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Beautiful this photo of the holidays in Trentino, with a little snow, the austerity of tall trees to frame the panorama. But wouldn’t it be prettier with a fawn watching us on the path? Indeed, now that I look better even that gray sky is not the best. A blue sky would be better… A few clicks and the wish is reality. Power of artificial intelligence, built into Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool, which we tested in this very example.
It is one of the first practical applications, in a popular and widely used product, for generative AI. It allowed us in minutes and with no Photoshop experience to do something that would have taken someone with minimal experience hours.
Anyone can now do professional photo editing and in a fraction of the time: it’s the first thought that comes after a short time of use.
In essence, Generative Fill is a function, now available in Photoshop Beta, which allows you to manipulate images in a non-destructive way (on different layers). Allows you to add, extend or remove content from images. Photoshop must connect to the cloud to use the tool, so it can be slower if the connection is less good.
For example, it is possible to generate objects by selecting an area of the image and describing what to add or replace through a text request, to be written in a special bar; for now only in English. We wrote “deer” (deer) and the instrument, after about 30 seconds, placed it in the desired place; it also gives us a few variants of deer to select from.
The most surprising thing in our test is that we selected the entire upper part of the image, taking – necessarily – not only the sky but also the tops of the trees. We wrote “blue sky” and here is a blue sky, leaving the trees unchanged. Artificial intelligence has only been able to change the sky.
Likewise, a new background can be generated for the subject of the image. Or with the extend images function, the working area of the image can be extended by selecting the empty area and applying the Generative Fill without any text prompts. Last chance: remove objects from the image, letting the generative AI take care of deleting the selected object. Some professional photographers begin to do wedding photo retouching like this, for example, to remove a chair, a vase that doesn’t look good in the photo. “A few days ago I used this system to remove a bench in a church photo. Photoshop automatically completed the drawings on the floor behind the bench,” explains Yulia B., international professional photographer.
We selected a boulder and clicked enter and the tool removed it (it figured out what to do by itself), but it also gave us options to browse with a click: it proposed inserting, for example, a mountain house, where, however, the perspective was wrong.
The result is not always realistic, even if you can try again to find the best option; but Adobe recommends further improving the result by applying the classic – manual – Photoshop tools at a later time. Here the expert hand of a professional comes in handy. As all studies confirm, artificial intelligence can replace manual activities but the maximum advantage is obtained in combined man-machine work.