Adobe Max is one of the largest conferences in the creative industry, bringing together developers, graphic designers, and business leaders to learn about the latest technological advances in the industry. These include sneaks, experimental projects by Adobe engineers that, over time, often end up being integrated into the company's official products.
But in this year's edition, the conference hosted the presentation of a particularly interesting 'sneak': a feature called 'About Face', capable of detecting (through machine learning) if the face of a picture has been manipulated in some way through graphic editing. In other words, the creators of Adobe Photoshop now let us know when a face has been 'photoshopped'.
All you need to do is apply 'About Face' to the image, and the tool will estimate the odds of that manipulation, a process that is very easy to do today thanks to multiple kinds of software. 'About Face' is not just about the face as a whole (as a facial identification algorithm could do) but about each pixel, providing a heat map of areas of the image that are likely to be altered.
The increasing number of fakes and deepfakes, especially as a means of disseminating hoaxes through social media, and the influence this is having on the reputation of those affected, as well as on public debate, is encouraging large companies to invest in new technologies capable of automating the detection of this kind of manipulation.
In the case of deepfakes it is more complicated because the technology evolves rapidly, but with traditional fakes, which are often the product of the use of Photoshop, tools such as 'About Face' can be remarkably useful.
Other AI applications presented in Adobe Max
But Adobe Max 2019 has also made it possible to release other sneaks based on the use of artificial intelligence.
All In: Have you ever had the problem of wanting to take a group photo without being forced to stay out of it? Well, this tool allows just that: take a photo in which you don't appear and add yourself from another photo taken in the same area, without noticing the photoshopping.
Sound Seek/Awesome Audio: Do you have audio clips where you just say "aahhh", "Uhm" and repetitive sounds like that? The 'Sound Seek' tool also uses machine learning to delete them with a single click. If the problem is environmental noises or the presence of echoes, 'Awesome Audio' will take care of cleaning the fragment to obtain a professional sound.
