I love this kind of silliness—just the right mix of idiom & constraint to bring out folks’ creativity.
Category Archives: AI/ML
Firefly: “Using Generative AI to Enhance Your 3D Workflow”
I love seeing Michael Tanzillo‘s Illustrator 3D -> Adobe Stager -> Photoshop workflow for making and enhancing the adorable “Little Miss Sparkle Bao Bao”:
Demo: Using Firefly for poster creation
My teammates Danielle Morimoto & Tomasz Opasinski are accomplished artists who recently offered a deep dive on creating serious, ambitious work (not just one-and-done prompt generations) using Adobe Firefly. Check it out:
Explore the practical benefits of using Firefly in real-world projects with Danielle & Tomasz. Today, they’ll walk through the poster design process in Photoshop using prompts generated in Firefly. Tune into the live stream and join them as they discuss how presenting more substantial visuals to clients goes beyond simple sketches, and how this creative process could evolve in the future. Get ready to unlock new possibilities of personalization in your work, reinvent yourself as an artist or designer, and achieve what was once unimaginable. Don’t miss this opportunity to level up your creative journey and participate in this inspiring session!
“20 Epic Uses of Generative Fill”
Check out a speed run of fun, practical applications courtesy of PiXimperfect:
Russell + GenFill, Part II
When you see only one set of footprints on the sand… that’s when Russell GenFilled you out. 😅
On a chilly morning two years ago, I trekked out to the sand dunes in Death Valley to help (or at least observe) Russell on a dawn photoshoot with some amazing performers and costumes. Here he takes the imagery farther using Generative Fill in Photoshop:
On an adjacent morning, we made our way to Zabriskie Point for another shoot. Here he shows how to remove wrinkles and enhance fabric using the new tech:
And lastly—no anecdote here—he shows some cool non-photographic applications of artwork extension:
AI: Russell Brown talks Generative Fill
I owe a lot of my career to Adobe’s O.G. creative director—one of the four names on the Photoshop 1.0 splash screen—and seeing his starry-eyed exuberance around generative imaging has been one of my absolute favorite things over the past year. Now that Generative Fill has landed in Photoshop, Russell’s doing Russell things, sharing a bunch of great new tutorials. I’ll start by sharing two:
Check out his foundational Introduction to Generative Fill:
And then peep some tips specifically on getting desired shapes using selections:
Stay tuned for more soon!
LinkedIn Learning tackles Firefly
Check out this new course from longtime Adobe expert Jan Kabili:
Adobe Firefly is an exciting new generative AI imaging tool from Adobe. With Firefly, you can create unique images and text effects by typing text prompts and choosing from a variety of style inputs. In this course, imaging instructor and Adobe trainer Jan Kabili introduces Firefly. She explains what Firefly can offer to your creative workflow, and what makes it unique in the generative AI field. She demonstrates how to generate images from prompts, built-in styles, and reference images, and shares tips for generating one of a kind text effects. Finally, Jan shows you how to use images generated by Firefly to create a unique composite in Photoshop.
AI: *Break* yo’self, fool!
Break-A-Scene seems incredibly cool, promising to extract objects from scenes, then remix them into other scenes while keeping them editable and preserving their appearances. Check out the 2-minute overview video:
Here we go again with the unrealistic beauty standards
“I’m so f***ing sick & tired of the Photoshop” — Kendrick Lamar
And yet we’re back at it with Generative Fill… 😜:
A fun conversation: Firefly & the future
Here’s me, talking fast about anything & everything related to Firefly and possibilities around creative tools. Give ‘er a listen if you’re interested (or, perhaps, are just suffering from insomnia 😌):
Phil to power
Old-school: Content-Aware Phil.
New school: Generative Phil. 😛
Come try Generative Fill on the Web, no wait required!
