Adobe Firefly is powering several of the new advancements that are being announced by the company at MAX today. Quite honestly, they’re insanely dystopian yet also pretty exciting for the future of photography if ethics and regulations are put into place. Daido Moriyama says that the camera is an imperfect way of capturing reality, so a photograph can totally be made in post-production. But when does a photograph stop being a photograph and instead be a composite? That’s a question I believe photographers should ask themselves when using the new Photoshop features. Included is a new adjustment brush that does some pretty insane things — powered by the new Adobe Firefly.
According to the press release, “New features including Reference Image, Generate Image, Generate Similar, Generate Background, Enhance Detail, enable everyone to bring their creative vision to life in seconds.” Here’s some more details from the release:
- Reference Image helps creatives achieve the outputs they imagine, using user-selected images as generative inspiration.
- Text-to-image with Generate Image shortens the distance between the blank page and amazing content with full text-to-image capabilities directly within Photoshop for the first time.
- Generate Background replaces and creates backgrounds, making it easier than ever to generate content that seamlessly blends into existing images.
- Generate Similar lets creators iterate with variations they select, to explore creation ideas more deeply with more precise control.
- Enhance Detail fine-tunes images to improve sharpness and clarity.
In reality, this means a user can create a composite image without shooting photos at all. The reason for this is that all of the images are available from Adobe’s Firefly solution in Photoshop. This is thanks to Adobe’s stock images but also several of the photos made freely available from the web. One can wonder if services like Unsplash have contributed to things like this.
It also means that an image can be made freely without needing to shoot photos. And here are some fascinating examples of how good Firefly is when given prompts within Photoshop.
There are still some very odd things about the images, as they don’t feel quite like a still-image that came from a camera. But they’re very close — and unless you’re trained to recognize them, you won’t see the flaws. Therein lies the problem, society is too addicted to the dopamine rush from social media that it creates a brain drain. So folks aren’t always strengthening their minds to be able to recognize when they’re being lied to. It’s a problem that might only become even more scary as we get closer to the US election. At the moment, we still don’t have any really great ways of authenticating images on various platforms.
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At the same time, Adobe states that they’re commited to responsible innovations. They speak a little bit about their ethics, in the quote below.
To provide transparency around the use of AI within Adobe’s applications, Firefly-powered features in Photoshop will automatically attach Content Credentials to the content. Like a nutrition label for digital content, Content Credentials are tamper-evident metadata that provide more information about the content, including whether AI was used in the creation or editing process.
However, there’s no word on how these credentials are kept when uploaded to social media platforms and various other services such as Reddit or YouTube. The Phoblographer has worked with photographers to add more authenticity to the work we post. We’ve got an entire series featuring photographers who don’t use Photoshop. And in all of our more recent interviews, we ask photographers about their thoughts on AI and ask them to provide proof that they shot the images.
Additionally, Photoshop is adding a new adjustment brush, which can do a variety of things. One function demonstrated was a hue change to the tint of sunglasses.
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Adobe should be absolutely praised for the fact that they’ve developed ethics around the use of AI, but the technology seems to be outpacing what the ethics are capable of covering and doing. And as a society, we really need to catch up.