Hey y'all ! Hope you've had a super week! Mine? Not too bad. This week I want to talk about Photoshop and the New  Generative Fill AI
that the Beta version has in it.  There has been an uproar on the internet on how this is going to change photography. And maybe it will. From the beginning of photography photographs have been altered. Whether is was dodging and burning in the darkroom like Ansil Adams was famous for or in the digital age of many photo manipulations. Photography is around us in everything we do from print in Magazines and Newspapers to online.  Almost every photo that you have ever seen has been manipulated in some sort. Beautiful women have been photographed and made even more beautiful by removing a blemish or smoothing out the skin to where people don't even look like people anymore.  The art of making someone loose weight just by the movement of a brush stroke has been with us awhile. Even the artful painters of years gone by used their judgment on how the subject they were painting looked. So why all the uproar of the new AI? All this has done is taken the people with the skill needed to do the manipulation out of the job. 

Since layering came out in Photoshop you could do what the new AI is doing. It was just harder. You had to have skill to do it. Now it's just easier. Just like when the healing brush and content aware fill came out it was like magic. Or when sky replacement came out. These things were going to change photography. And they did . They just made it easier. Will it change photography as we know it? It's hard to tell. But in my opinion it will just make it easier for the everyday man to do the job instead of a specialist. You will be able to add things to the photo just by typing "add hat" or " sunglasses" but you could do those things before but it did take a while. You had to go out to the internet and find those things in a photo cut them out add them to your photo make it look real by dodging and burning to make the light look right . Sound familiar ? Kind of what Ansil Adams was doing in the early 20th century. We've always had the way to do it. The new AI just makes it easier. I think its just a progression in what skill is needed. Let's use an analogy to kind of explain what I'm talking about.

When man used to roam the earth looking for food he walked and carried everything. Then the wheel was invented and they figured out how to use a cart to put things in. Then they figured they could put an animal on that cart to pull it. Then they figured out how to make a horseless carriage with a motor. But you had to be skilled to drive it. Changing gears and all. Then they came out with Automatic transmission and everyone could drive it putting chauffeurs out of business. Now they have gotten rid of the gasoline motor and have an electric motor car that can drive itself. Almost. But it will be coming . It's evolution . You either except it or not. The same is with the new AI in photoshop. You can do it the hard way like all the composite's that I've put in this blog or you do it the easy way with the new AI. Eventually it will be the new AI. Its evolution just like taking photo's with your phone. Who would have thought that that was ever going to happen. But its really made a whole type of camera (point and shoot) disappear .  Only very few even exist and they are specialized camera's that are very expensive for what they are when you can just carry your phone with you.

The moral view. A lot of AI has come out where it does all of the thinking and grabbing info from all of the internet causing copyright issues/concerns. There is even a statement with all of the smart people in the world that AI (not photoshop AI) will be the new doom and gloom event that will end the world with machines taking over the world. But I think that's a little on the far end of the spectrum of things. With the new AI in Photoshop they have taken the high road only sampling photo's from what is in Adobe Stock photos. I think eventually they will pay the contributors to Adobe Stock if their photo is used. It may be only a fraction of a penny but it will be something. I think that in the future there will be a credit type of system for using the AI. With the new AI it is using the internet to go to a server in Adobe and all of that cost money so I'm sure there will be in the future a credit. If your a subscriber maybe you get so many credits a month for free and have to pay for extra. But either way its good that Adobe is trying to take the high road in this. And of course you must be connected to the internet and I am assuming that you should have a fairly fast computer to run this new feature.

If you think about what the new AI really is. A new way of doing something that we could already do but easier its like going from stick shift to automatic in cars. It could bring out artist that were out there that didn't have technical skills needed to do the same thing in photoshop. Maybe the next Ansil Adams is just around the corner and will use AI instead of a dark room and dodging and burning.  Anyway those are my thoughts on the subject. The according to Max side of things. Until next week please get out and shoot!