There’s a roughly zero percent chance that you both 1) still find this blog & 2) haven’t already seen all the Generative Fill coverage from our launch yesterday 🎉. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the future, but for now, you can check out the module right now and get a quick tour here:
And here’s a rad little workflow optimization I’m proud we were able to sneak in:
Come use Firefly now, no waitlist required!
Wes Anderson’s Avatar, + “The World’s First Bootcamp for AI Filmmaking”
The folks at Curious Refuge are back on their bullshit, in the best sense, dropping a new AI-powered Wes Anderson homage:
They’ve also launching a new AI filmmaking course:
Welcome to AI Filmmaking from Curious Refuge. This is the world’s first online course for showing you how to use AI to create films. Our training will cover various aspects of the production process from prompt engineering to animation and movement. We’d love for you to join our course and unlock your inner artist. $499 $399 Per Artist – Pre-Sale Special
Skybox scribble: Create 360º immersive views just by drawing
Pretty slick stuff! This very short vid is well worth watching:
With Sketch mode, we’re introducing a new palette of tools and guides that let you start taking control of your skybox generations. Want a castle in the distance? Sketch it out, specify a castle in your prompt and hit generate to watch as your scribbles influence your skybox. If you don’t get what you want the first time, your sketch sticks around to try a new style or prompt from – or switch to Remix mode to give that castle a new look!
“Why AI art struggles with hands”
“AI knows how things look, but not how they work.” Check out this really accessible overview of such a devilishly weird, funny phenomenon in AI art:
AI: Wes Anderson Matrix
Yes, there is a day coming where I’ll tire of these AI-powered mashups.
No, that day is not today. 😛 (“Wow!”)
AI: A fun conversation with Bilawal & me
I had a ball catching up with my TikTok-rockin’ Google 3D veteran friend Bilawal Sidhu on Twitter yesterday. We (okay, mostly I) talked for the better part of 2.5 hours (!), which you can check out here if you’d like. I’ll investigate whether there’s a way to download, transcribe, and summarize our chat. 🤖 In the meantime, I’d love to hear any comments it brings to mind.
Firefly Faves FTW!
🎉
Note that this is just a first step: favorites are stored locally in your browser, not (yet) synced with the cloud. We want to build from here to enable really easy sharing & discovery of great presets. Stay tuned, and please let us know what you think!
AI: Wes of the Rings
“In the quaintest corner of Middle Earth…” 😅 More awesomeness from Curious Refuge, who promise to share more details about their process soon.
Demo: Sketch-to-image
I’m told that the video is sped up by 4x, but still, it’s a pretty darn impressive application of ControlNet techniques to Stable Diffusion:
I’m reminded of Nathan Shipley’s cool GAN-powered drawing experiments from a couple of years ago:
“Robots playing soccer?!”
Just a fun little moment in last week’s conversation with Deke, featuring multiple self-censored F bombs of pure wonderment. 😌
My interview & demos with Deke
Hah, OMG:
- No one should be this excited to talk to me.
- Deke kindly & wildly overstates the scope of my role at Adobe.
But hey, what the hell, I’ll take it!
I had a lot of fun chatting with my old friend Deke McClelland, getting to show off a new possible module (stylizing vectors), demoing 3D-to-image, and more. Here, have at it if you must. 😅
00:00 Introducing John Nack
00:33 Adobe Firefly Preview #1: Discrete Asset Generation
02:39 One Day, Masked Assets?
04:01 A.I. Assets from the Libraries Panels?
05:32 ControlNet Is Wild
07:41 An A.I. Beer Commercial, from an Alien’s POV
08:19 patreon.com/dekenow Plug
08:39 Adobe Firefly Preview #2: 3D
10:51 Wrapping Your 3D Objects in A.I. Textures
11:56 Firefly Does Not Limit You to a Command-Line Prompt
13:06 Keeping It Safe for Work
15:17 Adobe Firefly Preview #3: Inpainting
16:52 Filling a Background with A.I.
17:38 Remove Is So Much Better Than Content-Aware Fill
19:41 When Can We Upload Custom SVG Logos to Type Effects?
