Reality or Fantasy?
As an investor, wanting your memories captured to look back on, which do you prefer, reality or fantasy?
Reality
Fantasy
Obviously, photographers do some form of manipulation/editing to try and present the cleanest image possible. The big twist here is that the “Fantasy” image is filled with artificial intelligence, or “Generative Fill” in Photoshop.
Before Generative Fill, the only way to achieve similar results to the “Fantasy” photo would be through Content Aware Fill.
Content Aware Fill, as defined by Adobe, “seamlessly fills a selected portion of an image with similar image content from surrounding parts of the photo.”
Essentially, even though there’s manipulation, parts of the image using Content Aware Fill were still made up of pieces from the actual photo to fill in the gaps.
With Generative Fill, Adobe has given photographers the ability “to add and remove content from images using simple text prompts powered by Adobe Firefly generative AI.”
Basically taking the original photo as a reference and creating new imagery using data from licensed content found in Adobe Stock.
The background shrubbery, parts of the palm tree, and bits of the ocean are NOT from the original photo. It’s entirely new and attempts to resemble the reference photo.
Take a look below at how advanced the Generative Fill technology is compared to using Content Aware Fill to attempt the same result…
Generative Fill
(aka Fantasy)
Content Aware Fill attempt
As you can see, Content Aware Fill struggles with a large selection (the golf cart from the original photo). Before Generative Fill, Content Aware Fill was great for small to medium sized objects in photos, but a significant amount of the work would be spent on cloning, layering, blurring, and making other micro adjustments to come close to what the generative fill image looks like here.
With this new technology, the biggest limit seems to be the photo quality and megapixel count. If you have a RAW photo that can handle all the edits, Generative AI can fill in the gaps and reduce the edit time by more than half.
The only question remains…
As an investor wanting the best possible photo, is this how you want it? Do you care if A.I. is used to achieve what you want or do you prefer the traditional Photoshop methods?