Adobe teases a crazy AI photo editor named after the Death Star

Adobe plans to announce a ridiculously cool photo editor at Adobe Max, dubbed Project Stardust, that uses AI to understand objects in your photos as…objects — allowing you to quickly edit and modify them.

Adobe released a teaser for Project Stardust on YouTube, where Adobe employees showed off how Stardust could “understand” that a photo of a woman pulling a suitcase was made up of discrete objects. Simply by clicking on the suitcase, Stardust appears to understand that it’s an object, and that it can be moved around or deleted.

Though somewhat late to the AI party (following the launch of Midjourney and other early examples of AI art generators), Adobe launched its Firefly AI generative tool last year and quickly added AI features like outpainting to Photoshop before adding Firefly to Photoshop via generative art tools, albeit with a credit plan. Now, Adobe seems poised to take the next step.

Anyone who’s used Photoshop before probably understands that selecting an object evolved from carefully outlining it, to using the Magic Lasso tool, and so on. Now, it appears that you don’t even have to sketch the shape of an object — clicking on it will distinguish it from the rest of the scene. In the YouTube teaser, Adobe employees showed how simply moving the suitcase in question also tweaked the object’s corresponding shadow, too. Then, Stardust used Firefly’s generative AI fill function to replace the suitcase in the model’s hand with a bouquet of yellow flowers.

An even more interesting feat that Stardust apparently offers is the ability to get rid of “distractions,” a command which can be typed into the generative fill box. Stardust is apparently smart enough to pick out background objects which might take away from the subject, and then remove them — filling in their absences with AI-generated backgrounds.

All in all, Stardust appears to be a new take on capabilities that we’ve seen before — removing people from Google Photos, for example — but with additional levels of sophistication. Adobe said it will talk further about it at its Adobe Max conference next week.

(Star Wars nerds, of course, know that “Project Stardust” was the Empire’s secret project that later became what was known as the Death Star. Let’s hope that there isn’t anything to do with an “exhaust port” inside Stardust, no?)