Visual 1st Perspectives
May 29, 2024
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Tone-death #2: Move over Apple, it’s Adobe’s turn | |
Oh, these marketing folks! After Apple faced widespread anger among creative professionals for showing a commercial at WWDC that promoted the AI power of its newest iPads by depicting a hydraulic press bearing down on an array of artistic tools embraced by loyal Apple customers for their work or hobbies, it’s now Adobe’s turn.
Adobe managed to anger its loyal photographer customers by means of ads that carried the slogan “Skip the photoshoot.” The roots of this anger were already seeded by Scott Belsky, Adobe’s company’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president of design and emerging products, who proclaimed earlier this month, “AI is the new digital camera and we have to embrace it.”
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Responding to the Skip the photoshoot campaign was an open letter from the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP, a trade organization with 6,500 photographer members), stating, “… this was an attack; an attack on the creativity of the photographer, on the skill and nuance they bring to the photoshoot, and the countless hours they spend preparing for, and working after the photoshoot you are so cavalier to simply throw away.”
As an economist by education, I can’t help to think about the good-old concept economist Joseph Schumpeter introduced 60+ years ago: Creative Destruction – the process of innovation and technological advancements that leads to the destruction of existing economic structures, such as industries, firms, and jobs.
Creative Destruction could not only be devastating for those affected, but could also generate opportunities and growth. And, more often than not, it’s an unstoppable force, no matter how much the affected complain about it.
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Conference:
Oct. 16 (PM) – 17 (AM + PM)
Pre-conference networking:
Oct. 16 (AM)
Dead Pixels Society Meetup
Women in Imaging Luncheon
Where: Fort Mason, San Francisco
Buy $150-off Super Early Bird ticket!
($699 instead of $849; expires June 12)
Speakers, judges & moderators
to date:
Alexis Gerard, Strategic Advisor
Suite 48 Analytics
Analisa Goodin, Founder + CEO, Catch+Release
Andy Kelm, Managing Director,
Palmarés Advisors
Anna Dickson, VP, Content Strategy, Shutterstock
Anya Thrash, Executive VP of Marketing, Pro Channels, Bay Photo / Sensaria
Bruce Watermann, Founder, Executive Consultant, PrintReady Network LLC.
Cathi Nelson, CEO,
The Photo Managers
Elodie Mailliet Storm, CEO,
Catchlight
Hans Hartman, Principal
Suite 48 Analytics
Hans Scheffer, CEO,
HelloPrint
Jeff Herbst, Founding Managing Partner, GFT Ventures
Jeremy Toeman, CEO & Founder,
Aug X Labs
Krista Minekime, VP, US Operations,
Gelato
Sami Niemi, Partner,
Spintop Ventures
Sofiia Shvets, CEO & Founder,
Claid
Stephanie Mansolf, VP, Business Development & Partnerships,
Perfect Corp.
Tara Pixley, PhD, Executive Director +
co-Founder,
Authority Collective
Show & Tell presenters
to date:
Bec Ryttersgaard, Frintz
Eray Basar, IMG.LY
Marie-Eve Lemieux, Mediaclip
Noam Eshel, Photomyne
Russell Armand, Hypno
Ryan Jacobs, SpotMyPhotos
Sarah Lefebvre, EyeQ
Troy DeBraal, Imaige
Have an innovative photo & or video product you'd like to show at no charge for attendees? Check out our Show & Tell demo admission guidelines.
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We’ve seen Creative Destruction in action when digital photography more or less annihilated film photography, Photoshop and other software replaced film-based retouching and prepress, and, more recently, smartphone cameras reduced the digital camera industry to a fraction what it once was.
The provocative Adobe and Apple AI messaging raises a whole bunch of Creative Destruction questions.
- Will GenAI really eliminate the need for professional photoshoots? If so, for all photoshoots? Or for just the high-volume, low-budget shoots? Or for only the repetitive photoshoots that capture the same content but with different colors (say, red instead of blue sweaters) or models of different ethnicity wearing these sweaters?
- Or will higher end ecommerce brands seek the opportunity to distinguish themselves from their lower end competitors by featuring high-quality original photography rather than run of the mill AI-generated images? Would they attribute more value to these original photos if they could also use GenAI to generate more versions of the original photos for different market segments than they could afford to have photographed in the past? And pass some of this value on to the photographers in order to attract top creative talent?
