Is THIS The Future Of Graphic Design?

hey everybody what's up you know it's going to be a special Banger episode because Mo and I are back at it we're tag team back again as they say I'm going to be talking with Mo about AI tools and one in particular from a company that we love and respect who's been late to the game but is coming out guns freaking blazing swinging and that is Photoshop beta stick around let's jump into it okay Mo let's first go easy on on the on our audience and talk about a tool that they already use that it won't be so unfamiliar to them and it's done in the most ethical way as far as AI is concerned today you know asterisk I read the disclaimer at the bottom Photoshop beta you use Photoshop beta you love Photoshop and now you're making that switch over to Beta And Adobe has been very careful about rolling this out I feel they've been pressured with all the release and development that they too have to come out of the gate otherwise they're going to be left in the dust and no multi-billion dollar company and Silicon Valley is going to sit on their butt and wait for that to happen so Photoshop beta it's killer feature and it's really smart how they're releasing these killer features is just one feature at a time and so generative images which you all know takes a text prompt and fills in the background or replaces certain things Photoshop beta is no different what we're seeing are some super creative uses of this generative field which on the surface seems like so simple that anybody can do it let's look at it this way if you create YouTube content one of the painstaking things you need to do is create a really hilar thumbnail and oftentimes people send us images where part of their bodies are cut off the arms cut off and so it really limits where we can position the image and it's not always friendly for the composition or maybe what they're wearing is inappropriate or the expression needs to be changed a little bit now this sounds freaky but I've been testing this and Photoshop beta without any prompting if I want to draw the rest of the arm all I have to do is expand the canvas and just Mark heal box and it just knows to put in the arm what's crazy is the lighting the texture all of it matches and if you don't like one of the three options that you get from it you you just re-roll it and it starts working on it again it's incredible so this is where I think creative companies are harnessing the power of AI generated images and giving creative people a very specific tool to use that's going to save them a ton of time well I don't know if you've ever done this but I've had in the past cut and stitched arm parts and body parts together just so that my slides look good just so that my thumbnails look appropriate and I have some room now it's super easy to say what's the rest of the body look like now that is in essence the most fundamental use that you can use Photoshop beta for but actually much more creative things I'm a kid at 80s so you remember Nirvana's spells Like Teen Spirit or some of David Bowie's album art some collaboration just expanded the canvas to a bigger size and ask Photoshop beta to film the rest and what it draws in there using its imagination it's dreaming quality it's super cool to see like what it thinks of like what might be outside and to me this is art art is an invitation to look at the world from a different point of view so for decades now we've never known what the outside of the image might have looked like because that's what we got we got the cropped image but using some of this imagination thing it's pretty cool and it's pretty awesome for me as as the purse is really into art and music to be able to see like what might have been the rest of it and I just love that that question mark that AI adds to the conversation what's your take on Photoshop babe you're talking about it from a very like art almost how do we impact Society with how we uncover and utilize AI for art we've been using it for really practical usage in video and I can talk just specifically what my team have been doing for you for example not you specifically Chris but if someone is watching and you know you're filming video and maybe you're not super happy with your background or maybe you don't have the best lens that maybe the lens is too tight and you can't get a wide enough frame to shoot vertically or horizontally even what we're doing is we're telling our clients and even for ourselves we're taking a photo of where we're sitting and then in post-production using generative fill to expand what the scene looks like or even change the scene completely and then when we put the subject back in it it's almost like we've set design for them completely the opportunities are endless when you think about yourself or a client sitting down and shooting a video and you want to create different scenes it's almost like an infinite green screen which is just mind-boggling so that's how we've been using it practically for those that are doing YouTube videos for those that are doing talking head-on social I think it's just a game changer for you to be able to like in an instant change your background and you literally are sitting in the same place in the same set yeah I think it's going to make reformatting and aspect ratio a thing of the past like there's going to be a point in time when we're going to finally remember 2023 was the last year we had to stress over aspect ratio right he's going to be vertical or horizontal we don't know we don't care because right now it's for static imagery and there are creative uses of this what you're talking about is a concept that many people in the visual effects industry have known about and been using for years it's called set extension or an older term a matte painting it used to be no well I don't know if you know this but they would put a piece of glass in front of the lens and have someone paint semi-realistically the background so when you would shoot through and you would see a scene of somebody in the desert the rest of that the outside of it was not real this was done in Empire Strikes Back In many other films and they're just done by amazing artists now we're