A new beta version of photoshop was recently released with generative ai tools (adobe firefly) natively supported directly in the app. I tried it with a simple pixel art scene.
Midjourney
I started by prompting a bee image in Midjourney. Just to get started. I wanted to see how much I could edit this image in photoshop and would it still stay true to the style.
From this selection of images I chose the bottom left one for this test because I liked how soft it looked and how muted the palette was.
Photoshop & After Effects 1st test of AI pixel art animation
I then loaded this image in photoshop to test the image outpainting to see if the style would stay coherent.
To get access to these new Ai tools within photoshop, you need to have a CC subscription. Just load up CC and head on over to the Beta Apps tab. If you already are on a Photoshop beta, you might need to remove your old installation and download the beta again.
Now once inside Photoshop, simply make a selection and you will see the new generative AI prompt panel appear:
I took the newly generated image from photoshop to After Effects to do a non destructive pixelart rescale pass on the image.
After this test I could not help myself from adding some more animations on top!
Adding layered animation
This got me thinking, how hard would it be to erase things from the image with the new tools in photoshop to generate more layered animation?
I was very pleased with the way I could take a pre-existing image and remove parts, or extend the image and the new AI fill tool in photoshop was able to keep the style very coherent with the rest of the image. In these experiments I used an image from Midjourney s a source.
Editing Midjourney images with AI has always been difficult, as Stable Diffusion based tools did not manage to quite match the style. Dall-e2 was better at it, but I would have had to pay for yet another tool.
The final image
The fact that Photoshop now has built in a very capable generative AI system makes editing these images lightning fast. This little AI pixel art animation test took me a couple of hours to complete from nothing to a full short video clip!
I have multiple other devblog posts explaining the use of Photoshop Generative fill as part of a game creation process:
Creating an apartment location
Creating an apartment exterior
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