Category Archives: Photography

Netflix asks, “You wanna get high (dynamic range)?”

AI/ML, Image Science, Photography

Check out DiffHDR, which looks useful for making both captured & AI-generated vids more amenable to rich display and editing:

Most digital videos are stored in 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) formats, where much of the original high dynamic range (HDR) scene radiance is lost due to saturation and quantization. This loss of highlight and shadow detail precludes mapping accurate luminance to HDR displays and limits meaningful re-exposure in post-production workflows. Although techniques have been proposed to convert LDR images to HDR through dynamic range expansion, they struggle to restore realistic detail in over- and underexposed regions.

To address this, we present DiffHDR, a framework that formulates LDR-to-HDR conversion as a generative radiance inpainting task in the latent space of a video diffusion model. By operating in Log-Gamma color space, DiffHDR leverages spatio-temporal generative priors from a pretrained video diffusion model to synthesize plausible HDR radiance in over- and underexposed regions while recovering the continuous scene radiance.

Our framework further enables controllable LDR-to-HDR video conversion guided by text prompts or reference images. To address the scarcity of paired HDR video data, we develop a pipeline that synthesizes high-quality HDR video training data from static HDRI maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffHDR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in radiance fidelity and temporal stability, producing realistic HDR videos with considerable latitude for re-exposure.

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.

Remembering Jay Maisel

Photography

Like so many folks in the extended imaging community, I was sad to hear of the passing of Jay Maisel. Though I never got to know him well, Jay was a familiar & colorful presence in the world of Photoshop and Lightroom. See some memorable recollections from Joe McNally.

Many years ago I had the chance to drop by the iconic converted bank building in the Bowery he occupied for nearly half a century. (This must’ve been before phone cameras got good, as otherwise I’d have shot the bejesus out of the place.) It was everything you’d hope it to be.

More recently, my father-in-law (having no idea about the visit) dialed up the documentary “Jay Myself” last night, and whole family (down to my then-12yo budding photographer son) loved it. I think you would, too!

Amazing realtime relighting

AI/ML, Photography, Relighting

Wow—provided quality & resolution can be made high enough, tell me how soon tech like this can come to Photoshop & Lightroom:

Getting buff in Yellowstone

AI/ML, Nano Banana, Photography

Given that we’re taking our eldest son to start life as a University of Colorado Buffalo tomorrow (!), it was only fitting that we communed with a few real buffs in Yellowstone over the last few days. Here’s an Insta gallery:

 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by John Nack (@jnack)

Bonus wildlife from the trip: in Boise we dropped by the The World Center for Birds of Prey and got to see this handsome crew in action. (Inside-baseball detail: hopefully you’d never know that I was obliged to photograph the first owl shown through a dense set of bars on his enclosure. Nano Banana in Photoshop to the rescue!)

An AI e-clipse

Photography

Maciej Dobrodziej writes,

Today, a solar eclipse over Poland. The first such one in 72 years. The last time people looked up at the sky like that was in 1954 – through soot-covered glass, on Constitution Square in Warsaw. I froze that moment and flew through it with a camera. All the way to the sun. Zdzisław Wdowiński / PAP, 1954

Taking Nano Banana on the road

AI/ML, Nano Banana, Photography

Greetings from the midst of our bittersweet (but mostly very sweet!) roadtrip to take Finn off to college in Boulder. Me being me, I of course brought our Lego selves to use in making arguably cringey (#jeezdad) family pics. I don’t have a precise match for our newly modded van, so I brought the closest equivalent & then gave Gemini a reference image to use with Nano Banana. Not bad, robot—not bad at all:

Head-spinning photo->3D

3D, AI/ML, Photography

I have no words for this kind of witchcraft. In case the embedded tweet doesn’t show up in English, here’s a translation:

Wow. Maciej Dobrodziej – a digital creator – has “brought to life” one of Warsaw’s most famous photographs. The photo of a girl running in the rain on Puławska Street was taken by Zbigniew Siemaszko in 1968. Fun fact: After many years, it was possible to find Ms. Grażyna, who is the heroine of the photo. She recognized herself upon seeing… the photograph on FB.

Elsewhere, Bytedance helps you explore similarly, specifying camerawork just by drawing lines on an image:

Of beat labs & photo shoots

AI/ML, Photography

It’s always cool to see how creators are embracing new tools:

GenFill + Vividon = Magic

AI/ML, Photography, Relighting

It’s insane what we can do now—from object removal to lighting changes—that was simply out of the question even a year ago.

Check out this little progression of edits, starting with the newly enhanced Generative Fill in the Photoshop beta, followed by a couple of steps of Remove, followed by a pass with Vividon & a few tweaks in Camera Raw (running inside PS):

Nutty & I’m here for it. Per PetaPixel,

Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Marcus Kurn adds that the ability to deliver two or three lighting variations alongside every final image is a real differentiator: “once you start delivering two or three lighting variations with every final image, your clients will never want to go back.”

See yourself from a new angle in Google Photos

3D, AI/ML, Google Photos, Photography

Get some fresh perspective from our amazing teammates in research:

Today we are announcing a new approach to fix scene alignment after a photo was taken. Our method, now available as part of the Auto frame feature in Google Photos, uses machine learning (ML) models to understand the scene and its spatial layout and uses generative AI to imagine the photo from that new perspective. In contrast to classical photo editing, our method interprets a photo as a 3D scene — think of a real moment frozen in time — and change the camera position automatically within that space.

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, Nano Banana, 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.