Deeply chill photography

Photography

(Cue Metallica’s Trapped Under Ice!)

Russell Brown & some of my old Photoshop teammates recently ventured into -40º (!!) weather in Canada, pushing themselves & their gear to the limits to witness & capture the Northern Lights:

Perhaps on future trips they can team up with these folks:

To film an ice hockey match from this new angle of action, Axis Communications used a discrete modular camera — commonly seen in ATM machines, onboard vehicles, and other small spaces where a tiny camera needs to fit — and froze it inside the ice.

Check out the results:

Behind—and under—the scenes:

Adobe’s hiring a prototyper to explore generative AI

AI/ML

We’re only just beginning to discover the experiential possibilities around generative creation, so I’m excited to see this rare gig open up:

You will build new and innovative user interactions and interfaces geared towards our customers unique needs, test and refine those interfaces in collaboration with academic research, user researchers, designers, artists and product teams.

Check out the listing for the full details.

Two quotes worth reflecting on as we go into the new year

Shit That Actually Matters

One, I swear I think of this observation from author Sebastian Junger at least once a day:

We’d do well to reflect on it in how we treat our colleagues, and especially—in this time of disruptive AI—how we treat the sensitive, hardworking creators who’ve traditionally supported toolmarkers like Adobe. Our “empowering” tech can all too easily make people feel devalued, thrown away like an old piece of fruit. And when that happens, we’re next.

Two, this observation hits me where I live:

I’ve joked for years about my “Irish Alzheimer’s,” in which one forgets everything but the grudges. It’s funny ’cause it’s true—but taken any real distance (focusing on failures & futility), it becomes corrosive, “like taking poison and hoping the other guy gets sick.”

Earlier today an old friend observed, “I’ve always had a justice hang-up.” So have I, and that’s part of what made us friends for so long.

But as I told him, “It’s such a double-edged sword: my over-inflamed sense of justice is a lot of what causes me to speak up too sharply and then light my way by all the burning bridges.” Finding the balance—between apathetic acquiescence on one end & alienating militancy on the other—can be hard.

So, for 2024 I’m trying to lead with gratitude. It’s the best antidote, I’m finding, to bitterness & bile. Let’s be glad for our fleeting opportunities to do, as Mother Teresa put it, “small things with great love.”

Here’s to courage, empathy, and wisdom for our year ahead.

Adobe Firefly named “Product of the Year”

Adobe Firefly

Nice props from The Futurum Group:

Here is why: Adobe Firefly is the most commercially successful generative AI product ever launched. Since it was introduced in March in beta and made generally available in June, at last count in October, Firefly users have generated more than 3 billion images. Adobe says Firefly has attracted a significant number of new Adobe users, making it hard to imagine that Firefly is not aiding Adobe’s bottom line.

Happy New Year!

3D, NeRF

Hey gang—here’s to having a great 2024 of making the world more beautiful & fun. Here’s a little 3D creation (with processing courtesy of Luma Labs) made from some New Year’s Eve drone footage I captured at Gaviota State Beach. (If it’s not loading for some reason, you can see a video version in this tweet).

AI Holiday Leftovers, Vol. 3

AI/ML

AI Holiday Leftovers, Vol. 2

AI/ML, Typography
  • 3D:
  • Typography:
    • Retro-futuristic alphabet rendered with Midjourney V6: “Just swapped out the letter and kept everything else the same. Prompt: Letter “A”, cyberpunk style, metal, retro-futuristic, star wars, intrinsic details, plain black background. Just change the letter only. Not all renders are perfect, some I had to do a few times to get a good match. Try this strategy for any type of cool alphabet!”
    • As many others have noted, Midjourney is now good at type. Find more here.

AI Holiday Leftovers, Vol. 1

AI/ML, Try-on

Dig in, friends. 🙂

  • Drawing/painting:
    • Using a simple kids’ drawing tablet to create art: “I used @Vizcom_ai to transform the initial sketch. This tool has gotten soo good by now. I then used @LeonardoAi_’s image to image to enhance the initial image a bit, and then used their new motion feature to make it move. I also used @Magnific_AI to add additional details to a few of the images and Decohere AI’s video feature.”
    • Latte art: “Photoshop paint sent to @freepik’s live canvas. The first few seconds of the video are real-time to show you how responsive it is. The music was made with @suno_ai_. Animation with Runways Gen-2.”
  • Photo editing:
    • Google Photos gets a generative upgrade: “Magic Eraser now uses gen AI to fill in detail when users remove unwanted objects from photos. Google Research worked on the MaskGIT generative image transformer for inpainting, and improved segmentation to include shadows and objects attached to people.”
    • Clothing/try-on:
      • PICTURE: PhotorealistIC virtual Try-on from UnconstRained dEsigns: “We propose a novel virtual try-on from unconstrained designs (ucVTON) task to enable photorealistic synthesis of personalized composite clothing on input human images.”
      • AnyDoor is “a diffusion-based image generator with the power to teleport target objects to new scenes at user-specified locations in a harmonious way.”
    • SDXL Auto FaceSwap enables to create new images using the face of a source image (example attached).