- Or will photographers or other creative professionals actually become more creative by using GenAI to get their creative juices flowing by generating countless design ideas to work from, triggered by a few text or image prompts (such as the rough doodles that Microsoft Paint and others can now use as GenAI prompts – see the Other News section below)? Or enable them to eliminate unwanted objects in their photos through a few scribbles (as Lightroom now enables them to do – also see below), or retouch portrait photos through a few clicks (see Skylum’s Barcelona app – below) or batch-retouch large photo collections (see Retouch4Me – below), so that photographers or other creative pros need to spend less time on tedious editing tasks?
With new tools and approaches emerging on an almost weekly basis, the impact of GenAI’s Creative Destruction path still has lots and lots of unanswerable questions.
While the dust is not even close to settling, however, 4 conclusions are already clear in my mind:
- GenAI will eliminate the need for many traditional photoshoots, a reality that organizations like the ASMP can no longer ignore. This is not the time to stick your head in the sand.
- But GenAI will also empower photographers to enhance their photoshoot, extract more value from it, and be more creative by being able to eliminate repetitive or tedious tasks, or to quickly explore multiple creative directions?
- In other words: generative AI is the competing digital camera for some use cases, while it's the helpful Photoshop on steroids for others. Pro photographers will hate and love it – not unlike how film photographers have gone through the same process when facing the emergence of digital cameras and Photoshop.
- In the meantime, it behooves tech giants, who have become so big in no small degree thanks to their customer base of creative professionals, to be much more sensitive toward the customers who have good reasons to fear the impact of GenAI. Instead of provocative slogans, we need thoughtful, respectful and informative statements that give credit to the multi-faceted opportunities and challenges GenAI poses to photographers' livelihood and professional pride.
As the dust keeps settling, I'll keep you posted!
Best,
Hans Hartman
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And a few more things ... | |
Retouch4Me. Batch retouching. Retouch4Me announces Adams, a desktop suite of AI-powered plug-ins for curating and batch-retouching photos. Search for parameters like “Human” (the program detects if a person is in the frame), “Face,” “Overexposed,” and more. Adams then allows you to batch-retouch photos with an “unlimited” number of images, using the plugin combinations of your choice.
Printbox. AI & Printing. Printbox’s DRUPA announcements include updates to its GenAI Image to Image creation features currently under development, as well as pre-moderating features to block inappropriate or copyright-violating materials from uploading. The company also published its "Ink-credible AI" report, which delves into the transformative impact of AI within the personalized printing industry.
VSCO. Back to its roots pays off. Two years ago at Visual 1st, Lalit Balchandani discussed VSCO’s 180 strategy shift to refocusing on the “more serious Creators.” Apparently, this move is paying off. According to Bloomberg the company is now profitable, thanks in large part to the income generated from its 160,000 Pro subscriptions, an offering it launched last year. VSCO says it is also getting an average of 1 million new sign-ups per month, the majority of whom are drawn to Spaces, the social-network-like community VSCO launched in 2022.
Adobe. Removing distractions. Powered by Firefly’s GenAI, Lightroom’s new Generative Remove feature lets you identifying distracting elements in a photo’s background and remove them through a single click.
Microsoft. Doodling in Paint. Remember Microsoft Paint? No intent to age-shame here but Paint, né PC Paintbrush, launched in 1985, was sunset in 2017, and then again brought back to life. It now added, you guessed, text-to-image GenAI prompts. More interestingly, and along the lines of what LibAI demoed at Visual 1st last year, Paint also lets you create rough doodles, which Paint then turns into more presentable images.
HelloPrint. Sustainability for branded merchandise. HelloPrint, whose CEO Hans Scheffer will speak in our Innovation in photo print panel this year at Visual 1st, announces Merch by HelloPrint: an offering for companies to order eco-friendly and sustainably produced branded gifts. Earlier this year HelloPrint also announced it received B Corp certification.
Skylum. Pro portrait retouching. Past Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner Skylum announces Project “Barcelona,” a new desktop application designed specifically for professional portrait retouching. According to the company, the new software is designed to “empower photographers by automating routine face retouching processes through an efficient, AI-optimized workflow that runs locally on the user’s device.
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Join us Oct. 16-17 in San Francisco for our 12th annual edition of Visual 1st !
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