Category Archives: Photography

Photo history: How NASA trained moonwalkers to shoot

Photography

I love behind-the-scenes little insights like these. Click or tap as needed to see the full post:

Phota launches, promising maximum identity preservation

AI/ML, Photography

Phota—about which I expressed some initial misgivings, given its ability to rewrite memories—has launched Phota Studio & their API. From what I can tell, it builds upon a Nano Banana foundation and adds personalization that relies on uploading dozens of images of each individual in order to maximize identity preservation:

With Phota, for the first time, you can generate, edit, and enhance photos while keeping your identity intact, every time.

We’re not building a generic foundation model. We build personal models about you, and about the people and pets around you. At the center are profiles, built from your personal album that learn the details of your appearance that make you recognizable as yourself: how you smile, your eye color, and how your face looks from different angles. Your personal model is private and only used by you.

Here’s a quick thread in which I tried inserting myself into a couple of images, using both Phota’s model (which depended on my uploading 30+ images of myself) and just Nano Banana straight out of the Gemini app:

Pass the Craic pipe: It’s St. Paddy’s!

Photography

Now throw your shoulders back and go effin’ nuts. 😀

And for some more blog-appropriate content: Here are some fun pics & vids my son Henry & I captured on Saturday during SF’s wonderfully diverse & quirky St. Patrick’s Day parade:

Bonus: here’s a gallery of Irish wolfhounds, if you’re into that kind of thing. I couldn’t quite get these good boys to align like Cerberus, so I resorted to telling Gemini my hopes & dreams—as one does.

Antigravity 360 drone spins me right ’round

Photography

Hey, remember the pandemic? We sure made some impulse buys then, didn’t we?

For me it was Insta360’s bizarre, modular 360º camera plus the elaborate mounting kit that promised to strap its shards onto the top & bottom of my DJI Mavic, enabling some magical, drone-less captures. Suffice it to say the thing was a complete POS—dysfunctional even as a handheld action cam, much less as a bunch of theoretically interconnected pieces thousands of feet in the air.

And yet… who doesn’t love the promise of capturing immersive footage that enables crazy post-processing camera moves? Insta’s on it, releasing their first 360º drone, the Antigravity A1:

Some cool details:

With Antigravity’s proprietary FreeMotion technology, the drone — together with the Vision goggles and Grip controller — enables an immersive flying experience that feels both natural and intuitive. Pilots can fly in one direction while looking in another. This level of immersion enables more freedom to explore. The 360 immersion doesn’t end just because the drone lands — recorded footage can be viewed in 360 over and over again, letting users discover new angles every time they watch.

Photoshop is totally cooked… except not

AI/ML, Photography

I couldn’t have contrived a better example of the power & pitfalls of generative imaging if I tried.

Here’s a pretty crummy cell phone picture I took yesterday from a moving train & then enhanced with a single prompt using Gemini. The results are incredible—if you don’t really care about the exact capacity of your jumbo jet! 🙂

The current state of AI-driven editing drives home the wisdom of that old Russian staying, “Trust… but verify.”

See also my previously shared example, in which Nano Banana quietly upgraded this propeller-driven plane into a jet:

Photo tips: “The formats of our memories”

Photography

My longtime Adobe friend Adam Pratt founded the media digitization & preservation company Chaos to Memories a few years ago, and now he and his team have really comprehensive overview of the various formats one may encounter:

Every photo project should start with gathering all these materials because it helps us grasp the scope of your project and work efficiently. To help you identify the different types in your collection, many common photo, video, audio, and digital formats are explained in the list below.

Shooting up a storm

Photography

Supporting my MiniMe Henry’s burgeoning interest in photography remains a great joy. Having recently captured the Super Bowl flyover with him (see previous), I prayed that Monday’s torrential downpour in LA just might give us some spectacular skies—and, what do you know, it did! Check out our gallery (selects below), featuring one seriously exuberant kid!

I’ve also been enjoying Hen’s great eye for reflections, put to good use during our recent visit to the USS Hornet:

Bad To The B-ONE

Photography

MiniMe on the lens + Dad in Lightroom/Photoshop, making the dream work. 🙂

 

Check out our gallery for full-res shots plus a few behind-the-scenes pics. BTW: Can you tell which clouds were really there and which ones came via Photoshop’s Sky Replacement feature? If not, then the feature and I have done our jobs!

