Adobe just released a short sneak peek video demonstrating an upcoming feature of Photoshop CC which is called Select Subject and uses artificial intelligence to select a subject with a single click.
Selecting is one of the most common aspects of using Photoshop and there are several ways of selecting subjects – most of them are based on contrast or simply manual work. With this new tool which Adobe is still working on at the moment, we see a completely new way to make selections in Photoshop based on artificial intelligence.
The general idea is pretty simple – Adobe used a huge database of images to train its neural network to be able to recognize different subjects (humans, animals and potentially even some objects although at the moment we are not really sure about that part and we will have to see when Adobe will release this feature). All the user needs to do is pick the “select subject tool” and click on a subject and the software will select it automatically.
How good is the selection? well according to the video (and Adobe admits it but you can also see it if you look carefully at this video – for example the hair on the lady on the right 1:28), the selection is pretty basic and more complex things will need to be manually addressed or be improved using existing Photoshop tools.
What is nice is that this feature will be included as part of the select and mask menu so that you can choose your subject, mask and then improve the masking from the same interface.
If we had to guess we would say that this tool will continue to evolve after it’s release and maybe in a few years time it will be good enough to make most of the selections completely automatically by just clicking on a subject – truly amazing times ahead.
We are hoping that this feature should find its way to the next version of Photoshop CC and we can’t wait to try it ourselves.
You can find many more Photoshop videos on LensVid’s Photoshop section.