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ZDNET Highlights
- Photoshop can produce details that the camera never captured.
- Dynamically rotate object pairs with Harmonize.
- Good results still require Photoshop skills, judgment, and cleanup.
Adobe is moving forward with AI-enabled Photoshop features. Last time, I had a lot of fun with Photoshop’s Harmonize feature, which automatically adjusts the colors, lights, and shadows of an object to match a background. This time, it’s the Rotate Object feature, which rotates a 2D object in 3D space.
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You’ll have to see it in action to see what this new piece of magic can do, especially in combination with Harmonize.
Update your Photoshop
This new feature is available in Photoshop v27.6. If you don’t have that version, use the Creative Cloud app to update your version.
rotate object interface
Photoshop has always had the ability to rotate, but it also allows you to rotate an object in 2D space around a point. This new Rotate Object interface lets you rotate an object in three dimensions and generate the part of the image you can’t see.
Rotate Object is a menu command under the Edit menu. It is also available on the contextual menu bar.
There are four main controls, as shown above. You can rotate an object around the
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The AI will generate the missing parts of the item. This ability is nice, but keep in mind that the AI doesn’t know what everything looks like. It would be nice if Adobe allowed you to seed the rotation with multiple views of the object, but for now, the AI guesses what to render.
When you select a rotated object, AI renders a low-resolution view of what that object looks like. Then, once you’ve made all your changes, it clears the image.
let’s take it for a spin
For our first compositing example, I wanted to show the combination of rotation and cohesion. I dug through my archives until I found an old photo of a MacBook Pro. I chose this image because of the ultra-warm lighting, which displays harmonizing changes. Next to the original Mac image, you can see a set of AirPods Max. This image is particularly interesting because it’s a nice image and quite different from the hot laptop image.
Plus, you can see how the headphones were rotated to show the sides and bottom of the box, which you can’t see in the original image. One criticism: AI added the flashing circle, which isn’t present on actual headphones. That said, the harmony of 3D rotation and lighting makes the combination look quite realistic.
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You can get rid of that fake ring of hallucination light using Photoshop’s Rubber Stamp tool or Generative Fill, so it’s not a deal breaker.
Keep in mind that Photoshop is a tool that expects certain skills from you. Although this will handle the heavy lifting of creating a rotated image, it expects you to understand how much to rotate, how to size the composite image, and where to place it. I am no expert in these techniques, and my overall image reflects this. Still, it is close enough for government business.
back in time
For my next move, I’m going to take my mid-2010s Dodge Challenger and put it in early 1990s San Francisco. This task requires rotating, scaling, and some other old school Photoshop techniques.
As you can see, this output was not just a flip horizontal action. The entire vehicle was rotated, and the AI generated another part of the car. It also generated appropriate shadows, which were modified from the origin at the front of the vehicle to the sides of the car.
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I gave the Dodge 2-pixel motion blur because the original image was taken from an old film camera, and the other cars were in motion a bit (this was San Francisco, so bumper-to-bumper is much more common than driving on the border). I also added 5% noise to the digital image of the red car to compensate for the film grain in the rest of the photo.
suffocated
Although I still have 3,620 of the 4,000 generative credits left, I had to stop working on this article because Adobe cut me off. You can see the number of images I have created today by scanning the article up to this point.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think those are a lot of images. And when doing production Photoshop work, it’s a pretty strict cut-off. If my deadline was approaching, I would have been angry that I was cut off, even though I only completed about 10% of my credits.
It’s also 11:30 pm on the West Coast, so it’s not like it’s prime time for all businesses and professionals using Photoshop’s AI. It’s unlikely that I was cut off because their servers ran out of capacity, although I guess anything is possible.
Here we go again
It’s now the next afternoon, and Photoshop is once again allowing me to use the Rotate Object and Harmonize tools.
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This time, I started with a photo of a local car wash. Don’t ask me why I have a picture like that. Anyway, the advantage of a smartphone is that you always have a camera in your pocket. I decided to combine it with an image of the off-brand Teemu LEGO WALL-E I made a few years ago.
As you can see, the WALL-E image is a front corner shot. The AI has no reference to what the robot looks like from behind. But the version it produces isn’t bad, except for the eyes behind WALL-E’s “head”. By combining rotation with Harmonize, it’s almost as if there are robots in the scene.
Next, I took the front-quarter view and turned it into a side view of what I think is a mid-1930s Ford pickup and a barn here in Oregon.
Note the afternoon shadow in front of the barn. That shadow shows that the Sun is very high in the sky. On the original pickup image, the light is behind the vehicle, casting shadows in front. But once combined, rotated and harmonized, the shadow is now mostly under the truck.
the one that didn’t work at all
I wanted to conclude by showing you an image that I was having some difficulty with. I have a photo of a Dreo air fryer, and another photo of a hotel suite mini-kitchen. I tried moving the air fryer to place it next to the sink.
Although I managed to get the rotation to work mostly, I couldn’t get the perspective right. There is a Photoshop tool called Perspective Warp that should help with this task, but I couldn’t do it to my satisfaction.
On the other hand, when I placed the air fryer on the counter on the bottom right, I was able to rotate it. Then I used Perspective Warp to give the device the proper size. And then I applied Harmonize to help blend it.
Unfortunately, air fryers have very reflective surfaces. I tried using generative fill to fix the extra reflectivity, but either the AI isn’t up to the task, or my skills aren’t up to the task.
Do you rely on AI to generate missing details overall, or would you like to fix those areas manually? Let us know in the comments below.
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