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Adobe. Generative Expand. It’s now official: Adobe Firefly, the AI generation technology that’s making its way into Photoshop and other Adobe products, added Generative Expand, a way to synthetically expand an image, following similar offerings from DALL-E, Midjourney and Stability AI (called Outpainting, Panoramic Images and Uncropping respectively).
Adobe. Existential crisis. But in the meantime, some of Adobe’s employees are expressing concern that Firefly will kill their customers’ jobs. One Adobe employee cites a billboard and advertising business that has already made the move to reduce the size of their creative team because of how effective Firefly’s integration into Photoshop has become — and Firefly is still in beta.
The situation has gotten to the point that some Adobe employees are experiencing an “existential crisis” and are calling it “depressing” in an internal Slack channel seen by Insider.
We’re certainly witnessing a major disruption and it’s hard to predict how things will pan out. But there are other less gloomy predictions as well: “AI isn't going to replace your job – but someone using AI will.” And this is what Google Bard thinks of the matter.
International Photographic Council (IPC). Luncheon & awards. IPC, a non-governmental organization of the United Nations that I’ve recently joined as an advisory board member, will have its annual luncheon on October 18 in New York City when its Hall of Fame Award will be presented to Neal Manowitz, President and COO of Sony Electronics North America, honoring his contributions to the field of photography and leadership within the industry.
The IPC will also recognize several talented professional photographers with the IPC Professional Photography Achievement Award. More info about the event here.
Why is it often still a headache to connect your digital camera to your smartphone so that you could upload your photos to the cloud? This great article answers the question. (It’s also a topic I covered several times quite a few years ago and incorrectly assumed it would have been resolved by now).
Camera vendors get the bulk of the blame (they’re not software developers after all, and some still see the smartphone as their natural enemy), but it’s also the main phone operating system vendors who make things difficult: Apple and Google.
Still … things are getting slowly better.
And there are more alternative camera-to-cloud solutions emerging as well (stay tuned for the Show & Tell demo of Snapify at Visual 1st, whose recently announced instant sharing workflow solution includes a 5G cellular device to seamlessly upload photos to the cloud).
Canon. OMG: $25K. Want to take pictures with subjects miles away, even at night? Save up! Canon’s $25K interchangeable lens camera will ship in September. Concerned about atmospheric turbulence that could mess up your photos of faraway subjects? The Canon MS-500 will ship with Cannon’s CrispImg2 Custom Picture preset mode, which optimizes resolution and contrast while suppressing image noise.
Stability AI. Stable Diffusion XL 1.0. Stability AI launches Stable Diffusion XL 1.0, the company’s “most advanced” text-to-image model released to date. Available in open source on GitHub in addition to Stability’s API and consumer apps, ClipDrop and DreamStudio, Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 delivers “more vibrant” and “accurate” colors and better contrast, shadows and lighting compared to its predecessor, Stability claims. It supports inpainting, outpainting and “image-to-image” prompts.
Snap. Wall Street ain’t happy. Shares tumbled more than 17% when Snap announced its quarterly earnings last week. While tech companies riding the generative AI wave (Microsoft, Adobe, Alphabet and NVIDIA to name a few juggernauts) reported rosy quarterly numbers, Snap’s financial performance keeps disappointing Wall Street, no matter their steady active user growth.
Is it time to take Snap private so that the company can freely focus on long term growth? Or is it just a matter of focusing on the light at the end of the ad market slump tunnel that seems to be in sight?
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