Have you ever prepped a photo for printing but regretted not being more generous with your framing when snapping the image? Extending the borders of a photo before digital editing was all but impossible, and it still represents a time-consuming challenge for even Photoshop masters, but a new tool teased by Adobe on Wednesday could make it impossibly easy to “uncrop” a photograph.
Adobe Max, the company’s annual “creativity conference” where it brings artists together to talk about how they use Adobe’s tools, is wrapping up today. The company also uses the conference as an opportunity to reveal new features coming to its various apps, like Photoshop’s ability to now delete an ex from a photo with just a single click, and provide sneak peeks of even more advanced tools that could one day end up a part of the Creative Cloud collection.
The Adobe Max ‘Sneaks’ event showcases some of the innovative research the company’s developers have been working on over the past year, while a big-name celebrity oohs and aahs at the various on-stage demonstrations for an hour and a half. This year Qing Liu revealed a new tool in development called Project All of Me that heavily relies on AI to automatically rebuild missing parts of a photo, allowing an image to be uncropped, and extended on any side, with next to no effort from a user.
The tool first analyses an image and generates a layout map, which in the demonstration was a photo of a person, cropped at the knees, standing in front of a grassy field which was automatically broken down into its various components including their clothing, their hair, their face, and a bag they were holding. The photo’s framing was extended in all directions, and by using the layout map, the AI was able to not only intelligently fill in the background, but recreate the subject’s legs and feet, and a section of footpath they may or may not have been standing on when the photo was initially taken.
Liu then goes on to use Project All of Me to automatically remove the subject’s bag, recreating the parts of their body it was blocking, extend the length of the dress they’re wearing, and even change the colour and pattern of the dress’ fabric: a task that Photoshop is very much capable of accomplishing, but not with just a single click as demonstrated here.
There’s no word on if or when Project All of Me will make it into future versions of Lightroom or Photoshop, but many of those apps’ most powerful AI-powered tools started life as research demonstrations like this one, and an easy uncropping tool would, without a doubt, be a compelling addition to either app’s feature set.