Adobe releases new AI features to Photoshop CC: improved masking, depth blur, and more

In addition to making Photoshop and Illustrator available on the web, Adobe has introduced a bunch of other new features to its apps. The trend of relying on artificial intelligence continues, so Photoshop is now getting even more advanced Object Selection, new neural filters, artificial depth blur, and plenty more. So without further ado, let’s right into it.

Improved Object Selection and masking

Adobe released an AI-powered Object Selection tool back in 2019. It’s now been improved, especially when you have multiple objects in the scene. First of all, the tool has been improved to be more accurate. If you’ve used it so far, you know that you have to click and drag over the object for Photoshop to select it. Now you can just hover over the object you want to select, and a single click will select it. As before, if you want to add another object, hold Shift and click on it; or Alt/Option and click to remove it. Note that the old click-and-drag method still works as well – in case this one doesn’t do a trick.

Rather than selecting objects one by one, you can now do it for all of them at once. The new tool, Mask All Objects, will help you with that. Choose Layer > Mask All Objects and Photoshop will generate masks for all the objects detected within your layer.

Neural filters

It seems like Adobe is getting more and more into AI-powered tools, probably to compete with other image editors in the market (hi, Luminar AI and Neo). Therefore, there are now some new Neural Filters within Photoshop, too (all in beta for now):

• Landscape Mixer: this tool allows you to create entirely new scenes by combining any two landscape images together. Basically, it uses AI to turn your summer scene into a winter one or alter your noon photo to look as if it was taken during the golden hour. If you have people or other subjects in your scene, those can be automatically masked and harmonized with the new scene you create. In my experience, these edits usually look unrealistic, but we’ll see how close Adobe will come to making them appear natural.
• Color Transfer: Basically, this tool takes the color palette of one image and lets you apply it to a different one. This can be done manually, but the new tool should save you quite a lot of time.
• Harmonization: this tool is intended mainly for composite artists, and it’s basically color-matching. Once again, this is something that’s possible to do manually, but Adobe wants to make it simpler and faster.

Some existing Neural Filters have been improved in the latest update:

• Depth Blur: as the name suggests, this filter applies blurred background and keeps the subject more in focus. In an attempt to make it more realistic, Adobe now lets you add grain to the blur.
• Superzoom Filter: Now Superzoom operates on the entire image. Output as a new document and the zoomed results will apply everywhere, not just to the zoomed area in the preview window.
• Style Transfer Filter: this filter takes a style of a painting or a different photo and applies it to your image. Adobe says that it has retrained the AI to apply a more painterly, artistic effect. Models were trained based on the works of masters like Van Gogh, Picasso, and others to be more specific to their styles.
• Colorize Filter: finally, the Colorize Filter has been updated to add more natural colors to your images.

Seamless Photoshop to Illustrator transition

Here’s one novelty that illustrators among you will love. If you want to copy your work from Illustrator to Photoshop, from now on, you’ll be able to retain all the layers. When copying objects from Illustrator and pasting them into Photoshop, each object will be in its own layer, mostly editable, and retain as many properties as possible. This makes it a lot easier to shift between the apps and this is one of the features that I believe is extremely useful.

Other improvements

There are plenty more improvements coming with the latest Photoshop update, but I chose the ones that seemed most useful and interesting. In addition, Photoshop will now let you share your work with clients and colleagues for commenting, adding pins, and annotations. This will also be available in Photoshop for the web I wrote about today, and it will be linked to Photoshop on your desktop or iPad.

Export As, rendering, and language support for Type layers have been improved, as well as Dodge and Burn, Smart Objects, and some filters. As I said, there have been plenty of improvements, and you can read about each and every one of them in great detail on Adobe’s blog.