Category Archives: Illustration

Demos: Using Generative AI in Illustrator

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:

What if 3D were actually approachable?

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.

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:

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!

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:

https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1646951739176767515?s=20

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:

https://twitter.com/leebrimelow/status/1641228130030587905?s=20

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.

Animation: “Grand Canons”

Enjoy, if you will, this “visual symphony of everyday objects“:

A brush makes watercolors appear on a white sheet of paper. An everyday object takes shape, drawn with precision by an artist’s hand. Then two, then three, then four… Superimposed, condensed, multiplied, thousands of documentary drawings in successive series come to life on the screen, composing a veritable visual symphony of everyday objects. The accumulation, both fascinating and dizzying, takes us on a trip through time.

Kottke notes, “More of Biet’s work can be found on his website or on Instagram.”

Use Stable Diffusion ControlNet in Photoshop

Check out this integration of sketch-to-image tech—and if you have ideas/requests on how you’d like to see capabilities like these get more deeply integrated into Adobe tools, lay ’em on me!

Also, it’s not in Photoshop, but as it made me think of the Photo Restoration Neural Filter in PS, check out this use of ControlNet to revive an old family photo:

ControlNet is wild

This new capability in Stable Diffusion (think image-to-image, but far more powerful) produces some real magic. Check out what I got with some simple line art:

And check out this thread of awesome sauce:

Welcome to the meme-predicted future.

AI-made avatars for LinkedIn, Tinder, and more

As I say, another day, another specialized application of algorithmic fine-tuning. Per Vice:

For $19, a service called PhotoAI will use 12-20 of your mediocre, poorly-lit selfies to generate a batch of fake photos specially tailored to the style or platform of your choosing. The results speak to an AI trend that seems to regularly jump the shark: A “LinkedIn” package will generate photos of you wearing a suit or business attire…

…while the “Tinder” setting promises to make you “the best you’ve ever looked”—which apparently means making you into an algorithmically beefed-up dudebro with sunglasses. 

Meanwhile, the quality of generated faces continues to improve at a blistering pace:

Crowdsourced AI Snoop Doggs (is a real headline you can now read)

The Doggfather recently shared a picture of himself (rendered presumably via some Stable Diffusion/DreamBooth personalization instance)…

…thus inducing fans to reply with their own variations (click tweet above to see the thread). Among the many fun Snoop Doggs (or is it Snoops Dogg?), I’m partial to Cyberpunk…

…and Yodogg:

My Heritage introduces “AI Time Machine”

Another day, another special-purpose variant of AI image generation.

A couple of years ago, MyHeritage struck a chord with the world via Deep Nostalgia, an online app that could animate the faces of one’s long-lost ancestors. In reality it could animate just about any face in a photo, but I give them tons of credit for framing the tech in a really emotionally resonant way. It offered not a random capability, but rather a magical window into one’s roots.

Now the company is licensing tech from Astria, which itself builds on Stable Diffusion & Google Research’s DreamBooth paper. Check it out:

Interestingly (perhaps only to me), it’s been hard for MyHeritage to sustain the kind of buzz generated by Deep Nostalgia. They later introduced the much more ambitious DeepStory, which lets you literally put words in your ancestors’ mouths. That seems not to have bent the overall needle in awareness, at least in the way that the earlier offering did. Let’s see how portrait generation fares.

PetPortrait.ai promises bespoke images of animals

We’re at just the start of what I expect to be an explosion of hyper-specific offerings powered by AI.

For $24, PetPortrait.ai offers “40 high resolution, beautiful, one-of-a-kind portraits of your pets in a variety of styles.” They say it takes 4-6 hours and requires the following input:

  • ~10 portrait photos of their face
  • ~5 photos from different angles of their head and chest
  • ~5 full-body photos

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of traction this gets. The service Turn Me Royal offers more human-made offerings in a similar vein, and we delighted our son by commissioning this doge-as-Venetian-doge portrait (via an artist on Etsy) a couple of years ago:

Runway “Infinite Canvas” enables outpainting

I’ve tried it & it’s pretty slick. These guys are cooking with gas! (Also, how utterly insane would this have been to see even six months ago?! What a year, what a world.)

