Monthly Archives: April 2022

Outdoor Photographer reviews Adobe Super Resolution

Photography

Great to see Adobe AI getting some love:

Adobe Super Resolution technology is the best solution I’ve yet found for increasing the resolution of digital images. It doubles the linear resolution of your file, quadrupling the total pixel count while preserving fine detail. Super Resolution is available in both Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom and is accessed via the Enhance command. And because it’s built-in, it’s free for subscribers to the Creative Cloud Photography Plan.

Check out the whole article for details.

Snapchat rolls out Landmarker creation tools; Disney deploys them

AR/VR

Despite Pokemon Go’s continuing (and to me, slightly baffling) success, I’ve long been much more bullish on Snap than Niantic for location-based AR. That’s in part because of their very cool world lens tech, which they’ve been rolling out more widely. Now they’re opening up the creation flow:

“In 2019, we started with templates of 30 beloved sites around the world which creators could build upon called Landmarkers… Today, we’re launching Custom Landmarkers in Lens Studio, letting creators anchor Lenses to local places they care about to tell richer stories about their communities through AR.”

Interesting stats:

At its Lens Fest event, the company announced that 250,000 lens creators from more than 200 countries have made 2.5 million lenses that have been viewed more than 3.5 trillion times. Meanwhile, on Snapchat’s TikTok clone Spotlight, the app awarded 12,000 creators a total of $250 million for their posts. The company says that more than 65% of Spotlight submissions use one of Snapchat’s creative tools or lenses.

On a related note, Disney is now using the same core tech to enable group AR annotation of the Cinderella Castle. Seems a touch elaborate:

  • Park photographer takes your pic
  • That pic ends up in your Disney app
  • You point that app at the castle
  • You see your pic on the castle
  • You then take a pic of your pic on the castle… #YoDawg :upside_down_face:

NASA celebrates Hubble’s 32nd birthday with a lovely photo of five clustered galaxies

DALL•E, Photography, Scientific & Technical Imaging

Honestly, from DALL•E innovations to classic mind-blowers like this, I feel like my brain is cooking in my head. 🙃 Take ‘er away, science:

Bonus madness (see thread for details):

A free online face-swapping tool

AI/ML, DALL•E, Photography

My old boss on Photoshop, Kevin Connor, used to talk about the inexorable progression of imaging tools from the very general (e.g. the Clone Stamp) to the more specific (e.g. the Healing Brush). In the process, high-complexity, high-skill operations were rendered far more accessible—arguably to a fault. (I used to joke that believe it or not, drop shadows were cool before Photoshop made them easy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

I think of that observation when seeing things like the Face Swap tool from Icons8. What once took considerable time & talent in an app like Photoshop is now rendered trivially fast (and free!) to do. “Days of Miracles & Wonder,” though we hardly even wonder now. (How long will it take DALL•E to go from blown minds to shrugged shoulders? But that’s a subject for another day.)

Substance for Unreal Engine 5

3D

I’m no 3D artist (had I but world enough and time…), but I sure love their work & anything that makes it faster and easier. Perhaps my most obscure point of pride from my Photoshop years is that we added per-layer timestamps into PSD files, so that Pixar could more efficiently render content by noticing which layers had actually been modified.

Anyway, now that Adobe has made a much bigger bet on 3D tooling, it’s great to see new support for Substance Painter coming to Unreal Engine:

The Substance 3D plugin (BETA) enables the use of Substance materials directly in Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Engine 4. Whether you are working on games, visualization and or deploying across mobile, desktop, or XR, Substance delivers a unique experience with optimized features for enhanced productivity.

Work faster, be more productive: Substance parameters allow for real-time material changes and texture updates.

Substance 3D for Unreal Engine 5 contains the plugin for Substance Engine.

Access over 1000 high-quality tweakable and export-ready 4K materials with presets on the Substance 3D Asset library. You can explore community-contributed assets in the community assets library.

The Substance Assets platform is a vast library containing high-quality PBR-ready Substance materials and is accessible directly in Unreal through the Substance plugin. These customizable Substance files can easily be adapted to a wide range of projects.

Frame.io is now available in Premiere & AE

After Effects

To quote this really cool Adobe video PM who also lives in my house 😌, and who just happens to have helped bring Frame.io into Adobe,

Super excited to announce that Frame.io is now included with your Creative Cloud subscription. Frame panels are now included in After Effects and Premiere Pro. Check it out!

From the integration FAQ:

Frame.io for Creative Cloud includes real-time review and approval tools with commenting and frame-accurate annotations, accelerated file transfers for fast uploading and downloading of media, 100GB of dedicated Frame.io cloud storage, the ability to work on up to 5 different projects with another user, free sharing with an unlimited number of reviewers, and Camera to Cloud.


Behind Peacemaker’s joyously bizarre title sequence

Miscellaneous

I generally really enjoyed HBO’s Peacemaker series—albeit, as I told the kids, if even I found the profanity excessive, insofar as “too much salt spoils the soup.” I really enjoyed the whacked-out intro music & choreography:

Here the creators give a peek into how it was made:

And here a dance troupe in Bangladesh puts their spin on it:

https://twitter.com/JamesGunn/status/1507405773252575234

DALL•E 2 looks too amazing to be true

AI/ML, DALL•E, Illustration

There’s no way this is real, is there?! I think it must use NFW technology (No F’ing Way), augmented with a side of LOL WTAF. 😛

Here’s an NYT video showing the system in action:

The NYT article offers a concise, approachable description of how the approach works:

A neural network learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of avocado photos, for example, it can learn to recognize an avocado. DALL-E looks for patterns as it analyzes millions of digital images as well as text captions that describe what each image depicts. In this way, it learns to recognize the links between the images and the words.

When someone describes an image for DALL-E, it generates a set of key features that this image might include. One feature might be the line at the edge of a trumpet. Another might be the curve at the top of a teddy bear’s ear.

Then, a second neural network, called a diffusion model, creates the image and generates the pixels needed to realize these features. The latest version of DALL-E, unveiled on Wednesday with a new research paper describing the system, generates high-resolution images that in many cases look like photos.

Though DALL-E often fails to understand what someone has described and sometimes mangles the image it produces, OpenAI continues to improve the technology. Researchers can often refine the skills of a neural network by feeding it even larger amounts of data.

I can’t wait to try it out.

MyStyle promises smarter facial editing based on knowing you well

AI/ML, Photography

A big part of my rationale in going to Google eight (!) years ago was that a lot of creativity & expressivity hinge on having broad, even mind-of-God knowledge of one’s world (everywhere you’ve been, who’s most important to you, etc.). Given access to one’s whole photo corpus, a robot assistant could thus do amazing things on one’s behalf.

In that vein, MyStyle proposes to do smarter face editing (adjusting expressions, filling in gaps, upscaling) by being trained on 100+ images of an individual face. Check it out: