10 Ways AI Transformed My Photoshop Techniques!

What is the first thing you do when you have a simple question? Google, right? You don't get ready, drive 20 minutes to a library, search books for hours just to figure out whether you can eat Mentos right after drinking cocoa. Does that make libraries useless? Absolutely not. But it goes on to show that if you're someone who makes the most of technology that is available today, you already have an edge over the people who don't. And today I'm going to share with you 10 ways AI has realistically transformed my Photoshop workflow so that you don't miss out on the good stuff. So without any further ado, let's get started. Automatic selections have improved unbelievably well. Let's say you wanted to select this bicycle. Earlier, this would literally take a day. With the Pen tool, you would go around selecting each and every spoke. This would take ages to do. But right now, all you have to do is to turn on Cloud Select Subject. And no, this won't cost you any generative credits. So let's select any of these three tools, Quick Selection, Object Selection or the Magic Wand. And at the top, you'll see Select Subject. In the latest version of Photoshop Beta, all you need to do is to click on the drop down arrow, you want to make sure Cloud is selected, and then click on Select Subject. This will take a while longer than regular Select Subject, but definitely quicker than a day of doing it by hand. Oh my gosh, that was quick. I didn't speed anything up. And have a look at the selection. That is crazy. Now you can choose to create a mask out of this. And just have a look. This is something you can right away use. It might not be absolute perfect like the Pen tool, but this, my friend, is an incredible starting point. If you hold the Alt key or the Option key and click on the mask, just have a look at the details. And again, it won't be as perfect as manually doing it. But how many seconds did it take? To make sure it is always set to Cloud for better results, simply go to Photoshop Beta, Settings. In Windows, it would be under Edit, Preferences, and then Image Processing. Change this setting to Cloud and hit OK. Just to be sure, restart Photoshop and it should be fine. Now, before we move forward, I often get asked, what is the background music you're playing? What is that music playing in your outro or intro? For the last 500 videos here at PiXimperfect, I've been using Epidemic Sound, the world's best soundtracking platform and the sponsor of today's video. Say you found a track you love, but your video is only 32 seconds. Just click on Create Versions, type in the exact length and boom, you get a version of the same track perfectly timed for your edit. Now, let's say you want a similar vibe for your favorite song, just paste the Spotify link and Epidemic Sound suggests you tracks with the same energy. And even then, if you cannot decide what fits your video, just drag and drop your clip and the Sound Match feature analyzes it and suggests matching tracks instantly. Every track comes with stems. You can isolate vocals, remove drums, just play the melody. You have complete control to shape the sound the way you want. There are massive library of over 50,000 music tracks and 200,000 sound effects is completely restriction free, which means you can download as many as you want, experiment and use as many as you want without having to worry about copyright strikes or takedowns. I've teamed up with Epidemic Sound to bring you something special. Check the link and codes in the description to get a 30 day free trial and then 50% off for the next two months after the free trial. The offer is only valid for a very limited time, so I recommend that you at least try it. Now let's get back to the video. Let's say you want to select the sky for adjusting it, modifying it or changing it. Earlier, I would use something like the Quick Selection tool, and it does a fairly okay job. But as soon as you zoom in, you'll notice that there are some discrepancies. But these days with AI, you don't have to do any of that. There are two tools that you can use, the Object Selection or the Sky Menu. The first one is, let's select the Object Selection tool. And if you have Object Finder turned on at the top by clicking on the gear icon, make sure Object Finder is turned on, it will automatically detect objects across the image. And as you hover over, it tells you. So let's click here, it automatically selects the sky. And when you do zoom in, have a look, this is pretty good. It's better than before. Alternatively, there's one more way. Now you just have to go to Select because we are making a selection and then Sky. Done. This is also pretty good. I would say, yeah, about the same as the Object Selection tool. Now once you have a you can do whatever you want with it. Let's create a Curves Adjustment Layer by clicking on the Adjustment Layer icon, pick Curves, and then maybe you want to darken the sky like so. But that doesn't mean that the old methods are worthless. In this case, if you tried Select Sky, it tries to do a pretty good job. But then when you create a mask, have a look at the mask, it is not as good. What are all these dark areas around the trees? We didn't want that. So let's go back to how it was. In this case, we will use Channels instead. Let's go to Channels. Since the sky is blue, it makes the distinction very easy. Let's look at the Red Channel, Green Channel and Blue Channel and just have a look. This is so good to work with. Let's make a copy of this, drag it and drop it right there. In this copy, Ctrl or Command L and then make the darks very, very dark, make the bright areas very, very bright, like so. Hit OK once you're satisfied. Hold Ctrl or Command and click on the thumbnail of this layer. Let's get back to RGB, get back to Layers and now we have a pretty