Photoshop's New AI Editing Tools Can Be Used for Good, Too

Artificial intelligence (AI) photo tech doesn't have to be used for copyright-violating, social-fabric-tearing purposes. It's actually pretty great at pepping up your pics. 

Photoshop's new Generative Expand tool uses AI to un-crop a photo, which is exactly the kind of handy tool that AI is good at, and that would be impossible without it. And Photoshop—along with a host of other retouching apps—can also remove unwanted objects, quieten distracting backgrounds, and otherwise do in seconds what used to take a human hours to achieve. The same underlying tech is also responsible for unrealistic beauty filters that destroy our self-esteem, but does that mean we can't also have nice things? 

"Cameras are still at a disadvantage to our eyes, especially in low light situations. The file lacks the vibrant color and contrast until post-processing has been done. With AI retouching, we're able to expedite the process, see various options within Photoshop, and make more confident edits. These are edits that may have been made prior to AI technology anyway," professional photographer Clark Stinson told Lifewire via email.

AI Photo Editing Tools Are Just Tools

It has become painfully obvious in recent years that a photograph is not a slice of reality. Deep fakes and beauty filters are the biggest examples, but the reality (or lack of) can be a lot more subtle. Photojournalists might not be allowed to retouch their photos, but they can choose what to include and exclude just by pointing the camera in a different direction. 

In 1986, the Guardian newspaper ran a TV ad. It showed a skinhead (then-shorthand for a fascist thug) running towards an older man in a city street and apparently trying to steal his briefcase. Then, we saw the scene from another angle. In this wider shot, we saw a stack of bricks falling from the scaffold above, and the skinhead was actually rescuing the old man, shoving him to safety. This film showed two things: one, that UK ads used to be amazing, and two, you don't need Photoshop to lie with a photo. 

"Even in the journalism context, It’s generally accepted that color correction is fair in photo editing (according to Getty Images), but we see photos of politicians where definition is increased to make them look older or orange saturation is increased to make their skin tone look strange," says Stinson. 

But this darker side of photo—and audience—manipulation is just one aspect. AI tools are just another photo-editing tool, one which makes our snapshots better and which we cannot avoid even if we want to. 

Easy AI Photo Fix

"If I have a photo that I love and it's a full-frame photo with ideal composition, I can't post it to Instagram, for example, without significantly changing the photo either through a major crop or cutting off content. The composition is completely changed," says Stinson. "With Generative AI, I can take the photo and widen it and work with the new composition to come up with something that I am satisfied with for social media." 

If your primary camera is a smartphone, then pretty much every photo you take is already retouched. The iPhone uses machine-learning (aka AI) algorithms to grab several exposures and meld them together, increasing low-light details, rescuing overexposed skies, even avoiding blinking eyes, or detecting smiles. And that's exactly what most of us want: effortless point-and-shoot pictures that turn out great almost every time. 

And it's not just snapshots that benefit from AI tools like color replacement and background removal. It can reduce professional busywork too.

"One of the most useful abilities that AI offers for image editing is background removal. This is useful for when you want to do things like remove a background from a portrait and put the person on a pure white background," professional photographer Brandon Ballweg told Lifewire via email. "Same thing goes for product photography—oftentimes, you want to isolate the product and put it on different backgrounds. It can be a really time-consuming process cutting objects out manually, especially when the person or object isn't clearly defined. AI can do this quickly and easily, speeding up your workflow."

If you are a wedding photographer, you'll spend a lot of your time cleaning up those photos, removing dust, whitening smiles and eyes, and easing away wrinkles. Why waste the time, or pay an assistant to waste their time, when you could just let AI do it for you? It's not very different from applying a color filter you designed yourself, and nobody complains about that unless they don't like the colors you picked anyway.

AI in photography has plenty of problems, some huge and likely insurmountable with current laws and big-tech attitudes, but it is also pretty great at making your everyday snaps look better. Plus, it's not going anywhere, so we'd better get used to it.