This tutorial is looking at Adobe’s newest app, Substance 3D viewer. This app can integrate with Photoshop (I’m working on that tutorial next). Substance viewer can be used to apply textures and enviroments to 3D model and position them for placement into photoshop. Substance viewer also has the ability to generate actual 3D models from text prompts. This actually came out of one the sneaks at Adobe Max in 2023. This is a Quick Look, watch the video for more in-depth feature walk through.

Substance viewer is currently in beta and available for free.

How to Gert Substance 3D viewer

go to the Creative Cloud ap.

Click on beta.

You will see Substance 3D viewer.

Download it to your Mac or PC.

Once you launch Substance 3D viewer, you’ll see a welcome screen.

Ill go over all the features in another tutorial, let’s look at the Generative ai capabilities in this tut.

Click in the top right thumbnail that says: Create 3D model with text prompts.

You’ll see 2 options on the left. Choose text to 3D

Type in rotary telephone and generate.

This is an actual 3D model that can be tumbled and scaled.

It may not look like an amazing 3D model, but it serves a very important purpose for Generative ai.

Up until now, you have been able to generate with text prompts and reference images. You can sort of get what you want, but you are limited by existing photos.

With 3D, you now have the ability of get exactly the angles you want, by positioning the 3D model. I really think, this will become a very important part of generative ai in the future.

We can now. choose 3D model to image. Add your desired prompts and let the 3D model guide the main object.

phone on wooden desk. This phone, looks very similar to the 3D model, but this is now a rendered image.

Change the prompt to say plastic phone.

You can adjust the sensitivity to determine how closely you want to match the 3D object.

You can also bring in your own 3D models.

Here is a model of a DC3 that I created in Blender and exported as an .obj.

If you want, you can also apply a texture to your model using the materials. I’ll do another tut on that.

Now, I can enter a text prompt and use the 3D model that I built by hand.

Airplane at airfield.

And an image is generated to match the 3D model. Yes, its still got a ways to go, because it wanted to turn this into a jetted its far from perfect, but I like the direction it’s heading.

There are different ways we can generate too. If we choose Generate a new Look for my Model, it will make a texture for the model

You cn see it here. It’s still trying to make a jet engine, but it’s impressive that it was able to texture this well. If you have ever made UV textures for 3D models, you know how hard it is.

Let’s use a more simple model provided by Adobe.

Lets use this toaster.

We can generate an isolated subject with texture. This can be useful for compositing. I’ll show you how to bring this back into Photoshop in the next tutorials in this series.

We can add a prompt and generate a realistic image of breakfast in the kitchen from this 3D model.

I hope you found this intro to Substance Viewer interesting and useful.

Let me know, if you want to see more tut on this. (Im planning on doing one on Substance Viewer and Photoshop integration.)

Thanks

Colin

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Its that time of the year for the big upgrades. Big, as in they get full version numbers. Generally many beta features are now promoted to full features and new ones added.

There are a lot of performance improvements in LRC this time around and if you have modern computer, you should notice them. Modern, because more stuff is pushed to GPU.

The first thing you will need to do, is upgrade your catalog when you first launch.

This brings us to the first new feature, which is an unseen one. Lightroom automatically creates a backup of your old catalog now.

Another “small” but big to some people (I’m one of them) the long-awaited ability to easily rename your catalog. I know, I know, why did that take so long?

Now, when you rename your catalog, all the supporting files will be renamed including the ability to rename the parent folder. No more Lightroom_199_main-v13-3_v6_really_the_new_updated_2023_update filenames!

You can see everything is now renamed. You can also delete your old catalogs as you can see the names clearly now. (Tip: Before deleting old catalogs, I suggest moving them to a different folder and make sure everything works on the new catalogs before emptying out the old ones).

Choose Photoshop version

This isn’t new, but I want to include it because I am asked this ALL the time.

If you go to settings, you can choose the version of Photoshop  (regular or Beta) to edit in from the External Editing tab. If this doesn’t work, launch the version of Photoshop you want to work in first. Then when you choose edit in Photoshop, it should go to the correct one.

Remove Tool updates

Same as in ACR the ai remove tool is updated.

You can circle select

It will detect the shape, you can keep painting to add other objects, or hold alt/Option and paint to remove from the selection.

Click on remove

And it does a great job. Use variations arrow to choose the best one.

You can also scribble select to tell Lightroom which object you want to select for removal.

It works quite well.

And a bit more clean up

done.

This works best in smaller areas on images that you will print, because the resolution isn’t large enough for areas bigger than 1024 px x 1024 px at a time. You can safely using it on multiple small areas to eventually encompass a larger area. If you are sharing them smaller for social media, it mostly doesn’t matter as much.

Tethered Capture updates for Nikon.

Nikon shooter rejoice! The same snazzy new tethering that was added for Sony is now here for Nikon. Expect drastically faster and more reliable performance when your Nikon camera is tethered.

Content Credentials

Content credentials allow you to add your information and links to your socials into your photographs. You can have the info on the Cloud, attached to your images or both. Now people can find and contact you if they like your images.

This is optional, and you can choose what info to include.

Noise Reduction. Denoise

The ai denoise for RAW photos is out of beta (early access)

Look at this noisy image.

Choose Denoise

You will see a preview

Without denoise

With

As you can see it does a terrific job.

Unlike in ACR, this is still using the earlier version of denoise, which creates a new file. Hopefully the new beta version of denoise in ACR makes it way over, but nevertheless it works really well.

HDR update Gain Map

Lightroom Classic has been getting HDR updates for a while now and I’ve made tutorials about them and told you about each update.

If you have an HDR enabled monitor, you can see HDR images have more detail in the highlights and look more vibrant and realistic. (you will notice this on the XDR phones and HDR TVs as well).

If you turn on SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) previews you can adjust the output for non HDR (High Dynamic Range) screens.

