Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen
https://www.creativebloq.com/design/adobes-new-image-rotation-tool-is-one-of-the-most-impressive-ai-concepts-weve-seenRather than what many BigTech companies are currently doing: "Wall Street says we need to 'Use AI Somehow'. Let's invest in AI and Find Things To Do with AI. Later, we'll worry about somehow matching these things with user needs."
This is a testable claim: where were Adobe in previous hype cycles? Googles "Adobe Blockchain"...looks like they were all about blockchains in 2018 [0], then NFTs and "more sustainable blockchains" in 2022 [1].
[0] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2018/09/27/blockchain-and-...
[1] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/adobe-moves-to-sustainable-bl...
Which I'm reading as "Demo-ready, but far from production-ready."
Somewhat relevant: my experience with Photoshop's Generative Fill has been underwhelming. Sometimes it's wrong, often it's comically wrong. I haven't had many easy wins with it.
IMO this is a company that doodles with code for its own entertainment, not a company that innovates robust and highly useful production-ready features for the benefit of users.
So we'll see if Mr Spinny Dragon makes it to production, and is as useful as billed in the demo.
The gist is that once a company has a captive audience with no alternatives, investors come first. Flashy (no pun intended :-p), cool features to impress investors become more important than the everyday user experience—and this feature does look super cool!
--
Still, when I first heard of Adobe Firefly, my initial reaction was “smart business move, by exclusively using images they have the rights to”. Now seeing Turntable my reaction is “interesting tool which could be truly useful to many illustrators”.
Adobe can be a bad and opportunistic company in general but still do genuinely interesting things. As much as they deserve the criticism, the way in which they’re using AI does seem to be thought out and meant to address real user needs while minimising harm to artists.¹ I see Apple’s approach with Apple Intelligence a bit in the same vein, starting with the user experience and working backwards to the technology, as it should be.²
Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.
¹ Which I don’t believe for a second is out of the goodness of their hearts, it just makes business sense.
² However, in that case the results seem to be subpar and I don’t think I’d use it even if I could.
All of this is orthogonal to Adobe's business practices. You should expect them to operate the way they do given their market share and the limited number of alternatives. I personally have almost moved completely to Affinity products, but I expect that Adobe should be better placed to execute products and for Affinity to be playing catchup to some extent.
Cool features that excite users (and that they ultimately end of using), and that get investors excited.
(i.e. Adobe mentioned in the day 1 keynote that Generative Fill, released last year and powered by Adobe Firefly is not one of the top 5 used features in Photoshop).
The features we make, and how we use gen ai is based on a lot of discussions and back and forth with the community (both public and private)
I guess Adobe could make features that look cool, but no one wants to use, but that doesn't seem to really make any sense.
(I work for Adobe)
I mean, is there any Photoshop feature that’s come to dominate people’s workflows so quickly?
People (e.g. photographers) who use Photoshop “in anger” for professional use-cases, and who already know how to fix a flaw in an image region without generative fill, aren’t necessarily going to adopt it right out of the gate. They’re going to tinker with it a bit, but time-box that tinkering, otherwise sticking with what they can guarantee from experience will get a “satisfactory” result, even if it takes longer and might not have as high a ceiling for how perfectly the image is altered.
And that’d just people who repair flaws in images. Which I’m guessing aren’t even the majority of Photoshop users. Is the clone brush even in the top 5 Photoshop features by usage?
So instead of the old workflow:
"visit HR page" → "click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"
it's now:
"visit HR page" → "do AI search for the same link which is suggested as the first option" → "wait 10-60 seconds for it to finally return something" → "click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"
Sounds like engagement hacking?
What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"? You figure out the 10 that users find really valuable, another 10 that will be super-valuable with improvement, and eventually drop the other 80.
Especially when if Microsoft tries something and Google doesn't, that suddenly gives Microsoft a huge lead in a particular product, and Google is left behind because they didn't experiment enough. Because you're right -- Google investors wouldn't like that, and would be totally justified.