sitting there thinking well you don't have George Lucas budget for sure you don't you don't have access to the talent even if you had the budget you don't even know who to hire and if they'd be interested in working with you in the first place but what we're talking about right now is the ability to reframe this image so if your hands are cut off on the edges of the image that's a problem right now but if you keep your hands relatively within frame yes you would shoot this as tight as you can and then what you would do is you would then take a static image you would bring it into Photoshop beta and you would do all kinds of set extension map painting and just blend the two together seamlessly and it's a beautiful thing I don't think it's a great leap of imagination to say that adobe will probably be integrating this as a video feature in the near future we're not talking about years in the future but I'm talking maybe by end of year early next year maybe by time Adobe Max rolls around they have a video version of this and the pace in which this is developing and the quality of it is amazing Adobe Came Out Swinging with Adobe Firefly you know not great uses but them integrating into Photoshop beta now I don't have to leave that application and jump out and come back in and it's doing a really good job and I think if you have the time and you have the creative especially depending on the project you can integrate different things into one another another like you just talked about cutting somebody out and then putting it in the fill that you gave like here's a bonus app it's called unscreen you can go to unscreen.com and basically no more compositing in After Effects like it cuts the person out perfectly so you combine that with generative fill and now you have a subject inside of the set extension and just even a prosumer whether an editor or a designer or a photographer can really expand the ability of what they're able to produce as a final product because of these tools which then begs the question like what type of content could you make that serves as a demo reel right like the IP is still yours maybe you didn't have the resources or what kind of video treatment and Pitch could you make to send off to someone and be like hey this is what we did just as a treatment so you can see what we're able to produce these are probably the resources we need to produce a big budget version of this but it gets you that much closer to the end result without having to like break the bank and that's what I'm really excited about especially for prosumers and small businesses even that can bring many of the things that they're doing in-house there's another practical application of using Photoshop beta and it's another visual effects thing to go into the archives here so that you all can understand there is an effect that was popularized by this film called the kid stays in the picture where they take a static photo and they cut apart the layers and they paint back the missing parts and they put the different layers onto a multi-plane piece of compositing software and they're able to move the camera around so you can actually get this sense of Dimension and it's a really cool effect we would do those effects back in the day but you know I would sit there and think oh God this is a certain number of hours of work so what you can do is to use a number of different tools you can cut out the person first and then what you can do is then go back in and select a part of some that are missing and say fill that and would replace the missing person with what's in the background and then pump it into after effects and then create this really cool effect that used to take probably a ton of hours to paint and manipulate now you can do it in a snap of a finger that's another creative use of this and I'd love to see more people take advantage of not just the set extension possibility but also to replace parts to create this multi-dimensional multi-plane effect that The Parallax effect here's another thing I'd love to see and I think we're really close to it I've been meaning to watch unesh dinda's video on this pics imperfect about how he said AI now cuts out images perfectly I need to look into this but that's the next step I don't know about you but cutting out images especially people with fine hair on complicated backgrounds still very problematic I'm still spending an hour cutting it out because I have to redraw the hair back in that's a job that AI can do much quicker much more efficiently much better than what I can do so I'm hoping that adobe is a able to say okay you roughly draw a line around the subject and we will do the rest Adobe if you're listening please if you haven't already done so please do this because it's going to save creative people like myself a ton of time so this then posits the question then if AI can amplify the speed up or work process what are we supposed to do with all our free time and the answer is be creative explore compositions try different ideas out because it didn't take you 10 hours to cut an image out now if it doesn't work you just throw it away and you try a different image and if that image in the past was going to work but was missing this whole other part to it like an arm or half the head you can use AI to put it back in because that was the best photo it just would save you so much work to repair the image for beautiful composite hey before we go any further I'm going to ask you one thing because it helps us with the algorithm I want you to just pause the video and answer this one question if you love Adobe and you want to see them develop more AI tools integrated into Photoshop what's the one killer feature you want them to do put in the comment below I want to read this and hopefully somebody from Adobe is paying attention because they're going to give us artists the creators the tools that we need to go out and kill it I couldn't agree more there's something that comes to mind about the selecting and cutting out and I know for you you make Instagram carousels and decks and I remember you tell me it's like dude it took me like like hours to cut out this Bell so it could look 3D on my deck I was