In a recent live broadcast,
I showed some uses of artificial intelligence in Photoshop
that are more about being incredibly helpful than creative,
because that's exactly how I see the future of AI
being something that is a huge help in performing
difficult, challenging and time consuming tasks,
which ultimately will leave us with more time to be creative.
One example of what I covered was this Here we have an old portrait
that I took when I was a little too generous with the lighting and so blew out
detail on this side here to the point that no slider is going to bring it back.
To fix this I could maybe clone hair from the other side
or even mask in some other hair.
But here's how AI can really help us out.
First of all, I'm going to use a brush and quick
mask to make a selection of this area.
So I'll double click on the quick Mask icon in the toolbar.
This brings up the quick Mask options, which by default are set to masked areas.
This means that when we use it, the areas we brush over are not selected.
Now I only want to select a small area, so I'm going to change this
to the opposite and set it to selected areas.
So where I brush is what is selected.
Then I'll grab a normal round brush
and make sure that it's more soft than hard.
Now, ordinarily, when making
selections, white is what is selected and black is what isn't selected.
But I have changed the quick mask settings to the opposite way round.
So now to make a selection, I need to use the opposite
color to white, which is black.
Then with the quick mask active, I brush over the area I want to select
and that is represented by this red overlay.
When I'm done, I press Q to come out of Quick Mask
so that we now have an active selection.
And when we do, I can then simply click on Generative Fill
and without typing anything in the text field, I'll just click on Generate
and then give the AI a few seconds to do what it needs to do.
And there you go, some great results.
I think my favorite is the second one.
Another example I showed was this photograph of a lion
in its enclosure at a wildlife park where we can still see the metal fencing,
even though this was taken with a wide aperture.
But check this out.
The new remove tool, which uses AI is pretty damn good
at fixing this and really quickly.
I'll use it on a blank layer and making sure that in the options bar
the top of the screen, the sample all layers checkbox is ticked
and I'll use the remove after each stroke option.
Then all I do is keep brushing over areas and then letting go
and you can see that very quickly it does a really good job.
Now, years ago, when I originally took this photograph, I then went on
to do a cut out and composite of this Lion in a completely different scene.
But getting a good selection and cut out of his mane was quite
a challenge, as you can see here with how it looks when I zoom in.
Now, we could, of course, use brushes and all manner of techniques to fix this,
but again, AI here is super useful.
I'll add a new layer beneath the lion cutout
and fill it with gray so that we just have something behind it.
Then I'll use the same brush and quick mask
as before and brush to select this area just here.
Then I'll come out of the quick mask.
Click on Generative Fill and then generate.
And there you go.
Yet again, some great results that definitely look
better than my original attempt.
But what I also showed in that live broadcast is
where AI can’t be used or rather shouldn't be used,
and I'm not talking about some camera club that views AI as the devil's offspring.
I'm talking about something like this.
This portrait of a family dog.
Now, this was actually taken a few years ago by my friend Brian Dukes,
and he very kindly sent it over to me as an example of something back
then that was quite challenging for him to select and cut out.
Now even though if I use the same technique that I did
with the lion's mane using the AI, it'll do a great job.
But it also won't because what it's created is nothing like the original fur.
You see, this is a family pet,
and those family members know everything about that dog,
especially that it has these cute little sticky up bits on top of its head.
If we use AI on this to fake a great selection and cut out
those cute little sticky up bits, either won't be there or won't look the same.
So this shows that AI in this case isn't suitable but as will always be the case,
the final look saying what looks right or wrong is down to us the uses.
The creatives.
So to do this we'd be looking at a manual cut out and trying out some little tricks
to make the selection and cut out look better for example,
now I won't select all of the dog, I'll just do its head to show you what I mean.
I'll first of all use the quick selection tool to make a selection of the head.
Then I'll hold
down the option key on Mac or Alt key on Windows to remove the selection from areas
where we can see the original background through the dog's fur.
Once that's done,
I'll then go to select and mask
I'll click on the Refine hair button at the top
and then use the smart Radius slider to see if I can pick up
any more of that fine fur around the outside of the dog's head.
I'll just drag it over to the right just a little bit.
Then I'll just lower the transparency of this onion
skinning just to see what else there is that I need to pick up.
And I think I'll try the Refine edge brush tool
and using this, I'll just drag around the outside of the dog's head again
to see if I can pick up on any more of that fine fur.
Alright, so now we'll go to the black and white view
and this here shows how much of that fine fur I've now managed to select.
I'll, output this with a layer mask
and then when back in Photoshop add a layer beneath
and fill that with gray just like before.
Now to pick up on all these hairs here,
which don't look so good at the minute, there are many things that we could do.
The first way I'll show is just by using a layer style
So we'll use the inner glow layer style.
The great thing here is
we can then click on the color picker and sample the color of the dog's fur
so that that becomes the color of the inner glow.
We can then, of course, just play around with the sliders in here
to get the best looking result.
And that doesn't look too bad.
Something else
we could do is just add a layer above, then add a clipping mask
and just get a brush
and sample the color of the dog's fur and then just carefully
brush it on to the hair that we need to make it look better.
Just carefully brushing that on makes
a huge, huge difference.
Now I love this
AI stuff and I can't wait to see how it develops.
But the conversation in last week's Live was a really interesting
one involving camera clubs and AI, and that was motivated by an email
I had through.
I've added a link in the description to it so you can see the email at the start.
And if you get the time, I'd love to know your take on A.I.
and camera club rules by adding a comment.
For now though, that's all for this video, expect to remind you
that free pass is for the Photoshop Virtual Summit number 5 are now available
20 instructors over 30 hours of content and all for free.
The link to grab your free pass before the cutoff date is in the description.
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