You may have wondered what happened to the 2 versions? Is it just a simulation? Now with Gain Maps, when you create an HDR image, both versions are included and the viewer will be shown the correct version depending on their display. You have to choose a compatible file format, such as Jpeg XL. You will enable HDR output. I should mention, a regular (SDR) photo won’t be magically converted to an HDR image. And, no (as I’ve been saying for YEARS) you cant process the same image differently and merge them together to get HDR images, you will just get a heavily tone mapped SDR image. I have written and made videos extensively about HDR if you need to get up to speed. 

Extended displays on additional monitors now support HDR as well, this is a good new feature for people using multiple HDR displays.

There you have it, those are the big new features in Lightroom Classic. Check out the video above to see them all in action,. as well as mention of a couple more smaller ones.

Thanks for checking it out

Colin

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Hi everyone!

Last week we looked at the new auto remove people and auto remove power lines in Photoshop. Currently in Photoshop beta, see how to get the Photoshop BETA here. 

I had a few comments saying the wire removal was too easy, because it had a simple background.

This week, we try the remove tool on a number of challenging images, and I really try to break it. Let’s see how well it does, shall we? We go through each image in the video, let’s see what the challenge is on each image.

This is a a clear sky, simple background, but there are a lot of wires.

This appears simple. But, I wonder how it will manage the contrails in the sky. Will it think they are wires too?

More complex wires

The downed wires have a difficult background with the trees

This night shot has mixed low light and low contrast lighting, as well as haze and flares.

Maybe the ai isn’t trained as well on an aerial view.

Then, lastly, we will unleash the Kraken! Can it fix this impossible image?

Check out the video and see how well Photoshop can remove these power lines using the new ai wire Remove tool.

People asked about a second pass, so I tried that too and made a 1 min video here

Good to see you here.

Colin

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This tutorial in an overview of the newest Lightroom Classic features released this morning by Adobe. This tutorial shows you how to use the main new features in classic. Remember these are also in ACR, with the exception of Sony Tethered shooting. I’ll make more tutorials in the future and go more in depth on the relevant features.

Generative Remove (All Lightroom versions /Adobe Camera RAW)

If you go to the remove panel and choose the eraser option, you’ll see a box that says generative ai. The remove tool with use Generative fill when you have this option on. With it off, you can still use the tool in the old way. In the old way, it works well for smaller areas and doesn’t need cloud access.

Let’s test out Generative AI remove.

Paint over an area to remove. I’m removing the light stand.

The red shows the selected area. We have Object aware on, so it also detects the object we want to select, so your selections can be rough.

Once you paint, you will get the refinement, where you can add or remove brush strokes. (Hold Ctrl/Cmd key while applying to skip this option).

I added a little bit to the bottom left of the light stand.

Click the apply button in the remove panel to apply the Generative ai

As you can see, it did a superb job.

Click on Variations to cycle through 3 variations, just like Gen fill in Photoshop.

Just to test how well this works, let’s select our model. No, in real-life, we wouldn’t generally be removing the model, but this is a test, just to see if it can.

Click apply

Look at that. Pretty amazing!

Tethered Capture with Sony Cameras

I feel like hell froze over. Yes, we now have Sony cameras joining Canon and Nikon! Very unexpected (Sony are very tight on their APIs). And yet, very cool. See the Adobe sire for the supported cameras, just the newest ones right now.

I am using a Sony Alpha 1 (A1) to test this feature.

How to set up Sony Alpha cameras for Lightroom Tethered shooting

There are some settings you need to change on the camera for this to work.

Network>Smartphone Connect>Smartphone Connection>OFF

Network>Transfer/Remote>PC Remote Function>Connect Method>USB

Network>Transfer/Remote>PC Remote Function>PC Remote>ON

Once the camera is setup, plug in the USB-C cable from the camera to your computer.

Choose File>Tethered Capture>Start Tethered Capture

Start the tethered shoot

Choose the Session name and the location where the images will be saved.

Click ok

When your camera is detected, you’ll see a tether bar where you can change the settings and remote shoot by clicking the shutter button. You can, of course change the settings and shoot directly from the camera too.

If you click Live, a window will open where you get a live view from the camera.

From what I experienced, the shooting speed was faster than I expected, and very snappy transfer of the 50mp images, with very little lag. I did notice a but more lag when using the onscreen shutter button vs the physical shutter button on the camera. Another nice surprise, if I turned the camera off, I was able to reconnect without restarting the tether session. something I was not able to do with a Canon camera while tethered to Lightroom. I hope these newly updated settings in tethered shooting make it to Canon and Nikon too.

Updated Lens Blur

I’m not going to go too in-depth with Lens blur here because I already have a detailed tutorial on it here. 

We will touch on its functionality and then focus on the new features. Lens Blur is no longer an Early Access, it’s a finished feature now.

When you click on apply, Lightroom detects the subject and builds a depth map. It uses this to blur the background, or the foreground if you prefer. If there is already a depth map (smartphone shot in portrait mode), Lightroom will use this.

Turn on Visualize depth to see the depth map.

Darker colors are further away from the viewer, whereas lighter colors are closer.

The focal range now has Near and Far labels on the slider, as well as numbers. The bar on the left was added by me as a way to show the depth map..

Use the sliders (shown on the video, and the linked tutorial) to refine your depth map and adjust your bokeh and blur.

Syncing Lens Blur

The Lens blur can now be included in presets. These are called adaptive presets, because they will automatically adapt for the image and choose a unique subject for each and apply the preset settings.

When you copy the settings (Copy settings or Sync) you will see Lens Blur is now included.

Let’s choose a different photo of the cab in NYC.

Let’s paste the settings

Notice how the background is now blurred

The area in the window is missed.

You can easily modify the Lens blur settings after a preset has been used, or you copy or sync settings.

