Event Coverage

Adobe Sneak Peeks That Will Blow Your Mind

By Alvin Soon - 8 May 2013

Adobe Sneak Peeks That Will Blow Your Mind

Every year at the Adobe Max conference, Adobe shows off its experimental technologies in a special sneaks peeks session. These are features in development which may or may not make it to an Adobe app one day, although the amazing Camera Shake Reduction tool first shown in the Adobe Max 2011 Sneaks session is now making its debut in the new Photoshop CC this june.

This year, Adobe demoed 12 features in the works. We honestly don't understand all of them, seeing that some features have to do with coding and web development, but these are the ones which blew our minds. Videos from the event will be coming from Adobe soon, but you can whet your appetite first with these pictures.

Remember, these are features still in the works and may or may not eventually come to market!

Camera Shake Reduction in Mobile

There's a reason why Camera Shake Reduction is only available on desktop right now; it's computationally intensive and our mobile devices just can't handle it. But with the processing power of the Creative Cloud, you could send the task to Adobe's servers which will do the job for you. The demo even included multiple versions of the fix (why not, since you have so many servers anyway) for you to pick your favorite. Adobe says choosing a best pick wil also help them sharpen the shake reduction algorithm.

Changing the Lighting of a Photograph

Adobe also showed off a way to change the lighting of a photograph after it had already been taken. Using the sample image (the smaller one), the Adobe engineer was able to shift the colors and lighting of the main photograph to follow the sample, to make it look like it had been taken at the same time of day. Don't ask us how they achieved this sorcery.

The technique doesn't just apply to still images, Adobe also showed how they could pull a color grade from Michael Bay's Transformers movie and apply it to a home video, and even make the French movie Amelie look like a Michael Bay production.

Quick Painting in Seconds

This sneak peek showed a tool which lets you spot reference a photo and 'paint' a 'painting' in just mere seconds. We mean it literally, the two 'paintings' above were drawn out in mere seconds.

Liquid Search by Images

This experimental search tool lets you search by images. But unlike Google's search tool, with Adobe's you can manipulate the reference image to search via visuals. The demo started off with a black dress, which the Adobe rep then warped to make it slim-fit - viola, the search results also changed to slim-fit dresses. He then colored the black dress red, which then changed the search results to red dresses.

More amazingly, he then searched for shoes. The first result was a track shoe, which he pulled and pushed to sort of resemble the shape of a silhouette. The software miraculously recognized the shape and returned results for high-heeled shoes.

Edit Audio Like Photoshop Layers

This new feature lets you visually paint on audio tracks to separate selections into different layers. The demo used this feature to quickly eliminate a background ringing sound from a spoken audio track, and to separate the guitar sound from a singing voice.

New Perspective Warp

A Perspective Warp tool in the works lets you warp certain parts of the image while leaving the rest intact. By laying down the image planes via points, you can then warp the image in various ways. In the example above, the second-layer bus was clearly taken from a different perspective than the base layer environment. Using the Perspective Warp tool, the Adobe rep could quickly redefine the bus' perspective in a matter of seconds to match the perspective lines of the background. The tool is akin to using a 3D mesh to manipulate a mapped surface (maybe that's how it works) but all the end-user has to do is lay down image planes and move pins.

Mind blown yet? Remember we said there were 12 sneak peeks demoed? Read about them all at Adobe's official announcement.

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