A fistful of generative imaging news

Man, I can’t keep up with this stuff—and that’s a great problem to have. Here are some interesting finds from just the last few days:

Wayback machine: When “AI” was “Adobe Illustrator”

Check out a fun historical find from Adobe evangelist Paul Trani:

https://twitter.com/paultrani/status/1581008882541133824?s=46&t=XjcRX5DdV1OKyzGKVimjTA

The video below shipped on VHS with the very first version of Adobe Illustrator. Adobe CEO & Illustrator developer John Warnock demonstrated the new product in a single one-hour take. He was certainly qualified, being one of the four developers whose names were listed on the splash screen!

How lucky it was for the world that a brilliant graphics engineer (John) married a graphic designer (Marva Warnock) who could provide constant input as this groundbreaking app took shape. 

If you’re interested in more of the app’s rich history, check out The Adobe Illustrator Story:

Demo: Generating an illustrated narrative with DreamBooth

The Corridor Crew has been banging on Stable Diffusion & Google’s new DreamBooth tech (see previous) that enables training the model to understand a specific concept—e.g. one person’s face. Here they’ve trained it using a few photos of team member Sam Gorski, then inserted him into various genres:

From there they trained up models for various guys at the shop, then created an illustrated fantasy narrative. Just totally incredible, and their sheer exuberance makes the making-of pretty entertaining:

AI art -> “Bullet Hell” & Sirenhead

Shoon is a recently released side scrolling shmup,” says Vice, “that is fairly unremarkable, except for one quirk: it’s made entirely with art created by Midjourney, an AI system that generates images from text prompts written by users.’ Check out the results:

Meanwhile my friend Bilawal is putting generative imaging to work in creating viral VFX:

Alpaca brings Stable Diffusion to Photoshop 🔥

I don’t know much about these folks, but I’m excited to see that they’re working to integrate Stable Diffusion into Photoshop:

You can add your name to the waitlist via their site. Meanwhile here’s another exploration of SD + Photoshop:

🤘Death Metal Furby!🤘

See, isn’t that a more seductive title than “Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion“? 😌 But the so-titled paper seems really important in helping generative models like DALL•E to become much more precise. The team writes:

We ask: how can we use language-guided models to turn our cat into a painting, or imagine a new product based on our favorite toy? Here we present a simple approach that allows such creative freedom.

Using only 3-5 images of a user-provided concept, like an object or a style, we learn to represent it through new “words” in the embedding space of a frozen text-to-image model. These “words” can be composed into natural language sentences, guiding personalized creation in an intuitive way.

Check out the kind of thing it yields:

AI art: “…Y’know, for kids!”

Many years ago (nearly 10!), when I was in the thick of making up bedtime stories every night, I wished aloud for an app that would help do the following:

  • Record you telling your kids bedtime stories (maybe after prompting you just before bedtime)
  • Transcribe the text
  • Organize the sound & text files (into a book, journal, and/or timeline layout)
  • Add photos, illustrations, and links.
  • Share from the journal to a blog, Tumblr, etc.

I was never in a position to build it, but seeing this fusion of kid art + AI makes me hope again:

So here’s my tweet-length PRD:

  • Record parents’/kids’ voices.
  • Transcribe as a journal.
  • Enable scribbling.
  • Synthesize images on demand.

On behalf of parents & caregivers everywhere, come on, world—LFG! 😛

“Hyperlapse vs. AI,” + AR fashion

Malick Lombion & friends combined “more than 1,200 AI-generated art pieces combined with around 1,400 photographs” to create this trippy tour:

Elsewhere, After Effects ninja Paul Trillo is back at it with some amazing video-meets-DALL•E-inpainting work:

I’m eager to see all the ways people might combine generation & fashion—e.g. pre-rendering fabric for this kind of use in AR:

https://twitter.com/XRarchitect/status/1492269937829707776

“Make-A-Scene” promises generative imaging cued via sketching

This new tech from Facebook Meta one-ups DALL•E et al by offering more localized control over where elements are placed:

The team writes,

We found that the image generated from both text and sketch was almost always (99.54 percent of the time) rated as better aligned with the original sketch. It was often (66.3 percent of the time) more aligned with the text prompt too. This demonstrates that Make-A-Scene generations are indeed faithful to a person’s vision communicated via the sketch.

“Content-Aware Fill… cubed”: DALL•E inpainting is nuts

The technology’s ability not only to synthesize new content, but to match it to context, blows my mind. Check out this thread showing the results of filling in the gap in a simple cat drawing via various prompts. Some of my favorites are below:

Also, look at what it can build out around just a small sample image plus a text prompt (a chef in a sushi restaurant); just look at it!