Simply go to lens blur, choose the blur refinement brush and paint in the wood to include it.

Alright!

Other features include a “Exported” label. This works in the attributes filter, in Smart Collections and collection that allow you to filter images by those that have been previously exported. There is also an alt tag and description filed added to the meta data.

Let me know in the Comments, which features you would like to see me go deeper into.

I hope this was useful!

Colin

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I recently made a tutorial on all the new features of Photoshop 2024. I got a lot of questions and comments on Youtube and various social medias, so I’ll address the most asked ones here. There is also a video well worth watching above (It’s more in depth).

Is Generative Fill a paid add on?

A lot of talk about this one!

Generative Credits

Adobe is introducing Generative credits. The easy way to understand this is like a phone plan or data plan. An unlimited data plan allows unlimited data, but once you pass a threshold the speed may be throttled during peak time.

If you are a paid subscriber, you will get fast processing credits. Once you pass that limit, you can still generate without extra costs, but the speed may slow down if the servers are busy.

You don’t have to pay for the credits. Each month your meter will refresh.  AKA top off. You can’t accumulate credits and roll them over.

You can see the amount of credits you will receive each month in this chart from Adobe’s website. FAQ here

This doesn’t begin until Nov 1, 2024

Main ones are
Full CC: 1000 Credits per month.
Single app (aka Photoshop) 500 per month,
Photography + Lightroom CC 250 per month. New subs after November 1 will get only 100 per month.

What if you run out of credits?

To be honest, Most people won’t get though 1000 or even 250 credits per month. But if you do, then what? You can continue to use the feature and you may experience slow downs, or even a daily cap  (We don’t know what that means yet, because it hasn’t happened, but my guess is the cap is to stop people abusing the system, like starting a generation farm and selling as stock).

If the speed throttle is bad, you have the option to buy more credits fro $4.99 per month for 100. So basically it gives you priority processing, and you go to the back of the line when you use your monthly credits. They refresh each moth like the minutes on your phone.

Generative credits do not apply to the Remove tool to other ai features in Photoshop, only Generative Fill and Generative expand. Adobe express and Firefly it also applies to Text effects and Text to image.

Is resolution still limited to 1024 x 1024

the generated resolution is 1024 x 1024 px

This means 1024 px on the longest side. If your selection is larger than 1024  high or tall, the generated pixels will be enlarged to fit the selection resulting is a softer looking image. At selections of 2or less, the resolution should match your image.

I have a tutorial here on how to get high resolution fills in your image, see the tutorial here

Where is High Resolution?

Here is my best guess. I don’t know for sure, if Adobe had told me, I won’t be able to talk about it because of NDA, but I don’t, so I’m only speculating.. but it’s an educated guess

On Adobe’s site they say future capabilities may include Higher Resolution, may incur additional Generative Credits or additional cost. Lets examine that

If you compare to Mid journey, you have the ability to generate new images, or to upscale any of the variations.the U1-4 mean create high res on demand.

When you generate high resolution, it costs 1 credit.

My guess is Adobe will allow us to generate in low resolution (like now), but in the future we may be able to choose to redraw a variation in high resolution. This is like the current practice of using Adobe Stock for free in low res with a watermark. When we are happy with the results, we license the image and it’s replaced with a clean, high resolution version.

Maybe that high res generation will cost 1 credit, or even 5 depending on the resolution. We will see.

Is it Photoshop 25 or 2024?

They are the same. Photoshop is at version 25 as an app, but all the apps in Creative Cloud 2024 are called 2024 no matter their individual app versions.

Where are my Presets, plugins etc

When you install a full dot version update, (25 vs 24.7 etc) sometimes preset and plugins might be missing or not working. (I actually had good luck with my plugins this time and they all work)

Your plugins should be in: Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2024\Plug-ins folder

The key is to not replace your old version until you can be sure everything is working.

When you choose update from Creative Cloud, don’t remove old versions.

You can uninstall them later if you like.

Also if you do this, make sure you turn off Auto Update, I strongly encourage this anyway, or it could update you and wipe out your presets without your knowing. It’s happened to me before.

Running the correct version of Photoshop

If you need to reinstall an older version of Photoshop you can. To get back discontinued functionality like 3D.

Click the menu in the Creative Cloud app next to the open button in Photoshop

Click other versions

A menu will appear with other versions. You can install multiple versions at once.

Where are the new tools?

You may have the new version installed. Make sure you are launching the correct version if the new features aren’t there. You might Have added 2024, but still launching 2023. Check the name next to the icon.

Where is the Remove tool?

If you are using a workspace that didn’t include the Remove tool, generative fill or other new features at the time, they will be missing from your toolbar.

Click and hold on the toolbar options, you will see a fly-out menu.

Click Edit Toolbar

Click restore defaults and done and everything should be there now. If you had a custom workspace, update that workspace, or the tool will disappear again the next time you reset the workspace.

Wrong version is opening in Lightroom

When you right-click on an image in Lightroom classic, you can choose to Edit In>Photoshop

Some people are only seeing beta and can’t get it to open in the regular Photoshop

For Mac users, go to preferences>External Editing

Change the Photoshop version

When you right-click you will see the correct version of Photoshop, You can target the beta or other versions if you prefer.

For windows users, you need to First Launch Photoshop and then when you choose Edit in, it will open in Photoshop 2024.

I hope these tips are proving useful for you.

Drop a comment and let me know!

Thanks

Colin

By the way, I heard from some people they were waiting for Generative Fill to come to the main Photoshop because they didn’t want to mess with the beta. Well, it’s here now.

As you may know, I made a course on Generative fill (the first and as far as I know, the only course) and everything on the course works exactly the same in the final release, except you don’t have to download the beta anymore. If you missed the discount before, I thought it would only be fair to offer it again here if you are now ready to jump in.

