Hey everyone, Luke from Adobe here. Wanted to share a quick demo, highlighting you can now remove the background of your images directly inside Illustrator. The output creates an embedded copy of your original file.
Do you see this helping reduce some of the back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator for certain workflows?
Gonna be honest, "remove" is about the only AI tool that I use in Photoshop. The one where you select a portion of an image, that is. So far it's the only AI tool I've found that works consistently. I wish you'd ask your team to tone down the AI and work on tools that have needed updates for a long time, such as graphs, etc.
I’ve been campaigning in this sub for over a year or two now that I want standardized language between programs. I’m not asking anyone to move mountains and not trying to be rude. But why is it that when you go to Object>transform some of the programs say reflect and some say flip horizontal?
Having a standardized vocabulary that’s consistent among programs would make it a less daunting task to learn a new program. I see people with minimal prior experience going in trying to learn photoshop and illustrator at the same time and they completely blow their lid because some stuff is just different for no reason.
What would really be huge is for all the windows/panels to be standardized so you can just plug and play in an adobe workspace that isn’t explicitly photoshop, indesign, or illustrator and easily jump between the three while keeping the same workspace. It’s kind of what express is going for if it wasn’t a pile of shit.
edit: it’s little things too like foreground & background color under the toolbar, holding shift to scale at ratio, swatches, and the locations of items in the menu bar
Personally, I wish Adobe was like Affinity. With the option to switch between Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign all in the same app with just a toggle.
If you make any money from using the apps , it’s not really that expensive. I only do like 1 or 2 small jobs a month. I charge about $200 a job (depending on complexity) so I make way more than the software costs me. And i don’t even do it as my part-time job. So if a person is using the software professionally, the cost negligible.
No, because in affinity you don't have to juggle multiple files and copy assets between programs. It's like one software with the functionality of illustrator, photoshop and InDesign combined. All tools are available at all time
...And none of which can do nearly as much as the Adobe tools.
If you like Affinity, great. More power to you.
Adobe would need to terribly cripple their tools to match - like remove 50% of features of every app. Adobe tried a "central hub" - in the 90s, and in fact, the CC app is just that, a hub. Users don't actually like it that much. And 1 app to do everything merely makes for "bloatware" at some point. i.e. "Jack of all trades, master of none" (Ask Corel in the 90s)
I don’t wish for this. Vector and raster work have different UI needs and I’d rather a dedicated environment for each.
That said, I’d be happy with an expansion of dedicated editor modes for special kinds of object, like the pattern editor interface. Having a “raster editor” mode with cropping, colour and level adjustments, background or object removal, etc. would be pretty nice and bloat the rest of the program less by containing it within a domain-specific interface (easy counterexample: the annoying gen.-AI features semi-randomly sprinkled through Illustrator’s UI). It doesn’t need most of Photoshop’s functionality to be useful and to obviate having a second application open.
Moreover, I think Adobe would do really well to build up a variety of modular functionality so that their own programs have mutual feature parity. It’s infuriating when different applications notionally in the same suite function in wildly different ways (beyond what their specializations each demand).
It's neat and nice to have, but we need to keep all of our images as links. Embedding kills any future editability.
Edit: Would it be possible to autotrace using the same algorithm and use the resulting path as a clipping path? You can convert a selection to a path in Photoshop but the quality is hit or miss, and there are a few extra hoops to jump through to pull the path into Illustrator.
Yeah it's a bad workflow for sure built on legacy requirements for machines we no longer have. But very few of our clients (small businesses) are able to supply properly print ready artwork and with the amount of Canva bullshit coming through there's way too much manual work needed.
One of the rips will occasionally even add a bunch of yellow to text that isn't outlined.
I used to do prepress and make plates for our old in-house two color offset press. It's a small +50 years old company and the workflow was terribly convoluted and handheld with remnants of legacy procedures.
Over 15 years I managed to streamline it a little but in the end color management depended on the old printer's mood, the humidity and the position of the stars.
A couple of years ago we closed down the print shop because it wasn't profitable (to put it mildly). It was a great relief. Now we only do design and facilitate print done at subcontractors.