The fact is, it's often hard to tell which features users will find valuable in advance. And when being 6 or 12 months late to the party can be the difference between your product maintaining its competitive lead vs. going the way of WordPerfect or Lotus 123 -- then the smart, rational, strategic thing to do is to build as many features as possible around the technology, and then see what works.
I would suggest that if Adobe is being slower with rolling out AI features, it might be more because of their extreme monopoly position in a lot of their products, thanks to the stickiness of their file formats. That they simply don't need to compete as much, which is bad.
For users? Almost everything is wrong with that.
There are no users looking for wild churn in their user interface, no users crossing their fingers that the feature that stuck for them gets pruned because it didn't hit adoption targets overall, no users hoping for popups and nags interrupting their workflow to promote some new garbage that was rushed out and barely considered.
Users want to know what their tool does, learn how to use it, and get back to their own business. They can welcome compelling new features, of course, but they generally want them to be introduced in a coherent way, they want to be able to rely on the feature being there for as long as their own use of those features persists, and they want to be able to step into and explore these new features on their own pace and without disturbance to their practiced workflow.
And I haven't seen any "wild churn" at all -- like I said in another comment, a few informative popups and a magic wand icon in a toolbar? It's not exactly high on the list of disruptions. I can still continue to use my software the exact same way I have been -- it's not replacing workflows.
But it's way worse if the product you rely on gets discontinued.
Even the biggest tech companies have limited engineering bandwidth to allocate to projects. What's wrong with those 100 experiments is the opportunity cost: they suck all the oxygen out of the room and could be shifting the company's focus away from fixing real user problems. There are many other problems that don't require AI to solve, and companies are starving these problems in favor of AI experiments.
It would be better to sort each potential project by ROI, or customer need, or profit, or some other meaningful metric, and do the highest ranked ones. Instead, we're sorting first by "does it use AI" and focusing on those.
If you look at all the recent Google Docs features rolled out, only a small minority are AI-related:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...
There are a few relating to Gemini in additional languages and supporting additional document types, but the vast majority is non-AI.
Seems like the companies are presumably sorting on ROI just fine. But, of course, AI is expected to have a large return, so it's in there too.
Each of our decisions to buy or not buy a product, to use or not use a feature, influences the future design of our products.
And thank goodness, because that's the process by which products improve. It's capitalism at work.
Mature technologies don't need as much experimentation because they're mature. But whenever you get new technologies, yes all these new applications battle each other out in the market in a kind of survival-of-the-fittest. If you want to call consumers "lab rats", I guess that's your choice.
But the point is -- yes, it's not only OK -- it's something to be celebrated!
It's not "force-feeding". You usually get a little popup highlighting the new feature that you close and never see again.
It's not that hard to ignore a new "magic wand" button in the toolbar or something.
I personally hardly use any of the features, but neither do I feel "force-fed" in the slightest. Aside from the introductory popups (which are interesting), they don't get in my way at all.
"But Google does it. If we do it, we will be like Google".
Were you in my meeting about 40 minutes ago? Because that's almost exactly what was said.
If the big tech companies wanted to be really evil, they could invent a nonsense tech that doesn't work, then watch as all the small upstart competitors bankrupt themselves to replicate it.
The latter one is what overwhelmingly more companies (not only BigTech, not at all!) adopted nowadays.
And Boeing. ;)
"If I asked people what they wanted they would've said faster horses," or whatever Henry Ford is falsely accused of saying.
Also I am sure Adobe is doing both. They released an OpenAI competitor recently
Also, Lightroom is one of the worst camera tools out there. It's only known because ADOBE...
With bitmaps you get a blob of pixels but vectors you can be edited and refined much easier.
It makes me miss Apple’s old keynote style that they’ve abandoned in favor of the bland, sanitized, over-polished and pre-recorded video keynotes.
I’m honestly over so much of the corporate cynicism and Blind-indification that’s turned what was once a necessary precautionary stance to this demonization or ridicule of people who happen to love their work and where they do it.
This session is "Sneaks" which is held every year, and has a fun, casual atmosphere. i.e. it has a theme, has a celebrity co-host, lots of jokes, food and drink served, etc...
Its basically a bunch of people who are creative, and are having fun nerding out on the tech...
Its a lot of fun.
