Dylan Andersen retouches a 40-megapixel Fujifilm portrait using Lightroom's traditional tools and Photoshop Beta's Generative Fill. The AI removes blemishes and flyaways in seconds with more natural results than content-aware brushing, though it occasionally leaves odd artifacts. Generative Fill makes professional retouching faster and cheaper without requiring third-party plugins.
All right, I want to do a quick video here on my noob, kind of amateur level of retouching with Photoshop Beta and some of the generative AI stuff. So here is an image taken with the XH2. So we have a 40 megapixel image. We're at 100% here on a portrait. And the model's face has a kind of pimple that's kind of raised up a little bit and it does kind of detract. There is, you know, your eye kind of goes there and it seems like it's kind of raised. Now in Lightroom, if you go into this image, if I go into the image itself, you'll see. Usually what I've done in the past is I'll go in Lightroom, I'll grab my which is now the Content Aware Remove tool and I'll kind of paint over it because again, I want to level it with the rest of this and I want it to have some texture now. That's okay. But you see, there's like this sort of darker colored area there and if I zoom out, you can kind of see that even here too. There's kind of like these bumps on her head and we don't want that. We want it to look kind of flat. Now that's actually a great result there. The other thing is she has a lot of flyaways here. So normally I would probably go with that, maybe paint over it again, see what happens. But the bigger problem is with these flyaways. So I'm going to go back into lightroom here. I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger and what some people have done, they'll just paint through here. I'm doing this very haphazardly, just so you can see. And the result that you get is awful. You can really tell. I mean, it's taking the bokeh and kind of duplicating it. And even if I had a perfect paint, it wouldn't be as good. Now, some people say that's the wrong way to do it. You really need to go line by line, which I agree. You're gonna get better results kind of doing it this way, kind of selectively going through the flyaways and kind of removing them. But this is time consuming, right? Yes, you will get a much better result doing it that way. But look at all these edits I've had to make. Here's what I'm using workflow wise for Photoshop Beta. So I actually go edit in Photoshop 2023. I can export this as a TIFF and do it easier, but I'm jumping into regular Photoshop and then into Photoshop Beta. And on here we have that image again, I haven't done anything. I want to show you what Generative AI will do. So I'm going to highlight with my Lasso tool by clicking L and I'm going to generate a fill. I'm going to leave it blank, and I'm going to see what it comes up with here. Generative Fill is still not super fast, but it's definitely for the amount of craziness that this provides. It's pretty good. Look at that. I mean, it's unbelievable. It literally. You cannot tell that there's any volume to that. And again, comparing that to the lightroom, I mean, you can see there's still some, like, depth there, right? But if I go back to Photoshop Beta, it's. It's unbelievable. And then look at this. I even have a different texture there. And I have a different option here. Now, this third one, you can see the volume. So that one's no good. But these ones, if I want to use some of the texture on the skin, I can do that. But I think this first one is probably the best. How incredible is that? Now, another thing I want to do is these flyaways. What's the best way to do it? I don't know. Let's try Generative AI. I'm gonna kind of select through here. Really only select the parts that I really need. I kind of screwed that up there. Let's. There we go. Okay, I'm gonna click Generate, Fill. Generate. Give it a chance to do it. I think the coolest thing about Generative AI, Phil here especially, is that you can choose from some of the selections, and it's just going to make my life a lot easier. I hope so. Let's see how it does here. It's like. It's unbelievable. Now you look at this, you're like, well, it looks. Still looks a little weird, right? I mean, there's some hairs that kind of go nowhere. But, I mean, look at the image. It's so much better. And this. And then look, I have a couple different options. So here's one where it's giving more of the flyaways. And this one actually probably looks the most natural, right? So here's the first one. It looks a little bit like spider webby. This one probably looks the most natural. If you look at the bokeh in the background on the last one, it kind of fits with what the lens is rendering here. Unbelievable. So I mean, I could take this, send it, you know, clean up some more of the flyaways, either with the content where move tool or the generated AI and send it and be super happy with it. Really unbelievable stuff. So I wanted to share that with you. I'm loving Generative Phil and it's making my photography workflow a lot better. I don't think it's going to replace photographers right. But at the end of the day it's going to make retouching a lot easier. And you don't have to pay 500 to $1,000 for a lot of these crazy add ons and plugins for Photoshop. You just get to go in there and play around with it and see what happens. So yeah, thanks for watching.
