Monthly Archives: September 2026

A little prototype expression-changer

AI/ML, User Interface

Cool work from Gabi on the Firefly team; see details in the tweet.

Ironically, Adobe shipped interactive expression control six years ago (!) in Neural Filters, and I left Google to return to work on that stuff at Adobe. The quality & generalizability of GANs let us down, however. It’s great to see continued progress now.

Go flat->layered with “Ad Delayer”

AI/ML, Design

I can’t say I grok the name, but whatever: not unlike Canva’s Magic Layers feature, Ad Delayer promises, “The ad you already paid for becomes a working source file again.”

Controlling a generative scene via Intangible 3D

3D, AI/ML

I’m a fan of these guys. Charles is awesome, and my friend Philip (with whom I got my start in his pre-ILM/Pixar days) is leading product design. I’m excited to try out their “semantic scene architecture,” which promises to focus on outcomes rather than inputs:

GPT Astra driving AE & Premiere Pro

After Effects, AI/ML

Desire to know more intensifies…

“Everyone in the world now has a 3D designer at their fingertips”

3D, AI/ML

Insane that 3D worlds can be conjured straight from language, then rendered natively or used as guidance for AI-based rendering. Check out this demo from my former Adobe teammate Tom:

Days of Miracles & Wonder, man—always.

Behind-the-scenes thread:

And yet more magic:

Photoshop combines generative imaging & masking

AI/ML, Photography

It seems I’m on something of a Photoshop kick lately (something something you can take the boy out of West 10, but…), so I’ll mention a couple of interesting-sounding enhancements that have landed in the latest release:

  • Instruct Edit with Masks, powered by Firefly Image 5, understands the full context of your image so you no longer need to precisely mark every edit area yourself. Just describe the precise edits you’re looking for — such as opening closed eyes or placing a hat on a specific person’s head — with simple prompts. The unmasked areas remain untouched so your other important elements, like faces, logos, or brand assets, are protected.
  • Light Adjustment Layer gives you professional-grade lighting controls — Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks — in a new non-destructive adjustment layer, so you get Camera Raw-level results without ever leaving your Photoshop layers workflow.
  • Markup lets you visually communicate edits by drawing directly on an image to show the model what you want — select areas to recolor, sketch arrows to indicate position, or brush in rough shapes to suggest new elements — so you can get results that more closely match your vision while reducing the ambiguity of text-only prompts.

Omni Flash: Poolside AI

AI/ML, Google Omni

See, I just take Gemini to the dog park, but my teammate Genevieve took it all the way to the pool on vacation. There are levels to this stuff. 🙂

But seriously: this is a really nice visualization of the new clip-extension feature, among other things. That’s how the scene can run a full 30 seconds.