amazing selection. If you were to create a Curves Adjustment Layer or anything, a Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer, just have a look at the mask right here. This is so darn good. It has everything to the very last detail. The point is, we should never forget the traditional methods. We should never stop learning those fundamental concepts because at the end of the day when nothing works, when all of the fancy AI high tech features stop working, it is those foundational methods that's really going to save your rear. Let's talk about removing things and we have done major, major advancements here. Let's say you wanted to remove this particular window, but you cannot just do it with the Clone Stamp Tool. If you select that, try to sample this area, try to do this, the perspective would be broken no matter what you do. So, in cases like this, you have to create a brand new layer, go to Filter, Vanishing Point and create one perspective. Let's create a surface of the window, like so. I'm doing a very shabby job here and extend this plane, like so. Fantastic. Now you can adjust it to be more accurate, like I have done. And now you can use the Clone Stamp Tool inside of this, right here. Select that, hold the Alt key or the Option key, click to take a sample. You want to make sure everything is properly aligned and then start painting. And it is a tedious job, but also something you can fall back on. These days, all you have to do is to select the Remove Tool here, Mode Auto is fine, you want to make sure Sample All Layers is checked and then just loop around this window. And as you can see, this is perfectly done. As soon as you zoom in, there are not many issues and we can actually go with it. You already know this, the Remove Tool can do a bunch of magical stuff like removing distracting people by going to Find Distractions, People, it automatically detects all the people, hit Enter or Return, give it a bit of time and it's done. Here is the before, here is the after. And this, my friend, is pretty darn awesome. It can also magically, miraculously remove all the wires and cables. Have a look, the spider web right here, this is so darn complicated. Just go to Find Distractions, Wires and Cables, give it a bit of time again and oh God, this was crazy. Before, after. Retouching is something that can take a long time and things like removing blemishes doesn't require a lot of creativity. For example, earlier, I would create a new layer, use something like the Healing Brush Tool for the highest accuracy, zoom in, hold the Alt key or the Option key, click to take a sample and paint over. Hold the Alt key or the Option key again, click to take a sample and paint over. Yes, the results would be incredible, but this would take ages. You can actually use AI to automate this process. There are tons in the market. The one I recommend is retouch for me because you can just buy it outright. So all you need to do is to make a copy of the background layer by pressing Ctrl or Command J with the background layer selected, go to Filter, Retouch for me. I'm going to choose Retouch for me here. There you go. You can try these plugins absolutely for free. I'm going to leave a link to the free trial in the description. Also, if you're interested, there will be a discount code. It detects most of the blemishes and you can use the Sensitivity slider at the top to pick how much blemishes is it removing. Let's keep it at 100, make mask and hit Apply. And in this particular layer, you only have the blemishes removed. So darn nicely. After this, we would usually spend a lot of time with high-end dodging and burning. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to four hours, depending upon the complexity. Instead of doing that, create a stamp visible layer at the top by pressing Ctrl, Alt, Shift and E. This creates a merged layer of everything you see in the canvas right now. Now let's go to Filter, Retouch for me, Retouch for me, Dodge Burn. There are many plugins that touch upon different aspects of retouching and already this is incredible. And you can choose how much dodging and burning you want, less or more. So I'm going to pick somewhere around 132 and these are the areas it has dodged and burned. Once you're satisfied, you can turn on Soft Light layer, hit Apply. So you can see what it is doing in real time and then change the blend mode of this layer from Normal to Soft Light. This is so darn good. Let's have an overall look. Here's the before, here's the after. Before, after. Does that mean the manual methods are useless? Absolutely not. AI just gives you a fantastic starting point. But if you want to finesse the results, you would have to go at it manually. Also, there are some areas that it may not get right. And in the latest version of Photoshop Beta, you can even go beyond that. I hope it makes it to the main version. If you pick the Quick Selection tool, you will see a new option at the top called Select People. Click on that, it will detect all the people in the photo. You can select the entire person or just the mouth, nose, ears. So I'm going to choose Mouth, Apply. And now we have a fantastic selection. Maybe we can create some lipstick. Click on the Adjustment layer icon, choose Curves again. Let's make it darker. And there you go. Now the selection is still not very accurate. Maybe we can go to the Mask and increase the Feather slightly, somewhere around 16 or 18. And that should do the job. And you can easily use this method to select the eyes or just the skin, hair, so many options. Let's say you wanted to post this photo on Instagram as a square. Earlier, there were not many options. You would have to use the Crop tool by pressing C to get to the Crop tool, pick Square from here, or 1 is to 1 ratio, and maybe crop it like this. Or even if you wanted to extend, like