Adobe Photoshop is a ridiculously powerful GIF maker/photo editor, if you have a thousand hours to invest in online tutorials. While Photoshop professionals might not like it, Adobe obviously wants to make Photoshop as noob-friendly as possible — and that doesn’t just mean more magic Auto-Fill features.
Adobe Research’s newest project is a voice-based digital assistant that will automatically complete photo editing tasks for you. The appeal is obvious: rather than having to understand the difference between Magic Wand and Quick Select, you just tell Photoshop you’d like your teeth to become whiter, and it happens.
The demo shows the voice assistant performing basic tasks like cropping and rotating on an iPad. Simple tasks like that are the most obvious and easy application for this tech, which means that desktop Photoshop’s million menus aren’t going anywhere fast.
But it’s also a good look at where Photoshop is going next. For years, Adobe’s biggest improvements in Photoshop have been in computer algorithms that can automate tasks. Things like Auto-Fill and Auto-Move have replaced a lot of the clone stamping and selection tools of old Photoshopping. But that’s all automating tools; what Adobe is hinting at here is automating the entire process.
