Fri, Nov 22, 10:54 AM CST

Strawberry Letter - The New Photoshop Beta

Jun 08, 2023 at 07:00 pm by warlord720

The new Photoshop Beta, Strawberry Letter, is a groundbreaking Beta release in that a very powerful tool, Generative AI Inpainting to alter images has been released to Creative Cloud users that want to download the beta for testing. The beta is a separate application from the latest release of Photoshop, therefore, requiring additional installation.

A disclaimer from Adobe:

The Photoshop (beta) app is available to all Creative Cloud members with a subscription or trial that includes Photoshop. Generative Fill is currently not available for commercial use, not available to people under 18, not available in China, and works with English-only text prompts.

With almost 30 million subscribers, Adobe Creative Cloud is positioning Adobe to be a growing force in the future of AI-Generated or inpainting altered images. It is also trumpeting its Ethical AI approach as its AI is trained on Adobe Stock images which they have the right to use in such a manner. This does not encroach upon other artwork nor, from my testing, does it allow the use of individual styles such as adding an artist’s name in the prompt. There also seem to be a lot of ways to violate the terms of use as I have found out in generating test images. Words such as smoke and Dali (Salvador Dali) are not allowed and are removed from the prompt before it generates. To my knowledge, there is no way to know when you are violating such terms until you do so, and it pops up a warning. This warning has a link that takes you to a very ambiguous page of legalese that mentions little in the way of specific words or phrases.

Strawberry Letter Beta with the Contextual Toolbar under Shark that was added with Generative Fill along with other undersea items.
This was annoying to a large degree as I wanted to show a simple scene of alien spacecraft setting a city afire but not in a realistic style. Got the warning for smoke through the process of elimination. Hard to set up a battle scene without fire and smoke either terrestrial or in space. This shows that, at least for now, Photoshop skills will still be needed to create the items the AI won’t.

From the Adobe Blog some of the new features in Photoshop:

Adjustment Presets
Adjustment Presets are filters that speed up complex tasks by enabling you to preview and change the appearance of images in just a few steps to achieve a distinctive look and feel, instantly.

Remove Tool
The Remove Tool is an AI-powered feature that enables you to replace an unwanted object by simply brushing over it, preserving the integrity of nearby objects and providing an uninterrupted transition on complex and varied backgrounds.

Contextual Task Bar
The Contextual Task Bar is an on-screen menu that recommends the most relevant next steps in several key workflows, reducing the number of clicks required to complete a project, and making the most common actions more easily accessible.
 
Gradients Update
The feature enables you to create gradients in just a few steps and now includes new on-canvas controls which help you have precise controls over many aspects of the gradient in real time. A live preview that’s created automatically shows you instantly how the changes you make affect your image.

One downside to this beta is you can select a blank canvas with the Rectangular Marquee Tool and use Generative Fill without getting an Adobe watermark on the initial image as the generative inpainting was the original image in this case. 

Online Firefly injects metadata to tag the image as AI-Generated plus the watermark before download, but the above method does not openly appear to do the same thing as there is no download occurring. Using the old File Info method shows no metadata to tag the image as AI. Not sure where this happens in the process but the “right-click file properties Details tab” loses reference to it being AI-Generated. 

Hopefully, this will all get worked out with an adequate AI tagging system one day. Just don’t hold your breath. It might be a while.

The beta was worth the download for me and should be for most Renderosity members that are also subscribed to Abode Creative Cloud. According to Adobe, the beta is available to anyone whose subscription or trial gives them the use of Photoshop. Might as well stay ahead of the curve and check out the new features. The Remove Tool alone can save a ton of work and not the fun kind of work either.
M.D. McCallum, aka WarLord, is an international award-winning commercial graphics artist, 3D animator, published author, project director, and webmaster with a freelance career that spans over 20 years.  Now retired, M.D. is currently working part-time on writing and select character development projects. You can learn more about MD on his website. 
Tags: Adobe Photoshop Digital photo editing
Sections: Industry News

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