Photoshop, Premiere Pro And Other Adobe Programs Get More AI Smarts – Forbes

(Adobe Max image courtesy of Adobe)

Adobe ADBE is weaving its artificial intelligence capabilities into even more of its biggest creative applications, including Premiere Pro and Photoshop, it announced today. The company also launched an iPad version of its Illustrator vector-drawing program, and an iPhone version of its Fresco drawing software.

Those were just some of the many product announcements from the software giant, all timed to the start of its three-day Adobe MAX creativity conference this morning.

Thanks to the pandemic, the conference is virtual only, and free. Max features dozens of panels on using Adobe software, as well as appearances by creative notables such as photographer Annie Leibowitz, film directors Ava DuVernay and Taika Waititi, actors Zendaya and David Tennant, talk-show host Conan OBrien, writer Roxane Gaye and electronic musician Marshmello.

The biggest news, though, may be the ways Adobes AI and machine learning tools, which it calls Sensei, are being woven even more deeply into its programs, typically to simplify or speed complex, often repetitive parts of the business of creating images.

The company calls Photoshop, its flagship image-editing program, the worlds most advanced AI application for creatives as it released new versions for desktop computers and Apples iPad.

Our goal is to systematically replace time-intensive steps with smart, automated technology wherever possible, the company said in a blog post. With the addition of these five major new breakthroughs, you can free yourself from the mundane, non-creative tasks and focus on what matters most your creativity.

Photoshop gets five major new AI features, including Sky Replacement, with 25 replacement sky presets, and two Refine Edge Selections, to simplify the painstaking process of selecting hair and complex objects.

Adobe touted another new AI-based function, Neural Filters, as a reimagining of the ways Photoshop uses filters and image-manipulation tools. Neural Filters ships with a large group of new, non-destructive filters to modify images, though Adobe cautioned that many are still in beta stage, and will need further refinement.

The Neural Filters dashboard suggests groups of actions, such as Skin Smoothing or Smart Portrait, to improve an image with a single click or manipulation of a slider. Smart Portrait can tweak details such as where a subject is gazing, or the tilt of their head.

A new Sensei-based Discover panel adds better context-aware search, help and other tools and tips to help creators work faster within the program, which has long been known for both its power and brain-melting complexity.

Elsewhere, the Roto Brush 2 tool uses Sensei to greatly simplify the time-consuming task of rotoscoping. It smartly automates much of the process of closely outlining a moving figure in video, extracting the movement from the rest of the video and dropping it into another one. Roto Brush is in both the film-editing app Premiere Pro and the 3D and visual-effects tool After Effects.

Premiere Pro also gets a Sensei-based automated captioning tool that captures speech in a video scene, converts it to text, then uses machine learning to properly place the text in cadence with the speech on screen. The launch version works with 11 languages and multiple speakers. The company is also taking applications from people who want to beta test the new Captions Track, which allows a creator to modify the look, color, font, placement and other aspects of captions on screen.

Another app, Character Animator, is also adding AI smarts, with speech-aware animation and more accurate lip synching to allow creators to essentially puppeteer and capture a digital image so that its mouth and body parts move in concert with the live humans movements and speech.

The ability to capture arm movements, through what was previously called Arm IK, now extends to other body parts, such as knees, in Limb IK.

Other announcements on the day include:

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Photoshop, Premiere Pro And Other Adobe Programs Get More AI Smarts - Forbes