| Image: Adobe |
Disclosure: DPReview is attending Adobe Max, with Adobe covering travel and lodging expenses.
Adobe is holding its Max conference this week, which means we’re getting a slate of updates to Photoshop and Lightroom that make some of the features it’s been announcing over the year available to the general public.
Perhaps the most exciting one, especially for photographers, is Lightroom’s Assisted Culling feature. Adobe said it was working on it earlier this year, but it’s finally arriving in public beta. The idea is that it will let you quickly filter through a large batch of images to find the good ones, selecting by angle and how in-focus and sharp they are. The company says the feature will be launching in public beta soon.
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Adobe is integrating a chat assistant into several of its apps, including Photoshop. |
Another feature previewed earlier this year is what Adobe is calling the “Photoshop AI Assistant.” Essentially, it’s an AI chatbot that you can ask to do various tasks in the app, such as renaming layers and adjusting saturation, potentially saving you some clicks or time that otherwise would’ve been spent looking up a tutorial or searching for a specific tool. The company is now starting to roll it out, making the feature available in Photoshop for the web as a private beta, via a waitlist.
Of course, several of the features Adobe has announced make use of generative AI. Photoshop’s Generative Upscale feature, which was added to the Photoshop beta earlier this year, is launching in the mainline version of the app. By default, it will be powered by Adobe’s Firefly model, but now the company says you’ll have the option of using Topaz Labs’ Gigapixel and Bloom models as well, which could work better on certain types of images.
In that vein, the company is also updating Photoshop’s Generative Fill to support models other than its own Firefly model. Like Generative Upscale, this feature was announced earlier this year in beta, but is now available to the general public. Additionally, the “Harmonize” feature, which was shown off as a preview at last year’s Max and made available in beta this summer, is now widely available. The tool attempts to composite different layers together by matching color and lighting.
Despite Adobe’s best efforts, not everything new revolves around AI
Despite Adobe’s best efforts, not everything new revolves around AI. The new, more powerful version of Photoshop Mobile, which launched earlier this year for iPhones and iPads, is also now generally available for Android phones, greatly expanding the number of people who can access it. It has a free tier that you can use without a Creative Cloud subscription, but some features will require one. Access is included in the Photoshop Mobile and Web plan, which costs $7.99/month or $69.99 annually.
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| Image: Adobe |
Speaking of Photoshop Web, the company is bringing the stylization effects feature out of beta. These make it easy to add different looks to your image (or specific parts of it), and include options like “glitch,” which separates the red, green, and blue channels to make your image look like a poor VHS transfer, “comic” to give it an illustrated look, and motion blur, which adds directional blur to make it seem like something’s moving. Each effect has a set of parameters you can tweak. Of course, they’re all things you could have achieved in Photoshop before, but having them as one-click options makes the process substantially easier.
We’ll be on the ground at Adobe Max this year, so stay tuned for demos of some of these new features and previews of what we might see over the next year.