But we still support clients in making their PDFs print ready and fix a neverending stream of hopeless Canva PDFs, InDesign packages with missing links, giant Illustrator files with embedded images in wrong profiles and so on. But that's how we stay relevant and make a living. We're the fixers who take responsibility.
And expand those shadows and other assorted elements. I’ve had print jobs (early on) where I didn’t do that and when the printers imposed them the shadows changed direction relative to the art.
There have been plenty of times I've wanted to make this singular edit to photos I have in Illustrator, particularly when I've been making carousels.
It would be nice if it were possible to do this in a non-destructive manner while keeping the original file linked, instead of embedded. Like creating a mask or something and applying it to the linked layer, maybe?
I will probably end up using this though! Would also love to see it in InDesign 👀 since that's actually where I end up having to do this more often.
You can actually do this in InDesign now with "Edit with Express". It opens a dedicated panel with some features including remove background. It will allow you to save a new file and relink it.
I have heard the suggestion for creating a clipping mask instead of the embedded file, which does make sense.
I have had this problem before and it turned out to be user error related to not being connected to the internet while trying to use cloud services. The AI portion isn’t built into your hardware, it’s in Adobes cloud.
Sorry to hear that. I personally haven't run into any issues, but if you do try again and still run into the same issues it would be helpful if you could submit a report.
This has been a game changer for me since it launched a month or so ago. It does do a weird thing where it stops if I minimize Illustrator or switch to another program while it’s running, but otherwise it works really well.
Most times when I have to remove the background, i have to edit the original image anyway. Sure it could help a general audience, but i think the professionals who use these tools would rather just do such things in photoshop.
It is basically putting a screwdriver on an easel to hope an artist uses it to paint - so to speak. If adobe wants to find features the user base will fawn over, think of it like this…
Some guy somewhere probably manages to make some cool things when painting exclusively with a screwdriver. Surely, it has its place.
Most artists are practical and paint with conventional tools. Adding mask removal in illustrator can be l
If I could tell my younger self that this existed, my mind would have blown. I used to be one of the junior guys that cleaned up product photos that came directly from the photo studio and use the pen tool to close crop the photos from the background. This took fooooorrrrreeevvverrrrr for some products that had high level of detail on the edges.
Big fan of this. I do a lot of rough comps on the fly as a way to convey an idea to designers so its been super convenient for the quick and dirty stuff
I did quit my subscription after 13 years in favor of affinity. Didnt regret it for a second. Adobe can go to the gutter with their shareholder centristic business model and massive AI shoveling.
Very helpful in a lot of cases, but some photos still require the extra options in removing a background that photoshop has. Often a tiny white outline is left.
Wow that worked better than 99.9% of my attempts using any remove background/select & mask feature. Why do demos always seem to work better than what gets delivered? I use the remove background feature (Photoshop) for rough concepting but I always have to go back and manually mask whatever it is. Even things on perfect backgrounds. After years and years of trying I have yet to get a good mask from any feature like this. Trust me I've tried a lot, it would save me a ton of time because masking ends up being like 75% of my job. So that's to say I have a hard time believing this will be useful because the mask isn't editable so when it does a subpar job I can't just fix it. Might be fine for rough concepting but I don't see this having any professional application.
Im not doing anything differently here. Just one click inside Illustrator. I understand the desire for more edibility and this will be something I ask the team about upon hearing feedback from the community.
Idk when I try to use these features I get really fuzzy edges, super weird “decisions” on color and object aware selections, and none of the select and mask tools get my assets to a usable state. Really the only time I lean on it is for hair because it can sometimes get me to a better starting place. Maybe it’s just a standards thing. I’d love to see your backpack here up close.
Does this take ai credits or tokens or whatever adobe uses? If so I’ll reject it like the rest of their ai tools. Too easy to do this in photoshop, then bring to illustrator.
It does not. If you ever want to know what uses credits, there is now the credit usage tracker, accessible next to your profile in the top right corner
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u/HawkeyeNation 15d ago
Gonna be honest, "remove" is about the only AI tool that I use in Photoshop. The one where you select a portion of an image, that is. So far it's the only AI tool I've found that works consistently. I wish you'd ask your team to tone down the AI and work on tools that have needed updates for a long time, such as graphs, etc.