And peep this incredibly smooth camerawork that paired the flyover with the home of the brave:

 
 
 
 
 
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BTS: Choreographing today’s giant Super Bowl flyover

Photography

Through insanely good timing, I caught Friday’s practice flyover as the jets headed up to Levi’s Stadium:

Right now my MiniMe & I are getting set to head up to the Bayshore Trail with proper cameras, as we hope to catch the real event at 3:30 local time.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying this deep dive video (courtesy of our Photoshop teammate Sagar Pathak, who’s gotten just insane access in past years). It features interviews with multiple pilots, producers, and more as they explain the challenges of safely putting eight cross-service aircraft into a tight formation over hundreds of thousands of people—and in front of a hundred+ million viewers. I think you’ll dig it.

Snapseed adds automatic object selection & editing

AI/ML, Photography

Back when I worked in Google Research, my teammates developed fast models divide images & video into segments (people, animals, sky, etc.). I’m delighted that they’ve now brought this tech to Snapseed:

The new Object Brush in Snapseed on iOS, accessible in the “Adjust” tool, now lets you edit objects intuitively. It allows you to simply draw a stroke on the object you want to edit and then adjust how you want it to look, separate from the rest of the image.

Check out the team blog post for lots of technical details on how the model was trained.

The underlying model powers a wide range of image editing and manipulation tasks and serves as a foundational technology for intuitive selective editing. It has also been shipped in the new Chromebook Plus 14 to power AI image editing in the Gallery app. Next, we plan to integrate it across more image and creative editing products at Google.

Behind the scenes: Photographing Giuliani

Photography

A recent Time Magazine cover featuring Zohran Mamdani made me recall a super interesting customer visit I did years ago with photographer Gregory Heisler. Politics aside, this is a pretty cool peek behind the curtains on the making of an epic image:

As for the Mamdani shoot, it sounds quite memorable unto itself—for incredibly different reasons:

[Via]

Google Photos adds GenAI features

AI/ML, Google Photos, Photography

The app promises to let you turn static images into short videos and transform them into fun art styles, plus explore a new creation hub.

I’m excited to try it out, but despite the iOS app having been just updated, it’s not yet available—at least for me. Meanwhile, although I just bit the bullet & signed up for the $20/mo. plan, the three video attempts that Gemini allowed me today all failed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Safari: Shake a Tailfeather

Photography

To be honest I’ve never taken a more than passing interest in most birds, and certainly in photographing them, but the insane diversity of those in southern Africa was too much to resist. Here are some of my favorites we spied on our journey through Zimbabwe & Botswana:

Meanwhile we enjoyed visiting Painted Dog Conservation and learning about their tireless efforts to preserved & rehabilitate some of the 6,000 or so of these unique animals that remain in the wild—and that often fall prey to poachers’ snares. Tap/click to see a rather charming little vid:

Here’s a bit more about their work:

Safari: Big Mouths & Small Spots

Photography

Hey friends—we’ve made it home to Cali after a whirlwind trip to Zimbabwe & Botswana. I’ll try to post some observations about the state of photo editing these days, and I’d love to hear yours. Meanwhile, while my body still tries to clue into where & when the heck I am, here are a few small galleries I’ve shared so far:

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A post shared by John Nack (@jnack)

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A post shared by John Nack (@jnack)

Gone (lion) fishin’

Photography

D’oh—before heading to Zimbabwe & Botswana with my wife to celebrate our 20th anniversary, I neglected to mention that things will be a bit quieter around here than normal. We plan to return to the States next week, and I might share a few posts between now & then. Meanwhile, check out some new friends we made this morning!

AI brings people to tears—of joy

AI/ML, Photography

Several years ago, MyHeritage saw a huge (albeit short-lived) spike in interest from their Deep Nostalgia feature that animated one’s old photos. Everything old is new again, in many senses. Check out Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian talk about how touching he found the tech—as well as tons of blowback from people who find it dystopian.

The new Flux rocks for image restoration

AI/ML, Photography

Please tell me Adobe is hiding off screen, secretly cooking up magic. Please…

Meanwhile, you can try it yourself here.

Sigma BF: Clean AF

Design, Photography

Refreshingly simple design!

Is it for me? Dunno: lately the only thing that justifies shooting with something other than my phone is a big, fast zoom lens, and I don’t know whether pairing such a thing with this slim beauty would kinda defeat the purpose. Still, I must know more…

Here’s a nice early look at the cam plus a couple of newly announced lenses:

SynthLight promises state-of-the-art relighting

AI/ML, Photography, Relighting

Here’s a nice write-up covering this paper. It’ll be interesting to dig into the details of how it compares to previous work (see category). [Update: The work comes in part from Adobe Research—I knew those names looked familiar :-)—so here’s hoping we see it in Photoshop & other tools soon.]