AI: Tons of recent rad things

3D, AI/ML

  • Realtime:
  • 3D generation:
  • 3D for fashion, sculpting, and more:
  • AnimateDiff v3 was just released.
  • Instagram has enabled image generation inside chat (pretty “meh,” in my experience so far), and in stories creation, “It allows you to replace a background of an image into whatever AI generated image you’d like.”
  • “Did you know that you can train an AI Art model and get paid every time someone uses it? That’s Generaitiv’s Model Royalties System for you.”

Promising 3D research from Adobe

3D

Check out LooseControl…

https://twitter.com/alexcarliera/status/1733154617998074183

…and Diffusion Handles:

.

Pika Labs “Idea-to-Video” looks stunning

AI/ML

It’s ludicrous to think that these folks formed the company just six months ago, and even more ludicrous to see what the model can already do—from video synthesis, to image animation, to inpainting/outpainting:

Our vision for Pika is to enable everyone to be the director of their own stories and to bring out the creator in each of us. Today, we reached a milestone that brings us closer to our vision. We are thrilled to unveil Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon and cinematic, and a new web experience that makes it easier to use. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.

“Emu Edit” enables instructional image editing

AI/ML

This tech—or something much like it—is going to be a very BFD. Imagine simply describing the change you’d like to see in your image—and then seeing it.

[Generative models] still face limitations when it comes to offering precise control. That’s why we’re introducing Emu Edit, a novel approach that aims to streamline various image manipulation tasks and bring enhanced capabilities and precision to image editing.

Emu Edit is capable of free-form editing through instructions, encompassing tasks such as local and global editing, removing and adding a background, color and geometry transformations, detection and segmentation, and more. […]

Emu Edit precisely follows instructions, ensuring that pixels in the input image unrelated to the instructions remain untouched. For instance, when adding the text “Aloha!” to a baseball cap, the cap itself should remain unchanged.

Read more here & here.

And for some conceptually related (but technically distinct) ideas, see previous: Iterative creation with ChatGPT.

NBA goes NeRF

3D, AI/ML, NeRF

Here’s a great look at how the scrappy team behind Luma.ai has helped enable beautiful volumetric captures of Phoenix Suns players soaring through the air:

Go behind the scenes of the innovative collaboration between Profectum Media and the Phoenix Suns to discover how we overcame technological and creative challenges to produce the first 3D bullet time neural radiance field NeRF effect in a major sports NBA arena video. This involved not just custom-building a 48 GoPro multi-cam volumetric rig but also integrating advanced AI tools from Luma AI to capture athletes in stunning, frozen-in-time 3D visual sequences. This venture is more than just a glimpse behind the scenes – it’s a peek into the evolving world of sports entertainment and the future of spatial capture.

Phat Splats

3D, AI/ML

If you keep hearing about “Gaussian Splatting” & wondering “WTAF,” check out this nice primer from my buddy Bilawal:

There’s also Two-Minute Papers, offering a characteristically charming & accessible overview:

Iterative creation with ChatGPT

AI/ML

I’m really digging the experience of (optionally) taking a photo, feeding it into ChatGPT, and then riffing my way towards an interesting visual outcome. Here’s a gallery in which you can see some of the journeys I’ve undertaken recently.

  • Image->description->image quality is often pretty hit-or-miss. Even so, it’s such a compelling possibility that I keep wanting to try it (e.g. seeing a leaf on the ground, wanting to try turning it into a stingray).
  • The system attempts to maintain various image properties (e.g. pose, color, style) while varying others (e.g. turning the attached vehicle from a box truck to a tanker while maintaining its general orientation plus specifics like featuring three Holstein cows).
  • Overall text creation is vastly improved vs. previous models, though it can still derail. It’s striking that one can iteratively improve a particular line of text (e.g. “Make sure that the second line says ‘TRAIN’“).

The Young & The Spiderverse

3D

Man, I’m inspired—and TBH a little jealous—seeing 14yo creator Preston Mutanga creating amazing 3D animations, as he’s apparently been doing for fully half his life. I think you’ll enjoy the short talk he gave covering his passions:

The presentation will take the audience on a journey, a journey across the Spider-Verse where a self-taught, young, talented 14-year-old kid used Blender, to create high-quality LEGO animations of movie trailers. Through the use of social media, this young artist’s passion and skill caught the attention of Hollywood producers, leading to a life-changing invitation to animate in a new Hollywood movie.