on a family trip to the beach and I went into like photographer mode with my kids and back in the day when you would edit on Photoshop like to have to really isolate the subject to create different color correction for the background or so it took time right so just Lightroom alone I know we're talking about Photoshop beta but like Lightroom has Auto Select subject and Auto Select sky and it allowed me to not have to worry about like sitting there and zooming in and all this was on my phone even but it allowed me to focus my creative energy like what I want the color grade to look like how do I want to position the different thing that I fill the sky with so my Creative Energy went from like kind of production pushing tasks to more strategic creative Direction tasks the speed in which I shot edited and published was ridiculous like 100 photos in the span of one hour and quality production as long as you allocate your efforts towards the shot and the post-production versus all the little mundane in between so I think you're 100 right I want to attack the punch line real quick here I think the concern is people think they're going to be obsolete but you just highlighted how if you just reframe your thinking you're not going to be obsolete you're going to allow yourself to put your efforts where they need to be to make the work better so for those that are concerned what would you tell them to do right now as far as like training in preparation for how fast this thing is evolving I would encourage them just to play to reserve judgment until they have enough time with tools and to think deeply about how they can free up more of their time because I think what's happening with automation with AI with mass production of things it's going to free us up hopefully to do the things that humans should be doing which is being artists to be poets and dreamers and to to be philosophical and think about the things we want to create take an average day let's take an eight-hour date let's say you're a retoucher photo compositor if you spent six or seven hours of your day preparing elements for composite what if that were shrunk down to like an hour I'm not telling you to Output more things because then that just diminishes the value that you bring to the table that allows you to explore for seven hours more what it is that you want to deliver to your prospect to your client to wherever it is that you're going to do work for I think that's where your time needs to be spent now we've seen this trend and some Trends rarely reverse themselves there's a few instances where they do this but the trend has been creative people are asked to do more in less time or less money it's going to be a really cool day in hell as I say when people pay you more money to give you more time to work on something and to expect less of you if you know this is where this is going right it sounds ridiculous for me to say if we see where this is going why not arm yourself with the best tools and these are tools that you can use as a creative human being to be able to do what you do and not to say I'm going to turn out 45 ideas I'm gonna I'm going to still deliver three ideas to you but the time in which I spend in production versus creative it's going to be flipped it's going to be inverted so you will spend more time thinking about what you want to say what kind of artistic style you want to use because it hits the message and the concept correctly versus you cutting out hair Chris I get the feeling that you hate cutting out hair it's it's one of the veins of my life well and you know because I'm obsessive like that even though most people in the audience can't tell how much love and energy I put into my keynote presentations I can tell and for the five people that can tell they can also recognize man that guy didn't cut a corner there he made sure it was perfect and you know you think I'm joking but I actually have created hair brushes to paint back missing hair because of the way it's been cut we're talking about the two in the morning I'm doing this because it's got to be right so it's going to take me 30 minutes preparing an asset versus like what should I be writing about because I don't want clumpy hair I don't want artifacty hair in in my presentations I know how meticulous you are I was I would sit with you sometimes and see you doing it too in real time if we were together in at the studio or whatever and and sometimes in your late night workshops with the pro group and people would be like I remember the reactions from the community it's like wait you spend this much time cutting something out you're like yes to tie back into this imagine if you can for your own work for your own projects 10x the output rather than cutting out hair something that I want to microscope in on and then we'll wrap up is I love that you said the word without judgment what do you mean by going into this without judgment and how can maybe we flip the current emotional state around AI when it comes to those that are like this is gonna like put me out of business you've said something that's reminded me of a quote from krishnamurti famous philosopher Indian philosopher and he said to observe without judgment it's one of the highest forms of intelligence probably butchered it but that's the essence of what he said to me this goes Way Beyond AI it's it's about a way of life about how to stay when you meet somebody you're already walking with a lot of bias when you see something when you eat something you have so much expectations that you put on it either good or bad that it then skews what you see so Marcus Aurelius his whole thing about looking at life is try to look at life for what it is not for what you project it to be so we talk about your state your mental state if you have anger resentment frustration when you're doing something new you carry that emotional energy into the tasks that you're doing so you're going to self-sabotage so later on when you tell yourself I'm gonna go to this party it's gonna stop people that are going to be lame and it's a total waste of time and you leave that same party with that mindset going in that states what do you think you're concluding