stuff because of it. Yesterday, photographer Matthew Raifman shared a bizarre result Adobe’s Generative AI produced in Lightroom. The Generative Remove tool saw a selection of a reflection and decided to replace it with a Bitcoin logo. In Photoshop 25.9, they are joined by the ability to create entire images from scratch, in the shape of new text-to-image system Generate Image.
He said there are three ways the company could improve the resolution of generated images. The first image editing application that Adobe is enhancing as part of today’s update is Illustrator. It shares certain features with Photoshop but has a significantly narrower focus.