I’ll give you a week to use the code GENFILL2 to save 20%.  Grab it here (If you already bought the course, you don’t need to buy again, it’s unchanged, as the features are unchanged)

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Adobe released the new update to Photoshop and we will look at the new features. Some of these features have previously been in the Photoshop beta and I’ve already done in depth tutorial in each. Where appropriate, I’ll add links to the other tutorials. This is a overview of everything that is new, in the main shipping version of Photoshop.

First: I have already been asked this question many times: “Can I now uninstall the Beta version and just work in the new update?” The answer is, it’s up to you. Both versions can co-exist on your computer. If you were just using the beta for Generative ai, sure you can get rid of the beta. New features will appear in the Photoshop beta before they make their way to the regular Photoshop, so it’s up to you if you want a steak peek or not. As always, I’ll let you know in our newsletter and make tutorials to make you aware of new features.

The floating taskbar has been tamed.

You may have noticed the taskbar that appears when you do certain things in Photoshop.

This taskbar is loaded with shortcuts to common tasks.

But sometimes it gets in the way and jumps over your image

If you click on the Menu, you can choose Pin Bar position. It will now stay wherever you put it.

I heard a lot of complaints that it didn’t remember this when you restart Photoshop and you have to keep pinning it every new session.

I’m happy to say, the bar stays put now, even when you restart.

Updating Photoshop to v25 aka Photoshop 2024

Sometimes people have trouble finding the update.

Launch your creative Cloud app, from the top taskbar on Mac, or bottom on windows. (Or search “Creative Cloud”)

On the left, click updates

Here is a step, many people miss.

Click on check for updates on the top right.

This will look for the very newest updates, often they aren’t loaded in yet.

You will see Photoshop with update next to it. You can see I already updated mine here.

NOTE: This is a new version and will replace your version 2023 if you choose that option.

Be aware, because it’s a full version update, you will have to reinstall your plugins. If this is an issue for you, keep version 2023 as well and launch that when you want to use your plugins.

Generative Fill in now in the main Photoshop version

Gen fill is now out of beta and available in the main Photoshop. It has 3 main uses. Replace, expand and remove. I’ll cover them briefly here, but choose the ai art and tools category here at PhotoshopCAFE, for lots of detailed free tutorials on these tools. Check out my full course with lesson files to learn even more. Because it’s out of beta, Generative Fill is now approved for commercial purposes.

Lets look at replace using Generative Fill ai.

Make a selection around an object to replace.

Type in what you want. Let’s do hair dryer.

Click generate

You will now see the object you described. This is not stock photography. This image has never existed before. The ai looks at all the images it has been trained on, by looking at millions of photos. It then knows what a hairdryer should look like and generates (or draws) one to match the lighting and angle of the photo. I go more in depth on my topical tutorials. Generative Fill tutorial. 

Notice the the properties panel, you can click on 3 variations.

There is also a new button in the Properties panel that allows you to see larger thumbnails.

If you click, generate again, you get 3 different variations. Generate as often as you like to get more options.

Generative Fill for expanding or outcropping

The 2nd use is to extend a canvas, this is probably the one we will use the most.

Say we want to expand this image into a panorama.

Choose the crop tool

Drag outwards with the crop tool to expand the frame.

This is very extreme, often we will do it just a little bit.

Without entering any text, click generate. (You will notice new tips as the expansion is happening). This happens on the cloud, you will need internet access to use this tool.

You will see that it generated pixels to match the existing image.

The new generated pixels aren’t factual, they are randomly created match the aesthetic. So think of this as an aesthetic way of using it, for things like design and not for location factual uses such as a hotel listings. I’ve covered all the ethics in other tutorials, so we will just stick to the tools in this one.

One of the downsides is the resolution of generated pixels is limited at this time. Here is how to hack higher resolution from Generative Fill.

Adobe has said that high resolution is coming.

Generative Expand

Before getting to the 3rd use of Generative fill, let’s look at a closely related tool. Generative expand.

Generative expand is basically Generative fill, but with fewer steps and the ability to use the sizing presets in the crop tool. I have a separate tutorial on Generative Expend here. 

Choose the crop tool and use an aspect ration preset if you like.

Let’s make a square with 1:1

Drag with the crop tool. Position the image within the frame.

Click generate

The crop tool will crop away the sides and generate pixels at the top and bottom to fill the square.

This is game changing for social media, and changing image aspect ratio. Previously, we had to do a lot of cloning and content aware fill to do the same thing.

Generative Fill for removing object

The 3rd main use for Gen fill, is removing things from a photo.

Make a selection around the car.

Click generate

The car is gone and background has been created to fill the hole.

Generative Fill is amazing, but there are things it can’t so, or do well, and we address that next. First more info about the changes.

Generative Fill as paid add on

Generative Fill is entering a paid phase in its life. Don’t freak out yet though, let me tell you what’s happening.

All this ai stuff takes an incredible amount of super-computing power. The processing is done in large and expensive data centers. So it’s not free for Adobe to run, in fact it’s very expensive. So here is what Adobe has announced:

Starting November 1 2023 there will be a limit on generations. For Full Creative Cloud members, it’s 1000 a month, for Photoshop and photography program, it’s 500 a month. Each generation counts as 1. Honestly, from using a paid mid-journey account for a year, most people won’t get anywhere near the 500 or 1000. But if you do hit that allotment, you will still be able to generate, but it will be slower. You can buy more fast credits if you want.

Credits refresh each month and you can’t accumulate credits, it just restarts. From the lounge on Adobe’s website, it sounds like the higher resolution generation will count as more than 1 credit each. No more is known at this time.

Only Generative Fill and Generative expand count as credits. The remove tool and other ai tools don’t use credits.

Remove tool

If you want to remove things from your photos, the ai powered remove tool is a better option on many cases. I compared the remove tool ai with Generative fill here. 