(I work for Adobe)
As an aside, I hate that people like yourself describe fans of anything they don’t personally understand as cults. It’s an antagonistic framing of a question designed to remove any good faith discussion.
There are conferences for Adobe customers to teach them how to use Adobe tools. I think there was recently an Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles. It could have been filed there.
You have to read some of the YouTube comments to understand that some of those hoots and claps could be for real.
My wife's an artist and says they had a shitty version of this but this is crazy.
But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation.
There’s always been a significant gap in capabilities once you looked past the surface.
I find this sentiment is common among FOSS advocates who don’t actually professionally use those tools.
I am definitely an advocate for free tools closing that gap, but I both design content professionally and contribute to OSS projects to close that gap. So I feel quite confident in saying that gap has always been large when compared to the Adobe suite.
Most of the ai image generation stuff I've seen from adobe feels late to party in terms of what you can do with open source tools. Where they do compete however is with tight integration, and I guess that's what matters the most to users in the end.
There are plugins for gimp that let you do image generation, inpainting and other things.
As far as what the post shows, it looks very much like current models that generate novel viewpoints of an object, but for illustrations. It might be doable to fine tune this for illustrations and simply vectorise the new viewpoint again. Though this will destroy any structure previously held in the object.
All I'm saying is that we have the tech to do even more than what adobe is doing, we just haven't put it nicely together yet.
So I would love if GIMP started shipping these awesome plugins by default to pick up the pace!
That, by itself, would be a complete deal breaker for professional work.
There's plenty more deal breakers remaining.
I think they can afford the ML based content generation costs without increasing prices.
This is a common pattern across many fields. The truly top-end companies are always running ahead of open source.
But that doesn't mean it's a permanent situation. It just means you're looking at it from a point in time where the commercials got there, and open source hasn't yet. Open source will get there, and then Adobe will be ahead on something else.
I've played a bit with "comfyui" over the past few days, a bizarre name for an AI image generation power tool. (And other things, but I have no experience there to know how good it is at those.) It drips with power. The open source world is not generally behind on raw capability. As is often the case, open source's deficiency for generative fill for instance is that A: it offers too much control, too many knobs (e.g., "which of several dozen models would you like to start with?"), and while that's awesome if you know what you're doing, it is not yet at the "circle this and click 'remove'" yet, and B: the motivation and firepower to integrate this all into a slick package is not there. I can definitely do an AI generative fill with open source software, but I'll be exporting an image into comfyui, either building my own generative fill program or grabbing some rando's program online who may or may not be using compatible models or require me to install additional bespoke functionality into comfyui, doing my work, and re-exporting it. The job is done, but it's much more complicated, and most people don't care about the other extra capabilities this workflow yields so for them it's just cost.
It's a very normal pattern in the open source world. Nothing about the current situation particularly gives me cause to worry specially about it.
To be concrete, here's a YouTube video that's to the more advanced side of what you can do in the open source world, which is probably still ultimately simplistic compared to what some people do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc That entire series is worth a look, and there's more it doesn't cover. You can get incredible control over these tools in the open source world, but it involves listening to some guy on YouTube trying to explain why you might to sometimes use a thing called "dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu"... not exactly normie-friendly.
Ex - I can absolutely get exactly this same rotation feature using open toolchains, they just haven't been nicely consolidated into a pretty package yet.
So to recreate the same thing adobe is doing here I currently have to:
1. Use the 3d-pack in comfy-ui to get stack orbit camera poses for my char (see: https://github.com/MrForExample/ComfyUI-3D-Pack scroll down to stack orbit in the readme)
2. Import those images back into the open source tool manually.
Is it as convenient? Nope - it requires a lot more setup and knowledge.
Is it hard to imagine this getting implemented in open source? Also nope. It's going to happen, it just won't be quite as quick.
The only people who would actually equate them are people not professionally using these tools everyday.
Even paid apps like affinity designer are a fraction of the functionality of Illustrator.
Again, a great product but people are just dead wrong if they compare them as an absolute.
To a Linux user, yes. To a professional, it was always a cruel joke, it was never close, even a few years ago. It's like saying Notepad++ is a functional IDE, or Kdenlive is a functional replacement for DaVinci Resolve.