New AI-powered upscalers arrive

AI/ML, Photography

Check out the latest from Topaz:


Alternately, you can run InvSR via Gradio:

Thunder & The Deep Blue Sea

Photography

Everybody needs a good wingman, and when it comes to celebrating the beauty of aviation, I’ve got a great one in my son Henry. Much as we’ve done the last couple of years, this month we first took in the air show in Salinas, featuring the USAF Thunderbirds…

…followed by the Blue Angels buzzing Alcatraz & the Golden Gate at Fleet Week in San Francisco.

In both cases we were treated to some jaw-dropping performances—from a hovering F-35 to choreographed walls of fire—from some of the best aviators in the world. Check ’em out:

And thanks for the nice shootin’, MiniMe!

iPhone goes on safari

Photography

Austin Mann puts the new gear through its paces in Kenya:

Last week at the Apple keynote event, the iPhone camera features that stood out the most to me were the new Camera Control button, upgraded 48-megapixel Ultra Wide sensor, improved audio recording features (wind reduction and Audio Mix), and Photographic Styles. […]

Over the past week we’ve traveled over a thousand kilometers across Kenya, capturing more than 10,000 photos and logging over 3TB of ProRes footage with the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights into these camera systems and their features.

iPhone 16 + AI: Quick helpful summaries

Mobile, Photography

Check out my friend Bilawal’s summary thread, which pairs quick demos from Apple with bits of useful context:

There are some great additional details in this thread from Halide Camera as well:

Photography: Chasing Shreveport Steam

Photography

(And no, I’m not just talking oppressive humidity—though after living in California so long, that was quite a handful.) My 14yo MiniMe Henry & I had a ball over the weekend on our first trip to Louisiana, chasing the Empress steam engine as it made its way from Canada down to Mexico City. I’ll try to share a proper photo album soon, but in the meantime here are some great shots from Henry (enhanced with the now-indispensible Generative Fill), plus a bit of fun drone footage:

GenFill comes to Lightroom!

AI/ML, Generative Fill, Lightroom, Photography

When I surveyed thousands of Photoshop customers waaaaaay back in the Before Times—y’know, summer 2022—I was struck by the fact that beyond wanting to insert things into images, and far beyond wanting to create images from scratch, just about everyone wanted better ways to remove things.

Happily, that capability has now come to Lightroom. It’s a deceptively simple change that, I believe, required a lot of work to evolve Lr’s non-destructive editing pipeline. Traditionally all edits were expressed as simple parameters, and then masks got added—but as far as I know, this is the first time Lr has ventured into transforming pixels in an additive way (that is, modify one bunch, then make subsequent edits that depend on the previous edits). That’s a big deal, and a big step forward for the team.

A few more examples courtesy of Howard Pinsky:

Lego + GenFill = Yosemite Magic

Adobe Firefly, Generative Fill, Photography

Or… something like that. Whatever the case, I had fun popping our little Lego family photo (captured this weekend at Yosemite Valley’s iconic Tunnel View viewpoint) into Photoshop, selecting part of the excessively large rock wall, and letting Generative Fill give me some more nature. Click or tap (if needed) to see the before/after animation:

Google Research promises better image compositing

AI/ML, Photography

Speaking of folks with whom I’ve somehow had the honor of working, some of my old teammates from Google have unveiled ObjectDrop. Check out this video & thread:

A bit more detail, from the project site:

Diffusion models have revolutionized image editing but often generate images that violate physical laws, particularly the effects of objects on the scene, e.g., occlusions, shadows, and reflections. By analyzing the limitations of self-supervised approaches, we propose a practical solution centered on a counterfactual dataset.

Our method involves capturing a scene before and after removing a single object, while minimizing other changes. By fine-tuning a diffusion model on this dataset, we are able to not only remove objects but also their effects on the scene. However, we find that applying this approach for photorealistic object insertion requires an impractically large dataset. To tackle this challenge, we propose bootstrap supervision; leveraging our object removal model trained on a small counterfactual dataset, we synthetically expand this dataset considerably.

Our approach significantly outperforms prior methods in photorealistic object removal and insertion, particularly at modeling the effects of objects on the scene.

Irish blessings

Photography

Hey gang—I hope you’ve had a safe & festive St. Patrick’s Day. To mark the occasion, I figured I’d reshare a couple of the videos I captured in the old country with my dad back in August.

Here’s Co. Clare’s wild burren (“rocky district,” hence the choice of Chieftains/Stones banger)…

…my dad’s grandparents’ medieval town in Galway…

…and my mom’s mother’s farm in Mayo: