Masking a photograph’s background or other subjects in it is a common practice for many Photoshop users. The magic wand tool on the app allows you to do all this. In recent years, many Photoshop users have really mastered the art of masking and have become very good at it. But there’s a problem. The whole process is very tedious.
However, this could change soon. Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, is looking to introduce a new feature that utilizes artificial intelligence to automatically mask subjects in an image. The feature will also be able to automatically identify the subjects that need to be masked. The tool will be available in the Photoshop software and will use Adobe’s AI platform called Sensei.
The company has decided to call the new feature “Select Subject.” Using it will actually be very easy. The first thing you should do is to head to the “Select and Mask” menu. Once you are there, click anywhere on the photo. The new “Select Subject” tool will automatically select all subjects in the image and mask them. You will also get additional tools that can be used to edit or change the background of the subject.
Adobe has not released the feature yet. However, we have already seen a video teaser from the company. The Photoshop developer says that the next iteration of Photoshop will integrate the new feature. But the exact timeline for full rollout is still unknown. Reports are indicating that the Select Subject tool is a little bit complicated. There are a few problems that need to be solved and ironed out before it becomes available.
A number of key issues have been identified. For example, some reports say that the tool is having a lot of trouble identifying fine details in an image. The machine learning algorithm will need more data to solve this issue and it could take a lot of time.
Nonetheless, once the tool rolls out it will definitely be a big plus for Photoshop users. There is no doubt that Adobe Photoshop is the biggest photo editing software in the market at the moment. In the recent years, Adobe has added newer technologies and tools to the software in a bid to improve user experience, and things have worked out well so far.
However, integrating AI is a whole different thing. AI will significantly change how people use and interact with Photoshop, especially when they are masking images. But AI has its challenges too. Getting it to work as expected takes time and even though Adobe is confident that the majority of the work is already done, the feature is not ready yet.
Many Photoshop users are hoping that these final details will be taken care of as soon as possible. Adobe also confirmed that once the feature is ready for launch, everyone will be notified through media channels. The company will probably begin with beta testing by targeting a small subset of users before making it fully available for every Photoshop user.