so, there would be white bars or black bars or whatever you wanted to add. Hit Enter or Return. Alternatively, we would have to use something like the Content Aware Fill. We would select this area, go to Edit, Content Aware Fill. It takes information from the existing image and tries to fill these areas. And as you can see, it's not very accurate. Hit Cancel for now. So, posting on social media without cropping has become so much easier with Generative Expand. Press C again for the Crop tool. And let's expand it. For the Fill section, you can pick Generative Expand. Hit Enter. You can type in a prompt or keep it blank and click on Generate. And it already gives you incredible options that you can go with, which would not be possible with Content Aware Fill. First, second and third. And all of them you can work with. Colorizing a photo would earlier take hours and you would have to do the manual work. Even now, you have to do the manual work, but you can get a fantastic starting point in Photoshop. With the background layer selected, press Ctrl or Command G to make a copy and then go to Filter, Neural Filters. Inside of that, there is actually a Colorize filter. Scroll down and turn on Colorize. There you go. This gives you an incredible starting point. Now, the colors are leaking, the colors are changing here and there, but you do get a good starting point. And those discrepancies can be easily fixed. Now, you can choose to output as a color layer, but I recommend outputting it in a normal way. Output current layer is fine. Hit OK. Ctrl or Command D to deselect. And on top of this, you can create a brand new lip to correct it. Change its Blend Mode from Normal to Color. With the help of the brush, let's just zoom in. As you can see, the lip color is leaking. So hold the Alt key or the Option key, sample the surrounding area and just paint. Fixed. Sample and just paint. There you go. And just with that, you have repaired that area. Here's the before. See all the leaking there. Here's the after. We fixed it. And similarly, we would do that all throughout the image, but it's much easier than doing everything from scratch. We did not have a lot of options before for removing noise that actually worked well. And when we did try to use those sliders, the images would become soft and blurry. Not anymore. So I'm going to drag and drop this RAW photo. Keep in mind, this works with RAW photos. It will open that up in Camera Raw. Thanks to Jeffrey Galinowski for this photo. Super talented pro photographer. You can check out his work right here. Now, as soon as you zoom in, you would notice that there's a ton of noise. And to apply this AI filter the way I see it as a checkbox, just simply click here. This will take you to Camera Raw Preferences. Go to Tech Previews. Check New AI Features and Settings panel. Hit OK. Restart everything. And now when you scroll down and open up Details module, you'll see the Denoise checkbox. Now let's check it and have a look at the results. This is crazy. And if you increase Denoise, there you go. So this is the before and this is the after. Crazy, crazy difference. On top of that, you can add the details back by increasing Sharpening and working with the Radius a little bit, decreasing the Details. And there you have it. Now, let's say you like this photo and you want to create a nice reflection of the mountains here instead of this plain water body. And we have made several videos on creating reflections and even one including 3D. That feature has discontinued in Photoshop anyway. What if we just select this area, bring up the Contextual taskbar by right clicking outside of the canvas, show Contextual taskbar, Generative Fill, Reflection, Water, Lake, broken English there. Hit Generate. And oh my gosh, this is not bad. Here's the first one, the second one and the third one. It actually created something there. Third one. We can actually roll with this. Now there are some extra clouds which we can easily edit out. But really, even the little ripples and the discrepancies are there. The resolution might not be high, but you can slightly blur it to make it better. Now let me share with you a workflow change that not only happened with Photoshop, but photography in general. Earlier, I would be scared to take a photo from inside of the car window or the airplane window because of the reflections that would ruin the photo. Now you can carry all those filters, but it's not always possible for every travel, every outing you do, or you just randomly went out for a little drive. In those cases, if you take the photo in RAW format, even with your phone, you can go to the Remove section, scroll down, you will see Reflections or People. Just open up Reflections and click on Apply. Again, you want to make sure Technology Previews are turned on. And oh my gosh, this is so darn good. And if you work with this slider, this is the original image. And this is without the reflections. And if you take it all the way to the left, all you will see is just the reflection. Quite the Sherlock Holmes stuff that you can use. So let's remove it. And then you can go back to the settings and increase the shadows and make it better. That is something you can do. But this is just incredible tech. So those are a few of the ways AI has transformed my workflow. But what about you? How has it changed the way you work in Photoshop? Are you even using those features or prefer to go the traditional route? Or both? Let's talk in the comments. I hope this video helped you. And if it did, make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to subscribe and not just subscribe. Ring the bell so that you, my friend, don't miss any other future tips, tricks, or tutorials. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in my next one. Till then, stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating. Bye!