Choose the remove tool

Paint over the plant.

The plane disappears and is filled with natural background.

New way of using the remove tool

This is a brand new behavior. You can circle the object you want to remove, much like you would with magic eraser on the Google Pixel phone.

And it disappears.

Advantages of the remove tool over Generative fill include:

1. Often faster
2. On device, so no internet needed
3. Works in full resolution
4. No ai Gen credits used

New Gradient tool

The new gradient tool features re editable and non destructive gradients, I made a tutorial here on the new Photoshop gradient tool

For the sake of this example, let’s do lighting on a mask. I made another tut here, and it’s popular!

Start with a wall

Lets make it nigh-time

Add an adjustment layer

Choose color lookup

Click Load 3D LUT on the properties panel

Grab moonlight

Now it’s night.

To add a spotlight, choose black to white as fairground and background

Choose gradient tool (make sure it says Gradient, and not Classic Gradient)

Grab black to white and make it a radial gradient.

Drag to add a spotlight effect

Drag the dot on the side to change the shape.

You can add more than 1 light, see the video at the top

Some people wills, we could do that in Lightroom and Camera RAW. You would be right, but remember, this is a fully functional gradient tool that is capable of so much more, I’m just using it on a mask here to demonstrate.

Ok, that’s a wrap up of the new features in a nutshell. Check out all my other in-depth tutorials to explore there features more.

Thanks

Colin

By the way, I heard from some people they were waiting for Generative Fill to come to the main Photoshop because they didn’t want to mess with the beta. Well, it’s here now.

As you may know, I made a course on Generative fill (the first and as far as I know, the only course) and everything on the course works exactly the same in the final release, except you don’t have to download the beta anymore. If you missed the discount before, I thought it would only be fair to offer it again here if you are now ready to jump in.

I’ll give you a week to use the code GENFILL2 to save 20%.  Grab it here (If you already bought the course, you don’t need to buy again, it’s unchanged, as the features are unchanged)

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Luminar Neo is a full- featured photo editing application, similar to Lightroom in many ways. It can work as a stand alone application, or as a plug in for Photoshop. Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Apple Photos.

Skylum (maker of Luminar) recently released a module to stitch panoramas together. This is a tutorial on how to stitch panoramas out of photos and even video. This also serves as a review of Luminar, as I show some of the key features as we process the finished panoramas and other images.

This is a sponsored post, however all thoughts and tutorials are my own and not censored or edited by Skylum.

Skylum are providing a 10% discount, use the code PHOTOSHOPCAFE. Get it here 

Let me know your thoughts!

Colin

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With all the excitement around Generative Fill in Photoshop, its kind of overshadowed another amazing new ai tool. The remove tool, is equally an amazing, and maybe even more useful? Watch the video, or read on to see.

I made a tutorial on the Remove Tool when it was in Photoshop beta. Now its in the shipping version.

I have made a course on Generative Fill in Photoshop. Check it out here

Before I explain the differences in the tools, lets put them through their paces. The video shows the settings and variations of this basic theme I used.

At this time, Remove tool in in the main Photoshop version, generative fill is only in the Photoshop beta. Here is a short tutorial on how to get the Photoshop beta.

The Remove Tool

For the Remove tool, I created a new layer and then painted on the objects I wanted to remove.Creating anew layer gives non destructive use. Make sure to turn on Sample all layers for it to work. The remove tool in in Photoshop beta and also Photoshop 24.5 or newer.

The remove tool, is nested under the spot healing brush. If it doesn’t show in the toolbar if you are using a workspace preset. Click the 3 dot menu on the toolbar and choose edit toolbar to show the tool if its missing.

Make a new Layer

Paint over the object you want to remove

It removed the object and rebuilds the pixels behind the object based on the surrounding pixels and ai. Much better than Content aware fill, which is not ai.

I also removed the shadow in the video.

Meet Generative Fill

Generative fill is only in Photoshop beta right now. It only works on the cloud, so an internet connection is required. Generative fill is capable of creating objects and extending a canvas, In this comparison, we are only going to use it for object removal. I have plenty of other tutorials on other usage of Generative Fill.

For this tutorial, I used the lasso tool to make selections, and then chose, Generative Fill

Generate to fill with Generative fill, which uses a machine learning model than has been training on millions of images from Adobe stock.

It fills the area the car used to be with relevant pixels.

Removing a large object with repetitive background.

Lets remove this cabin.

Starting with Generative Fill.

Make a selection with the lasso tool.

Choose Generative Fill>Generate, leaving the prompt blank.

Tip: According the Adobe documentation, adding words like remove, don’t work. If you want to remove something, leave the text prompt empty. “Currently, the prompts used for the description are supported in English only. For best results, use descriptive nouns and adjectives in text prompts instead of instructive prompts like, “fill the area” or “create a scene“.”

Here you can see it didi a decent job.

Let’s grab the remove tool

Paint over the building and release

We also get a decent result. Although with this, we can see some repetition in the trees.

On close examination, the fill with Remove is the same resolution as the original image. It also works faster than Generative Fill.

If you look at Generative Fill results up close, they are soft and pixelated. That is because Gen-Fill uses a maximum resolution of 1024×1024 px to fill a selected area. This will change in the future. Here is a tip to get better resolution.

Removing a Difficult object from a picture

In this shot, we want to remove the tower.

With the Remove tool, paint over the tower first.

Then remove the power lines, it works well.

The moment of truth. How will it fare, while painting over an area of semi transparency, such as this veil.

It works wonderfully!

Ok, let’s try Generative Fill

Select the tower.

Hit Generative Fill>Generate

Oops, not so well here. None of the 3 variations are any better.

Lets try selecting the area through the veil.

Not too bad,

Note, if the entire tower was selected in a single selection, Generative fill worked much better. If you select part of an object, it tries to extend it rather than replace it.