I cannot stress this enough: Actual professionals do not think GIMP is a viable replacement, in any way, and never have.
Some would say that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable aren't really competitive yet because they haven't had enough investment. If we invested in them enough, and managed them well, they could be like Blender.
GIMP has been in development since 1995. Photopea was initially released in 2013, has been solely developed by one person, and is a far-and-away better Photoshop competitor. The projects themselves are mismanaged. GIMP should (frankly) be abandoned and completely reset, in my opinion, as being a failed attempt at salvaging old code forever. Wisdom is knowing when to keep pushing - and when to give up.
I don't know why it was embedded with the controls hidden.
They could be using transformers, sure. But plenty of transformers-based models are not LLMs.
Still not enough to make me pay for Adobe Creative Suite (I just dabble these days), but the target demographic will be all over it.
This makes me irrationally happy.
But this... this is really fuckin cool
They were double charging me for photoshop for two years. I caught them and it took 60 minutes on the phone to get them to do something about it.
They have an entire cancellation department. (!)
There might actually be a similar open source model already.
But I think to create it you would build it from a database of 3d assets that you could render from many angles. Probably quite similar to the way the 2d to 3d works. I don't know maybe the typical 2d to 3d models will work out of the box or with some kind of smoothing or parameterization. Maybe if you have a large database of parameterized 3d models then you combine that with rendering in 2d from different angles then you can basically use the existing 2d to 3d model.
Well, I confess I got a little bit confused here :/ . What's the purpose then for such an innovative solution if not commercialized?!
Great demo. This will really help animators and artists.
None of these new AI features will work on a pirated copy because it's all server-side processing.
https://www.adobe.com/max/2024/sessions/project-turntable-gs...
https://lookingglassfactory.com/looking-glass-go-spatial-pho...
which needs multiple views of your image from different angle and tries to make it up with AI.
Edit/ apparently I misunderstood it's only possible with vectors - getting close though to the reality mentioned!
I'm better off now, but I have a long memory and prefer to vote with my wallet by paying multiples to any competitor...which generally speaking is better for me and everybody else, since competition is the mother of innovation.
Apropo, Marmoset Toolbag 5 is out; it comes with a permanent license, it has a huge materials library, and the interface is very snappy and it doesn't feel like it has been programmed using Electron. You don't need to pay for Substance Painter this year.
Ah, and Adobe's latest exploit was a confusing TOS that more or less stated they would use your work that you edited locally with their software to train their AI models. I think they walked that one back when the wave of outrage hit them.
This looks like the perfect tech for a cel shaded game!
https://www.adobe.com/max/2024/sessions/project-turntable-gs...
Animators are even more out of a job I guess, but really have been for quite some time I think, almost no animation is entirely hand-drawn anymore.
- flintknapping
- the distaff activities: carding, spinning, weaving, etc.
- "teamster" as a very highly skilled occupation
EDIT: compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD2ua6q8FFA&t=475s with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjZX6L5cnUg&t=11s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM
It may not be AI, but this single video blew my mind back in *2013* and I find myself thinking about it often.
Perhaps you mean it doesn't use some of the techniques driving the current AI boom, like LLMs or diffusion models.
A version of this was available in Photoshop for a long time, but I think the feature was deprecated and removed completely this year. I had used it for a few things here and there, but dedicated 3D tools were much better if you were working in that space.
I personally started programming, in part, to make simple animations like the ones you see in Scratch, and it’s incredible how accessible the tools are today for anyone looking to bring their ideas to life.
This demo shows generating a 3D model from a simple 2D shape. It'll fall flat on its face trying to 3D model anything non-trivial which begs the question - who cares?
Also, you'll want to animate the 3D model - which this doesn't do, so you'll soon be back to your usual 3D toolkit anyway.
You start with 2D vector graphics that is significantly easier to create.
(I say "implied" because that's all they're showing in the video presentation, there may be additional setup involved that they're skipping. This is inside Illustrator though, which has a long history of 3d extensions being very awkwardly shoved into a corner of its toolset.)