Adobe AI Flawlessly Pastes Photos Into Backgrounds With Lighting & Shadows

Can’t leave your desk and jet-set off to a faraway land just yet? One day, perhaps, you may be able to live vicariously through cleverly photoshopped landscapes with just a few clicks.

At Adobe MAX 2022, research engineer Zhifei Zhang presented an experimental feature dubbed ‘Project Clever Composites’ that lets you paste images into backdrops and seamlessly blend them in in a jiffy. You probably already know how to do this manually—image compositions, after all, are some of the first things you learn when working on Photoshop. Project Clever Composites, however, eliminates all the steps in between.

The entire process is automated, including assessing an object’s color, tone, and scale, and then figuring out where to place it. Irrelevant parts around that object are instantly cut out, and the AI even looks at the image’s context to give the object the right lighting and shadows.

All you have to do is drag and drop the object of your choice—doesn’t matter if it has a backdrop that’s difficult to remove.

At the creativity conference, Zhang used a built-in search engine to find a suitable car, which he then dropped into a scene. The composited object started out small, but it quickly adapted to its new environment.

“And it’s done, in just seconds!” the researcher exclaimed.

Project Clever Composites is part of Adobe’s 2022 Sneaks, a series of state-of-the-art features-in-testing that may or may not be brought into future software updates. It’s too early to know if this one-click wonder will fully take shape; it now remains a proof of concept of Adobe’s evolving AI technology.

You can watch Project Clever Composites, along with other Adobe Sneaks, at work below.

[via Adobe and TechCrunch, cover image courtesy of Adobe]