You can’t type in remove, as it doesn’t understand those types of instructions, I tried sky, but also got weird results.

Removing a person, with a complex background

Starting With Gen Fill. Make a selection with the lasso.

And this did a fantastic job.

Same thing with Remove tool.

A very muddled result in the background.

Applying the Remove tool a few more times over the background changed it into a more acceptable result, although not as good as gen-fill on this one.

Removing a face

Let remove a person from this group.

Make a selection with lasso tool

Choose Generative Fill>Generate

On all 3 variations, Gen-Fill added a new face instead of removing the person entirely. On a second attempt, it did the same thing.

Let’s try the remove tool

I had to use it on smaller areas to rouch up the result, but it was very easy to remove the person.

The Conclusion

It looks like each tool excels in different circumstances and types of images.

The remove tool works very well on smaller areas and simpler backgrounds, although it can handle more complex backgrounds, you need to work it a few times to massage the results.

The remove tool is faster because it’s installed locally and thus doesn’t require an internet connection either.

The results are in high resolution and they are ready for prime time, because they are in the shipping version of Photoshop.

The Generative Fill can actually generate objects and thus works well on complex backgrounds, but remember its still low resolution and not yet for commercial purposes (beta).

The very best solution, is to use both together. I often start with Generative Fill and then use the remove tool to manually tweak the results.

I hope you found this tutorial useful, definitely check out the video if you haven’t, there is so much more o be gleaned than this brief writing.

Check out my new course on Generative Fill in Photoshop, Check it out here.

Also follow me on Instagram, Tik Tik and Twitter.  for shorts and reels.

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Happy Photoshopping

Colin

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Within the last week, it was just announced that Microsoft invested a further $10 billion into OpenAI. (they previously invested 2 billion)

What is AI Generated Art?

Now, OpenAI are the people that make Dal-e and of course, Chat GPT everyone’s talking about. Now, of course, there’s other ai art generators such as Mid Journey and Stable diffusion. And in fact, about a few months ago, maybe six months ago, I did a video on Mid Journey, kind of showing you how it works, how to use it, and then a little discussion at the end. I’ve kind of updated a lot of my thoughts since then. So having six months playing around and digesting this technology, I definitely have developed some different thoughts on it than I had back then.

Back then, I just kind of didn’t know what to think. And for those of you who don’t know about these AI engines or artificial intelligence, give them a text prompt. And based on that text prompt, it can produce art. So you could describe something, or you could describe a scenario, say it’s a cold day in Memphis and it will create art.

You can also direct it to create art in the style of a modern artist or DA Vinci, Giotto, or a pop artist, maybe Andy Warhol, and it will generate art in that style.

And as far as styles, it can do everything from cartoon, hand painted, photorealistic, photographic, it can look like 3D renders. And you can tell the AI all of these things and direct it. In creating art, essentially what it’s doing is you’re becoming an art director and you’re with these text prompts telling it, hey, this is what I want you to create. So we always thought with robots and technology, they’re going to do mundane tasks so we can sit around and create art and take photos. I thought one of the last things that would ever be replaced is the arts.

These are all unretouched images I generated with mid journey (Mid Journey Tutorial here)

But yet here we are today, where this AI on anybody’s computer or anyone’s phone even, is able to create art as good, if not better, than most artists. So it can do visual arts, chat GTP can also do written, where you can tell, hey, write me a story. And it can write a very convincing story. In fact, just recently, I think it was a week ago, they said it just passed the exam at Wharton Business School. And of course, even in the areas of music, AI is in there, and now it’s creating songs.

But let’s focus on photography and digital art because this is kind of what our niche is here.

History of Technology and how it affects jobs

So to kind of figure out where we’re at, why don’t we take a quick stroll through human history? Initially, humans were able to start building tools and things out of stone. And this enabled us to do things that we couldn’t do before. And then of course that went on to the bronze age, the iron age.

We were able to start building different tools and inventing things and eventually this led to the industrial age. And then came the industrial age where we were able to elevate beyond just creating tools into creating machines. And these machines were able to mass produce things. They were able to bring down the cost of living and at the same time raise living standards and provide us with a lot of the things that we enjoy even till today. Now, there is good and bad to all of these, of course.

One of the good things about the industrial age, it actually doubled the life expectancy of the average person. But one of the things about the industrial age of course, is now a machine can work more efficiently than a human and requires less skill. You can kind of see where I’m going with this. So there’s a term that we use for people that are against technology and against progress and that’s a Luddite. And this actually came around the time of the power loom.

Resistance to change – Luddite

There were highly skilled textile workers that made a good living and were very good at what they did. And they had these workshops where they created textiles, which is what cloth and clothing were made out of. Along came these power looms, they started building factories and were able to produce much more textile. And because of this, the prices came down, the workshops couldn’t compete. A lot of them closed down.

The workers went to the factories to try to get work. And of course they couldn’t all get work because number one, they didn’t need as many workers because of the machines. And number two, they didn’t need such highly skilled workers because the skill needed to run these machines was much less than the skill needed to create these things by hand.

And so the legend goes that the luddites were named after a guy called Ned Ludd. Now apparently Ned Ludd never actually existed, but it was a good folklore to kind of get things motivated.

And then the Luddites actually mobilized and went around smashing machines and to the point that the British army was fighting against them. And at one time, believe it or not, there were more British soldiers fighting against the Luddites than were fighting Napoleon at the time. So eventually they were suppressed and everything just kind of moved on.

We go from the industrial age, (through the atomic age, first space age) then we moved into the information age where computers come along. Now remember, computers also replaced a lot of jobs.