20:40 Check Out Posts by Bilawal Sidhu
21:41 OTF Character Replacement with Wonder Studio
22:08 NeRF Turns Video into a 3D Object
23:29 Select Anything Meets Video
23:52 John’s Blog: jnack.com
24:16 Adobe Firefly Preview #4: Video
25:10 Could I Synthesize Sound FX? Story Boards?
25:38 The Unexpected Power of Cute 3D Characters
28:07 Wrapping Up with Deke and John
Driving Photoshop via AI
Longtime Adobe vet Christian Cantrell continues to build out his Concept.art startup while extending Photoshop via GPT and generative imagining. I can’t keep up with his daily progress on Twitter (recommendation: just go follow him there!), but check out some quick recent demos:
Telling Photoshop to lens flare all the things:
Adding blurs:
Removing backgrounds:
And finally, tying it all together:
Cheers to our new AI beer hellscape
Pyroclastic Horror IPA looks 🔥!
AI brilliance: Wes Anderson meets Star Wars
Now this is exactly the kind of thing I want to help bring into the world—not just because it’s delightful unto itself, but because it shows how AI-enabled tools can make the impossible possible, rather than displacing or diminishing artists’ work. It’s not like in some earlier world a talented team would’ve made this all by hand: 99% likely, it simply wouldn’t exist at all.
The 1% exception is exemplified by SNL’s brilliant Anderson parody from a few years back—all written, scouted, shot, and edited in ~3 days, but all requiring the intensive efforts of an incredibly skilled crew. (Oh, and it too features a terrific Owen Wilson spoof.)
A BlobGAN with a plan
My Adobe Research teammates & their collaborators at Berkeley have devised an interesting way to represent objects in scenes—not via sharply defined segments, but via more diffuse blobs. This enables some trippy editing techniques and results. Check it out in action:
Runway introduces their mobile app
The simple capture-and-augment experience promises “The magic of Gen-1. Now on your phone. Download the new Runway iOS app today.”
HAL GPT
This is pretty great. 🔴🤖😛
Some great demos of Recolor Vectors
Veteran author Deke McClelland has posted a fun 1-minute tour of the new Recolor Vectors module:
And for a deeper dive, check out his 20-minute version:
Meanwhile my color-loving colleague Hep (who also manages the venerable color.adobe.com) joined me for a live stream on Discord last Friday. It’s fun to see her spin on how best to apply various color harmonies and other techniques, including to her own beautiful illustrations:
Sneak peek: Adobe Firefly 3D
I had a ball presenting Firefly during this past week’s Adobe Live session. I showed off the new Recolor Vectors feature, and my teammate Samantha showed how to put it to practical use (along with image generation) as part of a moodboarding exercise. I think you’d dig the whole session, if you’ve got time.
The highlight for me was the chance to give an early preview of the 3D-to-image creation module we have in development:
My demo/narrative starts around the 58:10 mark:
Check out Firefly’s new Recolor Vectors module
Our first new module has just arrived 🎉, so grab your SVGs & make a path (oh my God) to the site.
From the team post:
Vector recoloring in the Firefly beta now enables you to:
- Enter detailed text descriptions to generate colors and color palette variations in seconds
- Use a drop-down menu to generate different vector styles that fit your creative needs
- Gain creative assistance and inspiration by quickly generating color options that bring your visions to life in an instant
As always, we’d love to hear what you think of the tools & what you’d like to see next!
Adobe announces new Firefly plans for video
Our friends in Digital Video & Audio have lots of interesting irons in the fire!
From the team blog post:
To start, we’re exploring a range of concepts, including:
- Text to color enhancements: Change color schemes, time of day, or even the seasons in already-recorded videos, instantly altering the mood and setting to evoke a specific tone and feel. With a simple prompt like “Make this scene feel warm and inviting,” the time between imagination and final product can all but disappear.