it that party sucked I was a waste of time because you kind of predestined it to be that way because of how you approached it versus saying I'm just going to an event to be around other humans that is the most objective way to describe that and so sometimes you can have a very positive experience and sometimes it can be a negative but you're going to see clearly not through negative or rose-colored glasses right and so when we talk about trying something without judgment say like there's this thing it's Photoshop beta but if you're able to use those tools without that judgment so that you can see like I can see the benefit of this or you know what it actually doesn't work for my workflow but just to keep an open mind I think that's a critical thing in case you're enjoying this conversation and are intrigued but not sure where to go you're in luck because inside the future Pro Group we have a whole segment with thought leaders in the AI space that are having discussions about tools and techniques and how they're using Ai and leading the charge admittedly I'm not at the Vanguard of this and I'm humbled by seeing what they're able to create so this is intriguing to you I've included a link in the description below to go check that out I hope to see you inside the program Chris I think that is probably the best perspective to have on this particularly going into things without judgment and for as long as I've known you I feel like that's how you've approached the evolution of the creative industry can you tell me a story where you believe leading without judgment engulfs uh that experience for you I worked with the creative director and at that time was rgala Rob Greenberg and it's or Richard Greenberg and is is a very famous visual effects time main title design company and when I was this young buck coming out of school I was like and what do these old people know I'm a hot shot I could do this right I was a little bit cocky a little full of myself I'm okay to admit that and so what Garson had me do was we're working on a pitch for copelson entertainment and an Arnold culpelson the ones who produced seven they did such a great title sequence for seven that the copelsons wanted to see ideas for an animated logo we've seen these all the time if you can think about any of the big studios like DreamWorks with the boy fishing on the Crescent Moon somebody a designer a Storyteller thinks of that and then they produce that into an animated piece or a combination of visual effects of live action he had me build Brooklyn Bridge because he had this idea and back then the tools that I had access to in terms of 3D tools were fairly primitive and they weren't as good as they are today so I literally was modeling with a friend of mine the Brooklyn Bridge with the cables and the brick pad and all that stuff because he wanted this idea it's a very clever idea but it required us to have complete control over this thing and I would render it and I was like man this looks so good I was really proud of it because we spent so much time working on this single image he would look at it and he's like no that's not right you need to fix these things and I had to walk away kind of frustrated like aren't you appreciative of the work that we're able to do on a desktop computer we're doing some pretty Advanced 3D work that's what I was thinking I didn't say it So eventually we started getting closer and I showed the work and he's like you need to work on this and change this and he's just crazy about how attentive he is to certain details and then I finally like I broke I said isn't this close enough are we spending so much time on the single frame and then he turns to be eyes open and he's about to break out the ancient Asian grandfather wisdom he's not that old but he's in a busted on that I could feel it coming right right I've seen his face before my childhood like I'm gonna drop some knowledge on your head so you better shut up and listen do you understand the importance of the single image with a single image I can go get a million dollar job so we're gonna get this image right and at first I was like what and then it sunk in and he's absolutely right he's going to use a sequence of static images to print present to some of the most powerful producers in Hollywood to get them to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a sequence and so the image has to be perfect there can be no detail that's overlooked it cannot be close enough because he wants him to sign off on the idea so that he is then given creative freedom now I share this lesson or this story for a couple different reasons one just so all of you know I was an arrogant a-hole full of myself so audience rest assured now you have evidence but also the humility to in that moment to recognize this person spoke truth even though it was not comfortable for me to hear now I see all this stuff because now think about these tools that we have when you want to nail the composite when you want to get the perfect lighting or the texture that you need in that image if you took that same maniacal attention to detail that Garson instilled in me at that moment in time and now you have all these tools to help you my God it's like your your Thanos with The Infinity Gauntlet you have the power Stone you can do this people the people like Infinity Gauntlet I don't want that I'll just do this the old way you know I'll break out the acrylic and the gouache and sit there and paint with a brush at Windsor number six or whatever it is but why would you do that so I'm I'm trying my best to get those that are willing to listen the ones that are on the fence about using AI tools to Aid them in their creative process to give it a go clearly I don't need to convince the people already using it today they're already ahead of us right and then there's this other side Deck Over My Dead Body I understand and I respect that but for those of you that are undecided I am I think a voice for Creative people and I don't want you to get left behind the wave is coming and some of us will learn to surf and some of us will drown you have to decide are you gonna Surfer or you're going to drown it's up to you [Music]