So during this time, there was a lot of people that were doing things that were very labor intensive, that were now being automated. Even like today, things are being automated and replaced by machines. Machines are much more efficient they’re cheaper to run. They produce more. They don’t need to be fed, they don’t need sleep. They can’t go on strike. There’s a lot of reasons that it’s more efficient to use machines. Now. As more machines come along, less people have work in those areas.

So let’s go back a little bit, and then we’ll move forward.

Movable type was invented, which is the printing press. And before that, scribes that used to write. That’s how they made their living, by writing these books. All the books were created by hand. Monks and scribes wrote all these books by hand. That was their job. So then the printing press replaced them.

But look at the new opportunities that came out of that. So out of the printing press came people working in printing press. There were printers now. There were newspapers and bookstores. That’s kind of interesting. And so a lot of people were working in the print industry, and that created jobs. Now, of course, a lot of that is starting to diminish now, and it’s being replaced by digital and online. But think about that.

Now we have a whole IT industry. We have whole new jobs. I think about what I do as a digital artist. I wouldn’t have my job if it wasn’t for computers.

One of the interesting things about the industrial age is this brought about these massive cities that started to build, because now people were coming together because it was possible because of this technology, and also they were coming together to work and build things.

Where we are now? We’re in a different place, where now that’s being democratized, and we’ve already seen this happening. This is not new as far as outsourcing. Now everybody in the world competes for the same job. So it’s not necessarily someone next door that’s competing for your position in IT. It could be someone in India, it could be someone in Ireland, it could be somebody in New York. They could be anywhere.

That’s changed things, where literally now, because of the Internet, we can live and we can work anywhere. There’s less jobs in this particular area, but new jobs have opened up, and also new opportunities have opened up. All right, but where does that go for us as artists? Let’s look at photographers for a second. Okay, so I actually started photography when we were using film.

I was predominantly a graphic designer for a living, but I was making part of my living, part of my job was doing photography. And I would go to events, and I would take my camera and I would load my film. And I had a very specific skill set. See, here’s the thing. I couldn’t look on the back of my camera and see, like, all my exposure, everything’s, right? No, I had to learn the craft. I had to know the settings on the camera. I had to understand what was going to work and what wasn’t going to work, where I could hire myself out for a job. Because you can’t go and shoot a major event and then go to develop the pictures and none of the pictures came out. That’s not a good way to make a living.

A lot of photographers will nod and say, yes, wedding photographers will understand that. So there was definitely a skill set required to take photographs. Then along came the digital camera. Has that changed photography?

Absolutely.

We go to every event and someone’s got a digital camera, everyone’s got a digital camera, everyone’s got a phone. Yes, but now that everyone’s taking photographs with phones, is that taking away the art or is it making the artist obsolete? I don’t think so. I think the fine art photographer is still going to have a place, because that level of expertise and that level of skill to create that piece is beyond what the average person has with their phone. Not just that, but a lot of the photographs are throw away photos, like when I go to a hotel, I take photos of my room number so I know what room I’m in. I take photos of the menu at a restaurant so I can just look at it on my phone. It’s much more convenient. So the camera has become a tool, which is more than just art or documentation. But let’s look at this professionally, maybe as a working artist, graphic designer, illustrator.

People that used to do illustration were replaced by a camera. Does that mean illustrators are gone? Let’s go all the way back. Does that mean stone workers are gone? No, there’s still people working with stone (usually the last possession anyone has), there’s still people working with steel, there’s still people creating handcrafted goods.

So as designers, we’ve been using props for a while. For example, stock photography. There was stock photography, which was rights managed, licensed before we got into royalty free. And having licensed stock photography as part of my job, I can tell you there’s many times where it has been more cost effective to have just gone photograph it myself or sent a photographer out than it would have been to use the stock photography. Of course, now with royalty free (and micro stock), it’s become very cheap.

Now, that doesn’t mean that stock photographers don’t have a job anymore. And notice I’m going back there. I’m talking about stone workers, steel workers, photographers. They still work. I’m going somewhere with this.

And this will apply to Photoshop and what we’re doing in a second. While we’re working, we can use stock photography, but then there’s other things. We’ve been using overlay assets, templates. So we’ve been using these things to aid us in our work, and it hasn’t put us out of work. And in fact, the design digital art industry is probably bigger than it’s ever been because of the advent of new technology, because now a lot of things are going from print to digital to online. We’re looking at things like iPads, phones, we’re looking at websites, we’re looking at apps, we’re looking at ads, social media. So now there’s more demand than ever to create these digital assets.

Is the Digital artist doomed?

All right, let’s bring all of this in for a landing and wrap all of this up where it all kind of comes together and makes sense. This is what I think. So if we look at AI art that is able to generate what people need, will it replace the digital artist, the photoshopper, the photographer?

And I say, no, I don’t think it is. When I first started using it, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is ridiculous. This can do this. Why do I even need to learn this craft? Well, there’s some limitations that I’ve kind of noticed. And yes, it’s getting better. Mid journey, couldn’t do eyes before. Now it can do eyes perfectly. Now it can’t count. If you look at hands, teeth, toes, you’ll very often get ten fingers on one hand or 100 teeth in a mouth.

Ai art is Improving, but how fast?

So there’s definitely some areas where it has to improve, and it will get better. Now, here’s the thing. It’s not going to get perfect overnight, because there’s that whole principle of, you know, 80/20, that last 20% is going to take way more time and way more computational power than the initial 80%. If you learn a musical instrument, you’re going to learn some chords and stuff on a guitar.

You can learn some chords very, very quickly, and you can make progress very quickly. But the further you go and the better you get, the more difficult it is to make more noticeable progress. So one of the things I found is that AI is capable of generating some incredible things, but it cannot generate what I see in my mind. If I have a picture or a vision in my mind, maybe I can draw it. Or I can find someone to draw it (a job), and then I can feed it into the AI, and that will actually get a lot closer to what I’m looking for.