- Advanced music and sound effects: Creators can easily generate royalty-free custom sounds and music to reflect a certain feeling or scene for both temporary and final tracks.
- Stunning fonts, text effects, graphics, and logos: With a few simple words and in a matter of minutes, creators can generate subtitles, logos and title cards and custom contextual animations.
- Powerful script and B-roll capabilities: Creators can dramatically accelerate pre-production, production and post-production workflows using AI analysis of script to text to automatically create storyboards and previsualizations, as well as recommending b-roll clips for rough or final cuts.
- Creative assistants and co-pilots: With personalized generative AI-powered “how-tos,” users can master new skills and accelerate processes from initial vision to creation and editing.
Animated Drawings tech + Firefly = 🍬🌽🕺🏻
Meta Research has introduced Animated Drawings, “A Method for Automatically Animating Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure” (as their forthcoming paper is titled).
You can try it out via their Web interface, and/or take a bit more technical dive here:
I’m of course delighted to see folks starting to use it to bring their Adobe Firefly creations to life:
Demo: Creating cute characters in Adobe Firefly
Adobe prototyper Lee Brimelow has been happily distracting himself by creating delightful little creatures using Firefly, like this:
Today he joined us for a live stream on Discord (below), sharing details about his explorations so far. He also shared a Google Doc that contains details, including a number of links you can click in order to kick off the creation process. Enjoy, and please let me know what kinds of things you’d like to see us cover in future sessions.
Firefly + Sky = Superfly Firesky?
Terry White vanquished a chronic photographic bummer—the blank or boring sky—by asking Firefly to generate a very specific asset (namely, an evening sky at the exact site of the shoot), then using Photoshop’s sky replacement feature to enhance the original. Check it out:
A peek at upcoming Firefly enhancements
On Thursday I had the chance to talk with folks via a Discord livestream, demoing vector recoloring enhancements (not yet shipping, but getting close), talking about how we evaluate feature requests, showing some early thinking about saving presets, talking about “FM technology” (F’ing Magic), and more. Check it out if you’re interested:
I promise I don’t have this stupid look on my face all the time. 😅
ControlNet + Blender = 🔥
I love this; just don’t make me download and learn Blender to use it. 😅
Animation + Firefly live stream this morning
Chris Georgenes has been sharing tons of great Firefly-enabled creations (see recent posts), and he’ll be presenting presented live via Behance at 10:30am Pacific today:
A fun Firefly-powered composite 🐰⚔️
Happy Easter!
Wouldn’t it be amazing to make and composite things like this right in Photoshop? I can’t speak for that team, of course, but it’s easy to imagine ways that one might put the proverbial chocolate into the peanut butter.
Finds from the AI Film Fest
A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to attend Runway’s inaugural AI Film Fest in San Francisco, from which the team has now posted the winners. Numerous entries are well worth a look, and I thought I’d highlight a couple of my favorites here (with perhaps more to come later).
“Checkpoint,” below, offers a concise & stylish intro to the emerging domain of AI-assisted storytelling. I particularly like the new-to-me phrase “cultural ratcheting”:
I also vibed out with the sheer propulsive, explosive energy of “Generation”:
And if you want a deeper dive into What This All Might Mean, check out a recording of the panel discussion that accompanied the debut session in New York:
A pair of cute Firefly animations
O.G. animator Chris Georgenes has been making great stuff since the 90’s (anybody else remember Home Movies?), and now he’s embracing Adobe Firefly. He’s using it with both Adobe Animate…
…and After Effects:
Upcoming Firefly events
Come meet Adobe folks & fellow creators in person!
- London (4/15) (Rufus Deuchler presenting)
- NYC (4/20) (Terry White + Brooke Hopper presenting)
- SF (4/26) (Paul Trani + Brooke Hopper presenting)
Here’s info for the London event:
——–
We are finally back in London! Join us for a VERY special creative community night.
