And they shouldn’t scare you either. Adobe’s new AI-powered tools in Photoshop, Premiere Pro and other applications get things done faster.
Imagine using the Clone Stamp tool to take the person out of the scene in the photo above. It took about 30 seconds using Adobe AI Generative Remove in Lightroom.
34 years ago…
Photoshop came on the scene in February of 1990. Photographers were shooting film. Digital cameras were a few years in the future. Doomsayers were sure that Photoshop would destroy photography’s reputation for “seeing is believing.”
Photojournalists condemned the retouching, cloning, and exposure modifications. Photographs would no longer be credible. The fear was that Photoshop would destroy trust in photographs.
Photography survived Photoshop. I suggest that it is a stronger storytelling medium because of Photoshop.
Adobe AI
The AI tools from Adobe have made my workflow more efficient by an order of magnitude. I am a commercial photographer. My work is presenting idealized images that are as perfect as possible. Generative Fill, Generative Expand and the Remove tool are some of the over 100 AI-powered features in Adobe products. They all make me more efficient and visually more eloquent.
Ethically trained
Adobe AI tools are trained using Adobe Stock, which currently contains over 460 million images.. This means that the results their AI tools produce are commercially usable. They do not violate copyrights as some large language models trained by scraping the Internet do. This is a huge win for Adobe’s users.
Content authenticity
Adobe is a partner in the Content Authenticity Initiative. It’s an open-source system. It allows users to add information about AI in an image or video. The Content Credentials pin in the corner of a piece of media means that it has Content Credentials. Click the pin to show more data about the content.
Give Adobe AI tools a big hug!
Adobe has been evolving its tools with AI for quite some time now. The more I use them, the more I want to use these tools. The thing Iove is that when one AI tool doesn’t do what I want, chances are that another one will. Embrace these timesavers. I have.
Are the image creators compensated by Adobe for training their AI on their images? If not, I fail to see how it’s ethical. I don’t think people submitting images with the goal of selling them on a stock website expect said images to be used by Adobe for free to develop commercial tools for their busines.
Hey Michael, Yes! Creators who submit to Adobe Stock are being compensated. Here’s an excerpt from Adobe’s FAQs on Firefly their AI image generator: “Adobe enables its customers to monetize their talents through Stock marketplace, compensating Stock contributors through paid programs like Stock royalties, Firefly contributor bonus, and payments for custom content. While the terms Adobe already has with Adobe Stock contributors permit Adobe to create and train Firefly models, Adobe has created a Firefly bonus compensation plan, for all eligible Adobe Stock contributors whose content was used in the last dataset training of the first commercially released Firefly model.… Read more »