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Following yesterday’s news of major updates to its suite of Lightroom software, Adobe has also announced a new neural filter for Adobe Photoshop. The new AI-powered filter, Photo Restoration, is designed to automatically remove scratches, marks, dust and other imperfections from old photos and make them look smooth and clean.
Adobe released a video showing the new Photo Restoration Neural Filter in action, which you can check out below.
There are different ways to combine the new filter with other AI-powered technology in Photoshop, including using Content-Aware Fill to fill in areas of an image that are missing or too damaged to repair. Plus, a previous Neural Filter, Colorize, uses AI to convert a black and white image into a full-color photo.
Using Photoshop, you can repair an old black and white image and then colorize it in just a couple of clicks. Simplicity is one of the key features of Photoshop’s Neural Filters. There are currently three categories of Neural Filters: Featured, Beta and Wait List. The Featured category are fully-released, tested filters that pass muster with Adobe. These include Skin Smoothing, Super Zoom, JPEG Artifacts Removal, Colorize and Style Transfer. The second group, Beta, are filters available for anyone to test, but Adobe doesn’t guarantee high-quality output. This section is where Photo Restoration will appear when it’s available. Smart Portrait, Harmonization, Landscape Mixer, Depth Blur, Color Transfer and Makeup Transfer are currently in beta testing.
However, in the video above, which shows a beta version of Photoshop, it appears that there’ll be a bit of a change in how Neural Filters are presented, with filters being categorized more by what they do. There will be five categories: Faces, Creative, Color, Photography and Restoration. The Photo Restoration filter will be here, along with JPEG Artifacts Removal and Noise reduction. The lattermost filter is currently in the ‘Wait List’ group on Photoshop, meaning it’s not even available to beta test. It’s not immediately evident if this new Neural Filters organization structure will be available in a public release of Photoshop anytime soon.
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In the video, we also see that the Photo Restoration Neural Filter includes two sliders, one for ‘Photo enhancement’ and another for ‘Scratch reduction.’ Each slider can be disabled entirely. There’s also a drop-down menu for ‘Adjustments,’ but we don’t see what it contains.
The new Photo Restoration Neural Filter is like many previous Neural Filters in that it’s designed to use AI to reduce various pain points in manual photo editing workflows. You can manually repair old images using different Photoshop tools like repair brushes and clone stamps to carefully remove scratches, spots, dust and creases in old images. You can then manually adjust color and even colorize an old photo yourself. However, this process, while impressive and skilled, can take a very long time.
Author:
Jeremy Gray
Source: Dpreview