Hands up for Res Up ⬆️

Adobe MAX, AI/ML

Speaking of increasing resolution, check out this sneak peek from Adobe MAX:

It’s a video upscaling tool that uses diffusion-based technology and artificial intelligence to convert low-resolution videos to high-resolution videos for applications. Users can directly upscale low-resolution videos to high resolution. They can also zoom-in and crop videos and upscale them to full resolution with high-fidelity visual details and temporal consistency. This is great for those looking to bring new life into older videos or to prevent blurry videos when playing scaled versions on HD screens.

Adventures in Upsampling

AI/ML, Enormousness

Interesting recent finds:

  • Google Zoom Enhance. “Using generative AI, Zoom Enhance intelligently fills in the gaps between pixels and predicts fine details, opening up more possibilities when it comes to framing and flexibility to focus on the most important part of your photo.”
  • Nick St. Pierre writes, “I just upscaled an image in MJ by 4x, then used Topaz Photo AI to upscale that by another 6x. The final image is 682MP and 32000×21333 pixels large.”
  • Here’s a thread of 10 Midjourney upsampling examples, including a direct comparison against Topaz.

Demos: Using Generative AI in Illustrator

Adobe Firefly, AI/ML, Illustration

If you’ve been sleeping on Text to Vector, check out this handful of quick how-to vids that’ll get you up to speed:

Sneak peek: Project Glyph Ease

Adobe MAX, Typography

Easy as ABC, 123?

Project Glyph Ease uses generative AI to create stylized and customized letters in vector format, which can later be used and edited. All a designer needs to do is create three reference letters in a chosen style from existing vector shapes or ones they hand draw on paper, and this technology automatically create the remaining letters in a consistent style. Once created, designers have flexibility to edit the new font since the letters will appear as live text that can be scaled, rotated or moved in the project.

Project Primrose: Animated fabric (!) from Adobe

Adobe MAX

The week before MAX, my teammate Christine had a bit of a cough, and folks were suddenly concerned about the Project Primrose sneak: it’d be awfully hard to swap out presenters when the demo surface is a bespoke dress made by & for exactly one person. Thankfully good health prevailed, and she was able to showcase Project Primrose:

Here’s a bit more info about the tech:

We propose reflective light-diffuser modules for non-emissive flexible display systems. Our system leverages reflective-backed polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC), an electroactive material commonly used in smart window applications. This low-power non-emissive material can be cut to any shape, and dynamically diffuses light. We present the design & fabrication of two exemplar artifacts, a canvas and a handbag, that use the reflective light-diffuser modules. 

Reflect on this: Project See Through burns through glare

Adobe MAX, AI/ML, Photography

Marc Levoy (professor emeritus at Stanford) was instrumental in delivering the revolutionary Night Sight mode on Pixel 3 phones—and by extension on all the phones that quickly copied their published techniques. After leaving Google for Adobe, he’s been leading a research team that’s just shown off the reflection-zapping Project See Through:

Today, it’s difficult or impossible to manually remove reflections. Project See Through simplifies the process of cleaning up reflections by using artificial intelligence. Reflections are automatically removed, and optionally saved as separate images for editing purposes. This gives users more control over when and how reflections appear in their photos.

Check out my MAX talk on the potential of Generative AI in education

Adobe MAX, Idle Philosophizing, Shit That Actually Matters

I got to spend 30 minutes chatting with educator & author Matt Miller last week, riffing on some tough but important questions around weighty, fascinating stuff like what makes us human, what we value around creativity, and how we can all navigate the creative disruptions that surround us.

Hear how Adobe generative AI solutions are designed to continually evolve, develop, and empower educators and students from kindergarten to university level. Generative AI is expected to have a significant impact on the creativity of students. It has the potential to act as a powerful tool that can inspire and enhance the creative process by generating new and unique ideas. Join Matt Miller, author and educator, and John Nack, principal product manager at Adobe, for this exciting discussion.

In this session, you’ll:

  • Learn how Adobe approaches generative AI
  • Hear experts discuss how AI affects teaching and learning
  • Discover how AI can make learning more personalized and accessible

What if 3D were actually approachable?

3D, Adobe MAX, Illustration

That’s the promise of Adobe’s Project Neo—which you can sign up to test & use now! Check out the awesome sneak peek they presented at MAX:

Incorporating 3D elements into 2D designs (infographics, posters, logos or even websites) can be difficult to master, and often requires designers to learn new workflows or technical skills.

Project Neo enables designers to create 2D content by using 3D shapes without having to learn traditional 3D creation tools and methods. This technology leverages the best of 3D principles so designers can create 2D shapes with one, two or three-point perspectives easily and quickly. Designers using this technology are also able to collaborate with their stakeholders and make edits to mockups at the vector level so they can quickly make changes to projects.