Get to know the latest from Adobe creative tools, Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly. Learn why you should have Adobe Express on your list of tools to quickly create standout content for social media and beyond using beautiful templates from Adobe. We’ll show you how to leverage your designed assets from Photoshop in to your workflow.
We’re also presenting Adobe Firefly, a generative AI made for creators. With the beta version of the first Firefly model, you can use everyday language to generate extraordinary new content. Get ready to create unique posters, banners, social posts, and more with a simple text prompt. With Firefly, the plan is to do this and more — like uploading a mood board to generate totally original, customizable content.
Meet creators, artists, writers, and designers. Plus hang out with Chris Do and The Futur team! With sips, snacks, and a spotlight on inspiring projects — you won’t want to miss this.
Space is limited, please register now.
Some delightful Firefly-made characters
I love these little buggers from longtime Adobean Lee Brimelow. We really need to make it easy to save and share cool prompt/preset combos like these. Stay tuned!
A quick update on Firefly access
Quiet Nackblog = hard at work, trying to speed up progress. 😅
Live stream: “How to Use Adobe Firefly”
Check out this recording of evangelist Paul Trani’s 1-hour deep dive into Firefly, including examples of how to refine & extend its output in Photoshop:
Good Firefly perspective: livestream & space
I enjoyed hearing my colleagues & outside folks discussing the origin, vision, and road ahead for Adobe Firefly in this livestream…
Eric Snowden is the VP of Design at Adobe and is responsible for the product design teams for the Digital Media business, which include Creative Cloud…. Nishat Akhtar is a designer and creative leader with 15+ years of experience in designing and leading initiatives for global brands… Danielle Morimoto is a Design Manager for Adobe Express, based in San Francisco.
…and this Twitter space, featuring our group’s CTO Ely Greenfield, along with creator Karen X. Cheng (whose work I’ve featured here countless times), illustrator & brush creator Kyle T. Webster, and director of design Samantha Warren. Scrub ahead to about 2:45 to get to the conversation.
— Adobe (@Adobe) March 23, 2023
AI does the impossible: making the first actually likable Vanilla Ice song
Made with genuine diabeetus! All right stop, collaborate and listen:
On one hand, you may be convinced we somehow assembled the original cast of The Matrix alongside the ghost of Wilford Brimley to record one of the greatest rap covers of all time. On the other hand, you may find it more believable that we’ve been experimenting with AI voice trainers and lip flap technology in a way that will eventually open up some new doors for how we make videos. You have to admit, either option kind of rules.
Some great Firefly reels
Hey, remember when we launched Adobe Firefly what feels like 63 years ago? 😅 OMG, what a week. I am so tired & busy trying to get folks access (thanks for your patience!), answer questions, and more that I’ve barely had time to catch up on all the great content folks are making. I’ll work on that soon, and in the meantime, here are three quick clips that caught my eye.
First, OG author Deke McClelland shows off type effects:
@dekenow Create Type Effects Out of Thin Air with Adobe Firefly #AdobeFirefly #photoshop #genai #deketok #typeeffects #texteffect #news ♬ original sound – Deke McClelland
Next, Kyle Nutt does some light painting, compositing himself into Firefly images:
And here Don Allen Stevenson puts Firefly creations into augmented reality with the help of Adobe Aero:
A creator’s perspective on Firefly & ethics
I really appreciate hearing Karen X. Cheng’s thoughts on the essential topics of consent, compensation, and more. We’ve been engaging in lots of very helpful conversations with creators, and there’s of course much more to sort through. As always, your perspective here is most welcome.
Adobe’s new generative AI art tool, and my thoughts on it @adobe #AdobePartner #AdobeFirefly
(🔈Sound on for narration)https://t.co/VVL8qdOrCV
I do wanna acknowledge this video is sponsored…
(see thread below) pic.twitter.com/CNHyJfPT3h— Karen X. Cheng (@karenxcheng) March 21, 2023