Photoshop Serves Up Sensei AI Features Including Neural Filters And Sky Replacement

At its annual MAX event today, Adobe announced that Photoshop is getting a slate of new features centered around Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence. Chief among these new features are Photoshop's Neural Filters, which were crafted with help from NVIDIA and allow you change a picture's look – sometimes dramatically – with just a few clicks or by using a series of sliders.

Adobe says these Neural Filters can be applied non-destructively, so users can experiment with them without degrading the quality of the original image. Essentially, it sounds like Adobe intends these filters to offer up quick and easy edits at the cost of some precision. "The filters in this workspace will speed parts of your workflow, but they might not produce the result you need every time," Adobe wrote in its announcement

They sound like pretty powerful tools as well, as there are Neural Filters that can change the direction your subject is looking or even change their expression. The first two featured filters will be Skin Smoothing and Style Transfer, with six beta filters that will allow you to change the lighting in your image, colorize a black and white image, or even remove JPEG artifacts. Neural Filters will also be open source, so in addition to the filters created by Adobe, you'll be able to use filters created by other Photoshop users too.

Adobe is also using artificial intelligence to power a new feature called Sky Replacement. The feature does just what it says on the tin, using Sensei to tell the difference between the foreground and background in an image and allowing users to replace the sky. Adobe says that Sensei can even "harmonize the foreground of your image with the sky," changing the color temperature of the foreground image to match that of the sky you select. There are 25 different skies that Adobe is shipping along with this update, but users also have the option of using pictures of skies they've snapped themselves.

Newcomers to the world of Photoshop might benefit from the app's new Discovery panel, which features in-app tutorials and uses Sensei to provide recommendations based on the work you're doing. "These recommendations include tips and tutorials on how to get multi-step workflows done faster, and we have also packaged top workflows into automated one-click Quick Actions that help you remove and blur backgrounds, make a black and white background, or enhance an image."

Beyond these new features, Adobe has also rolled out a large number of features that are more narrowly focused, including a new pattern preview, and some ease-of-use improvements to Photoshop's shape tools. Photoshop users on iPad can even livestream with Adobe Behance from the export menu, which will not only show other users your project, but also use your iPad's front camera to show them video of you and allow them to chat with you. You can read more about all of the new features coming to Photoshop over on Adobe's blog.