Designers use Photoshop AI to “expand” featured panels and covers

The blend fill functionality in Photoshop does more than make it easy to edit images in Adobe. Publishers and AI enthusiasts recently discovered that the Adobe Firefly-powered tool can be used to “expand” iconic art and popular album covers.

Many of the results of the experiment have been shared on Twitter and are, to put it mildly, intriguing. Among the enlargements are classic albums such as excitement (Michael Jackson) and It doesn’t matter (Nirvana), famous works of art such as the Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci) and the Cafe Terrace in Forum Square (Van Gogh).

At first glance, the AI-generated complements are impressive: Generative Fill manages to replicate the color palette and visual style of a real photo, as well as add everything to the work as if it were one thing. However, it doesn’t take long for you to notice the oddities and errors in the parts created by the device.

Famous art reimagined by artificial intelligence

In abstract paintings, smudges and imperfections are indistinguishable, but the most attentive eyes will soon notice imperfections and inaccuracies that would never have occurred if they were produced by human artists.

An example of this is in the painting Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Grand Jatte by Georges Seurat: the original work consists of people, animals, children, and other elements. The Adobe tool even managed to make out some missing parts (trunks, legs, clouds), but everything around is practically unrecognizable, despite the imitation of the oil painting technique.

In the music albums, the scenario is similar, and the results of the inserts of the creator Alexander Dobrokotov are funny. on the album cover Teenage dream (Katy Perry), the artist is shown lying on the fur of a giant cat, and Art Master of puppets (Metallica) turned into a red fruitcake.

Interesting experience

Despite the flaws, experience shows that Adobe Firefly is effective at interpreting the rendered shapes and can be inspired by the artistic style to complement them. The results may not be worthy of showing up in art galleries or the walls around them, but they are interesting to observe the limits of computational imaging.

You can play with the tool yourself in Photoshop Beta: just download the beta version of the image editor from Adobe, upload the image you want to enlarge, select its invert and click Generative Fill. Of course, a paid Adobe license is required to try it out.