Sneak peek: Adobe’s Project Stardust
Adobe has posted a sneak peek video for Project Stardust, an experimental object-based image-editing engine that will “revolutionize the way we interact with Adobe products”.
The AI-based system lets users “edit photos as if they were real”, simply clicking on objects in an image, then dragging them around, deleting or replacing them.
The sneak peek is literally a sneak of sneak, since the firm will reveal more details at Sneaks, its preview of upcoming technologies, at this week’s Adobe MAX 2023 conference.
Combines AI features for object selection, deletion and replacement
Project Stardust combines a number of AI features, including object identification, auto-masking, color correction and generative synthesis of new content,
The demo shows a user selecting objects within an image by clicking on them, with Project Stardust automatically identifying the boundaries of the object and masking it.
The user can then reposition the object simply by dragging it around; delete it, with Project Stardust automatically synthesising the missing background; or replace it, by entering a text prompt describing a new object to insert in its place.
Similar to the new AI-based features in recent releases of Photoshop
A lot of this functionality will be familiar to Photoshop users, who already have access to AI-based object selection and object deletion – and, as of Photoshop 25.0, new text-to-image capabilities based on Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI toolset.
However, there are some interesting new options, like a ‘Remove distractors’ command, shown automatically identifying and removing background characters from a shot.
So which Adobe applications will Project Stardust be used in, and when?
Adobe hasn’t said which applications the new image-editing engine is designed for, but the format of the video suggests that it is intended for mobile apps.
There are also currently no details on when the technology is likely to be publicly available in Adobe software. We’ll update this story if we get any more information.
Read an overview of Project Stardust on the Adobe Labs website
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