The next Photoshop update will bring a feature I'm genuinely excited to use
I'm at the Adobe Max London conference, and I've also shared with you the big changes to Photoshop announced today. But that's not all I have to share.
After the main keynote, Adobe evangelist Terry Waite came back on stage for 'Sneaks', a popular segment in which the software giant teases stuff they're currently working on. And there was one that really got the audience's attention.
People Distractions is a forthcoming Photoshop feature that's tailormade for those situations when you're at a tourist site, you want to shoot an amazing building, but there are other people all over the place ruining your photo.
Sometimes if you're patient enough, you can just line up your shot, wait for long enough and eventually you'll get a clear view. Other times, you think: 'No chance' and either resolve to come back at five in the morning or just not even bother.
A third option is to just take the shot, bring it up in Photoshop later and painstakingly edit out all the errant humans. But if there's a lot of them, that can be quite a longwinded and painful process. So the new feature cuts out all that effort, and lets you do it with one click.
Terry demoed this privately to me last night, and then again this morning on stage, using a photo of Rome's Colosseum that was littered with tourists. And it really is simple: you just click a single checkbox, and then the generative fill engine in Photoshop does the heavy lifting of removing the people and refilling the scene. It's worth noting that if there are specific people you want to keep, you can easily deselect them.
Once you click on Remove, Photoshop then gives you three possible people-free images to choose from. In the results we were shown, you really couldn't see the join in any of them; but the software also gives you the choice to zoom in and examine the image close up to make sure.
