Web AI Image Editor Lets You Quickly Retouch Photos With Just Text
By Mikelle Leow, 08 Feb 2023
The time has come. Instead of sitting through hours of Adobe Photoshop tutorials to figure out how to remove background subjects or erase reflections, you can just tell artificial intelligence to do it. With your words.
A new feature on web image generator Playground AI lets you instantly edit photos without navigating the usual imaging tools. It works similarly to software like DALL-E and Midjourney; only this time, you upload a picture and include text instructions, like “add sunglasses” or “add a mustache.”
The novel photo editor is also capable of making multiple tweaks at once—understanding phrases like “with a mustache and in a red shirt”—and masking and removing objects.
There are even parameters to adjust the level of detail or “instruction strength” of the revised image. The greater the values, the more time the AI will take to tweak a photo—though it will still perform its magic in mere seconds.
Introducing AI-first image editing to Playground—a way to instruct an AI to synthesize spectacular yet subtle edits
— Playground AI (@playground_ai) January 24, 2023
Try it here: https://t.co/pRmwNfsfzg
Example: "Make it a ferrari" pic.twitter.com/9Lq3Aqn9AM
Playground AI is free to use, with some limitations. It can edit up to 1,000 images per day. However, the results for the basic tier are low-res. Software developer Jim Clyde Monge says he received a 448 x 512-resolution PNG file in about 10 seconds.
With a Pro subscription, Playground AI offers higher-quality and more immediate generations, as well as support for more images. It also grants you a commercial license to sell or distribute your edits.
That’s not to say Playground AI will replace your go-to pro editor soon, as its results can still be pretty rudimentary. Powered by Stable Diffusion, it is still laced with bias. For example, when DesignTAXI got the AI to give its male model ice cream, it regenerated the subject as a woman. In a pink shirt, no less.
Regardless, one can foresee Adobe eventually jumping on the bandwagon with text-to-image edits to streamline the retouching process completely, if only to introduce it as a nice-to-have feature.
I've been playing with the @playground_ai beta and it is POWERFUL.
— Alex Valaitis (@alex_valaitis) January 24, 2023
Here are my 7 favorite #AI photoshop examples:
1) "Make hair darker" pic.twitter.com/5QD3uVssQ4
3) "Make photo black & white" pic.twitter.com/W38lDz2tTD
— Alex Valaitis (@alex_valaitis) January 24, 2023
[via Jim Clyde Monge / Medium and Playground AI, images via various sources]