Magic Insert promises stylistically harmonized compositing

New tech from my old Google teammates makes some exciting claims:

Using Magic Insert we are, for the first time, able to drag-and-drop a subject from an image with an arbitrary style onto another target image with a vastly different style and achieve a style-aware and realistic insertion of the subject into the target image.

Of course, much of the challenge here—where art meets science—is around identity preservation: to what extent can & should the output resemble the input? Here it’s subject to some interpretation. In other applications one wants an exact copy of a given person or thing, but optionally transformed in just certain ways (e.g. pose & lighting).

When we launched Firefly last year, we showed off some of Adobe’s then-new ObjectStitch tech for making realistic composites. It didn’t ship while I was there due to challenges around identity preservation. As far as I know those challenges remain only partially solved, so I’ll continue holding out hope—as I have for probably 30 years now!—for future tech breakthroughs that get us all the way across that line.