Adobe Photoshop Camera is now publicly available and introduces some innovative AI implementation to upgrade people's smartphone photos. The app is worth checking out, even if it's just to see the crazy technology in action.
Photo filters might be the defining advancement in smartphone camera technology for the last decade. Image editing used to be a task entirely relegated to expensive imaging software, but even after the majority of such programs went free, it remained a skill-intensive task. Since Snapchat and Instagram took off though, software-based, user-friendly filters and effects have been embraced by the layman. Tools that previously required days of practice to employ are now accessible to people within seconds of casually swiping on their phones.
Now, image editing is somehow becoming even more accessible, thanks to artificial intelligence. Adobe Photoshop Camera is an app that enhances photos and lets users add filters and effects to photos captured with their phones. That's the simple part. What makes Photoshop Camera impressive is the ways it figures out how to improve photos without much user input. It has a collection of filters that receive weekly updates, but most of these filters are more like groups of common photo editing tasks. The app will detect the type of image being captured and select an appropriate filter. So, in a selfie, for example, the Portrait filter will handle lighting on the subject's face, skin smoothing, bright spot reductions, and depth of field to blur the background and bring the person into focus. Furthermore, it then has options for the user to swipe between multiple variations of these tasks within the same filter, or edit them manually.
How AI Helps You Take Better Pictures
The use of AI is what separates Adobe Photoshop Camera from the filters button on Snapchat. One of the key parts of manual photo editing is telling the software where different types of objects are within an image. Having AI handle such a task means being able to take a picture and have it highlight things individually. The AI being used here is called Adobe Sensei and it's the same technology the company uses in the desktop versions of Photoshop to power things like the Magic Wand tool for quickly selecting an image's background and removing it. To put it simply, the AI can "see" the image and has enough "experience" with similar images to know what kinds of changes will make it more aesthetically appealing. In fact, while using Photoshop Camera, the original image is always one tap away, so it's possible to watch the AI perform the various edits and refinements that would usually only be possible with dedicated image editing software in real-time.
The Adobe blog describes all of these features as "our journey to expand our focus to deliver creative tools, including Photoshop, for everyone." That may be standard marketing language, but there's merit to it in this case. Having these kinds of options on a phone isn't exactly new, but having them function automatically while remaining customizable, is a big deal.
Adobe Photoshop Camera is now available for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Source: Adobe