Now, if it’s not perfect, you can’t tell mid journey, “hey”, “rotate that person 45 degrees and put a blue hat on them instead of a yellow hat.”

It can’t do that right now. So this is where the Photoshop skills come into play. You can take that AI piece, maybe as a plate or as a starting place, and then you can composite over the top of it. You can move things around. You can change the color. You can change the hand into only five fingers. Now, these things still require skill, so there’s always going to be skill. But  you’re applying your skill in a different place. There will be retouchers in the future who’s job is to retouch AI. Now there’s a position that didn’t exist. There were retouches that did commercial retouches of people cars, shoes, whatever. But now we’re going to be doing retouching on AI. We’re going to be using AI to generate ideas. And we might use those ideas as a basis for doing a photo shoot or for creating another piece of work.

How to secure your future

So AI is going to reduce the amount of digital artists that are needed. That’s a fact. Am I excited about that? No. Can I change it? No. So what do I say to you?

I say to you, get as good as you can. Start learning the AI. Learn how to apply it, use Photoshop with it, use it with photography, use it for backdrops, for photography, use it for different things. Start to understand it, start to learn how to use the prompts. And you’re more likely to be one of the people that’s going to be hired in the future to create and make things.

What about the Hobbyist?

So what about the hobbyist? Well, as a hobbyist, it shouldn’t change anything if you’re doing something because you enjoy doing it. It doesn’t matter if a machine is doing it or if other people are doing it too.

It doesn’t matter how well it pays or it doesn’t. If just for this sheer joy of doing it, you should still do it. If you enjoy photography, do photography. If you enjoy design, compositing, enjoy design and Compositing. Maybe use AI to help you with your compositing, to create some of the elements so you’re not searching for stock photography for hours and hours.

You can generate some of those elements in AI, cut them out, drop them in and put them together inside of Photoshop. And at the other side of things, there’s going to be new opportunities, new positions created.

There’s going to be prompt, artists. People’s job is going to be to work with this AI and feed it with the right prompts to create what we want, to create different iterations. And there’s other jobs I can’t even think of right now, but with each one of these major steps forward in humanity because when I talk about AI, we’re not just talking about art, we’re talking about robots, we’re talking about self driving cars, self driving lawn mowers.

All of these things are real and they’ll be more and more ubiquitous in life as we go forward. The AI age is upon us. It’s going to cause a lot of changes. It might change the way we live. Just like the Bronze Age, the Stone Age, the industrial, the machine, the atomic, all these different ages have changed the way we look at the world, the way we live, where we live, all these things.

It’s the future and it’s coming at us very, very quickly. And so my advice is don’t fight the future. Embrace it. It is coming anyway. So learn how you can use it to improve your lifestyle.

Because one of the things, through each of these ages, the standard of living and the life expectancy of humans has gone up. Rather than look at this from a dystopian point of view where this is it. We’re doomed. This is the end. I prefer to be optimistic about it and look at how this can enhance our lifestyles. The new opportunities, new jobs that we never even thought of are coming. We’re able to live in ways we’re going to enjoy things that we weren’t able to enjoy. We’re going to spend less time doing menial things, more time doing the things we want. And so, okay, here’s my prediction. What is going to be valuable in the future?

The future value of art?

I believe that handcrafted goods are going to be valuable in the future. If we look at the young people right now, digital natives, people born within the last 20 years, they always had digital with them. They always listening to music on ipods, never listening to records, never having cassette tapes. And trust me, if you’ve had cassette tapes, they’re not that good. But yet the kids today are craving them because they want something tactile.

They want to have an experience. So saying, “hey Siri/Alexa/Google, Play this song.” It’ll just play that song, and if I want to hear it again, I’ll play it again. But there’s an experience in putting a cassette tape, be it good or bad. You remember we had hold it half down. I’d be like and you hear the gap up, and you’re like, okay, there’s the beginning of the song, and then you’ll hear the song again. To get to the beginning of the song, you know what I’m talking about.

If you’ve used the cassette tape. And then, of course, it gets in the heads. They get dirty. It gets all chewed up. Then you get the pencil out, and then you turn it on the cassette, and then you put the tape on it, where it gets cut or it gets chewed, and then you’re listening to your favorite song, and then there’s this sound in the middle, because where it got chewed, right? And it sounds warbly or whatever, or the record gets a scratch. So they’re not perfect. But yet people are craving that experience. It’s something real.

Even now with photography, because digital cameras that take perfect photos, so young people are craving things like lomo, holga cameras, things that have floors. Wabasabi. Wabasabi is looking at the beauty in the imperfection. Wabasabi is your favorite pair of old jeans. There’s something special about them.

And so with handcrafted goods. In the future, as we get more 3D printing and doing all the things with technology and everything moving forward, people are going to crave that hand crafted good, that pot, that’s not quite round, that painting, that’s not quite perfect. That photograph, that oh, it’s got a little bit of noise. There’s some shadow over there. These things are going to be what make people fall in love with handcrafted goods when we’re living in a world of artificial perfection.

People are going to be craving for the imperfection, for the imperfect which is us humans, humanity. We are not perfect. We don’t do anything perfectly. Everything is different. Handcrafted, whatever it is, things that are handmade, I believe, are going to have extreme value in the future. So I’m curious to know your thoughts. Let’s open the discussion. And two things I ask. Number one, be civil. And number two, respect other people’s viewpoints and emotions. Because we’re all at different places with this. As we’re changing and growing, it it’s not comfortable. I’m not going to say it’s wonderful and this is so great and so comfortable. No, it’s uncomfortable. It’s a time of change.

It’s a time of transition. Things are changing. Let’s come together and support each other. And together we can forge the new way forward where we can create more beautiful things than I’ve ever been created.

Thanks

Colin

The post Will artists be replaced by AI Art? Mid Journey and Chat GPT. What I think appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

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Colin

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