Photoshop Revolutionized: Adobe's New AI Reshaping Photo Editing

0:00Adobe, of course, the global tech giant known for its design and creative software suite is poised to revolutionize the digital imaging imaging imaging imaging. at least that is what they're telling us. So the company has teased an innovative AI-driven photo editing tool called Project Stardust. And this is set to be unveiled in full at the Adobe Max event, which I believe is happening tomorrow. So I'm just giving you a quick heads up on what to expect. The new quote unquote object aware editing engine, which is named Project Stardust, has been the talk of, I think the tech community after, you know, a promotional video was cited by TechSpa and it kind of gave a sneak peek into the capabilities.

0:41I think what's really intriguing about this tool is its ability to automatically detect and identify objects in photos. So I think this offers users the flexibility to easily maneuver these objects within the frame kind of mirroring functionality similar to Google's recently announced Magic Editor for its latest Pixel phones. During this demo that they did the software was super impressive and identified and highlighted individual objects in a photo. In one instance, you know, it was a yellow suitcase, and it was including its shadow, and it was automatically selected as though it had been like really intricately outlined using Photoshop's lasso tool.

1:17If you've used Photoshop before, you know this can be, you know, could take a lot of time to get this right. The subsequent clip showcased the simplicity of moving or even deleting objects without the backdrop, or with the backdrop auto filling in to pretty much seamlessly match the scene, right? So you have a photo, and you're like, okay, delete this chair, delete this TV, and it just automatically fills in what would be there if that object wasn't there, which is really, really cool. And at the same time, you can also grab the objects and move them around. So it's like, love the photo, but I wish that the table was like, you know, just a little bit to the right.

1:50It's like, honestly, it's kind of crazy when you think about it, and you think how far we've come with photo editing, because a lot of this, you know, had to be done pre shot, where you had to have everything set up just perfect and then you do your family photos and oh no this person's eyes are closed or this person's not looking or whatever. It appears that we're getting to a place where you pretty much just take a rough idea of the image and everything can be edited after by pretty much anyone to a very high level. So this is really really interesting. A feature to look forward to is something similar to the contextual taskbar that made its debut in Photoshop recently.

2:25So this new dynamic taskbar is designed to predict your next design move, thereby expediting essentially the editing process. So one demo highlighted the software's ability by auto-suggesting a, quote, you know, remove distractions button when a crowd was selected. So it really efficiently kind of cleared the crowd as soon as you selected it. But I think it's not just about moving objects. Adobe's product Stardust seemingly integrates the advanced generative AI capabilities seen in their Firefly powered Photoshop tools, which is really cool. So one of the things that I think was really interesting in this whole promo video involved Aya Filmon, that's Adobe's product manager for digital imaging, interacting with a floating taskbar prompt.

3:11Essentially, she selected a portion of an image and then pretty much had it like generate AI generated flowers inside of that image another demonstration i think featured the model um getting replaced by just describing the like desired clothing items so pretty much you there was like a model on the screen wearing something and you're like okay make this model wear like a you know a polo shirt with pink flamingos on it and boom um it was able to do that which is super interesting right no you don't need to go and like outline the exact shapes or you know it's crazy this is super super crazy so they just have a text input you start with an image and you just talk to it and tell it what you want um to the point where i think on this right you could just say like delete the red suitcase and boom it's gone so and of course there's like different tools that you can manually do that especially if you want to like kind of adjust where exactly on the screen the red suitcase is but you can do a lot of this all from the text input field which is incredibly interesting and not something we've you know really ever seen or had the capabilities of doing before so very very powerful adobe's uh teaser visuals of project project stardust i think kind of emphasized the departure from the very tedious manual process which i personally am very very familiar with growing up uh i was like i think photoshop was kind of like my software i i tried a bunch of different uh software growing up i tried like dreamweaver for websites and i never quite got into that.

4:39And I really kind of kind of got stuck on Photoshop to the point where actually it's probably a flaw because I know Photoshop really, really well. And a lot of things that probably should be done in like Adobe Illustrator, I still use Photoshop for and just do them in a janky way. So, you know, probably to a fault there, but I know Photoshop very well. And it is definitely very tedious to do certain things on there. I've watched more tutorials on Photoshop than maybe any other software. I don't know, Premiere might give it around for the money. But in any case, it definitely, I think it's due for an overhaul.

5:08And this AI makes a massive difference when it comes to editing photos in there and really like manipulating photos to a very high level, which is very, very interesting. I think in like instead of separating objects into new layers, users are offered a bit more of a streamlined and intuitive editing experience. Now with this whole project Stardust thing, I think the rise of generative AI has definitely spurred the development of these kind of automated design tools across the industry. Adobe is not the only one doing this. Canva now has some, you know, offers some like it pretty much has a bunch of similar different editing functions for easy object manipulation in images.

5:47To be honest, if you see my podcast covers, all of the ones I do when I have a special guest on and it's like me and the guest on the front cover and I kind of like cut out the background. I just do that all in Canva. They got like a one click background removal. I don't have to select around anything and it's very, very good. Google Photos Magic Editor, which is, I think it's packaged with Pixel 8 devices, is also, I think, a fairly noteworthy mention in this regard. They do some cool things. However, Aya Filmon suggests that what we've glimpsed of Project Stardust isn't merely the tip of the iceberg.

6:19The teaser features represent just a fraction of the software's full capabilities according to them. She also goes on to say that this editing engine will quote revolutionize how we interact with Adobe products. So that's going to be very interesting. I would be super curious to see how this, you know, impacts like Premiere, for example, editing video is that's very tedious. It can be a very tedious task as well. I think with, you know, while details surrounding this whole project startups are still like they're trying to keep it under wraps for the big reveal tomorrow. I think the tech community is very interested, definitely anticipating everything that's going to come out.

6:52And I think this whole event is going to be very, very interesting to see what the future of AI assisted photo editing is. Stay tuned, because I'm sure when they drop the announcement tomorrow, I'll also be covering it if they have anything crazy that wasn't kind of just in this video or in this podcast here. But all in all, a very interesting story. And I think Adobe really is doing a great job of leading the way on some of these AI tools and honestly doing them in a fairly responsible way.