Photoshop's Perfect Blend Concept Stuns With Composite Photos

It’s only two buttons — remove background and harmonize — but with those two clicks, Adobe Applied Research Scientist Mengwei Ren has seamlessly integrated a picture of herself on a California beach into an image of a cozy holiday kitchen table, perfectly lit and shadowed. You never would’ve known that the image was made of composites and that she never sat next to her boyfriend at the table. It’s impressive, and also a little terrifying, how well the images match.

The program Ren used is called Project Perfect Blend, an experimental tool that may or may not eventually show up in Photoshop. Before Ren demoed the tool in front of the crowd at Adobe Max, I sat down with the project lead to discuss what all goes into creating AI-powered photo harmonization.

Photo harmonization is a process where a photographer tries to match one image to another. When done manually in Photoshop, it’s a pretty involved process of adjusting shadows and reflections, highlighting and blurring and extensive color theory work. It takes professional editing prowess and a good chunk of time to achieve visual consistency — to make one element look like it belongs, or was originally part of, another image. With perfect blend, all that adjusting and editing is handled in minutes by generative AI.

“We can hand over the initial composition to the harmonization model and let the model do the heavy lifting,” said Ren. 

Perfect Blend works on people, animals and objects. Its colorization and illumination are meant to help when existing tools are insufficient. That’s where generative AI comes in to help create more ideal or matching lighting. Like all of Adobe’s other generative AI models, Perfect Blend’s models are trained on Adobe Stock and other public databases.

Wrinkles, hair and other characteristics aren’t being erased or created — they just look different because of the AI-generated lighting effects applied to them. “We need the generative power, but we don’t want to let it be too creative,” said Ren. “It’s generating some lighting effects but preserving the identity, the structure and faces. We don’t want to change anything dramatically.” 

While the actual elements stay the same, changing the lighting can have an enormous effect on the resulting image, which is why perfect blend has such contrasting before and after photos. 

Perfect Blend is a forward-looking project, meaning it isn’t available in Photoshop now and might not be any time soon — or ever. One of the biggest factors that determine whether a sneak peek like this is released is audiences’ reaction. Luckily for interested users, Ren’s presentation drew the loudest cheers of the night.

“We’re really focusing on ‘how can we enable more control?’ We don’t want to change anything in terms of identity, we only provide options in terms of lighting and shadow. We’re trying to make this easier for users,” said Ren.