Photoshop's Neural Filters; Nightmare Fuel.

If used "properly", Photoshop's Neural Filters can be used to achieve some truly disturbing effects.

The topic for today’s newsletter came about after a couple of people asked me about the avatar for this substack. It’s an image I also use as my twitter avatar, and while it looks kinda like me, it’s not exactly … right. Something about the eyes, the double-hat, the shape of the head, the floating blue frame...

Like we went hiking in the uncanny valley together and only one of us came back. The one who talks with a scratchy backwards voice, only eats engine oil and lives under a bridge returned and is peering out of your screen at you.

Here’s some of the alternatives I had lined up that didn’t make the cut;

That’s wild, right?

So what happened?

If you are anything like me, an update to a piece of software that you’ve been using since the 1990s can mean a couple of things - either a set of cool new features that will enrich your life and streamline your workflows, or a baffling reorganisation of familiar features that will frustrate you to tears. Like walking into your local supermarket and finding out they’ve moved the milk or something.

A while ago, Photoshop added Neural filters, and this is what I’d like to discuss today, because this update falls into a new category - updates that can cause a genuine lingering disturbance to your sleep patterns.

The neural filters were designed (I assume) to perform adjustments to images by way of processing in adobe’s cloud. Here’s a look at the currently available neural filters, including stuff like skin smoothing, JPEG artefact removal, photo restoration and most importantly for today, smart portraits. Using the smart portrait, you can apparently ‘creatively adjust portraits by generating new features like expressions, facial age, lighting, pose and hair’.

The example given here is… very generous.

Much Better.

I’m going to talk you through this slowly and gently, so please don’t scroll down too fast if you scare easily.

Step one. Start with a photograph of yourself. This is the one I started with.

The neural filters are under the filters menu in the toolbar.

So the trick to getting truly ghastly results here is to pop the slider that says ‘retain unique details’ all the way to the left. This makes sure that photoshop no longer cares about what you actually look like, just what you could look like.

Here’s me with a +50 Be Happy! modifier, a modifier I’m sure we could all do with here in the 2020s. I like how it’s imagined my teeth as well as perhaps a cheeky wisp of hair peeping out from under my hat. Now that’s +50 happiness, ignore that ‘results may be less predictable’ warning.

Next, I’ve plus 30’d my facial age slider. I’m not sure what the 30 corresponds to, because if it was years, this should be what I’ll look like when I’m 70something. Maybe it equates to months? Who knows, get some labels on your sliders, Adobe! For some reason, turning up the age closed my mouth here. Maybe we can bring them back later on? (we call that ‘foreshadowing’)

Let’s go full-on toddler-mode and push a bunch of buttons at once and see what happens.

Hmm. What seems to happen is that the image starts to descend, ever so gently into the uncanny valley. I’m typing this and trying not to make eye contact with it. It’s not wrong, but the more I look at it, the more it’s apparent that it’s not right. Anyway, my next step is to accept those changes and run the chimera back through the neural filters again to see what happens. A bit like photocopying a photocopy, if you replace the word photocopy with ‘face-mangling’.

aaaaannnd another +50 Be Happy! modifier later (which I think, if you are keeping count is a staggering cumulative +100 happy at this point) What a happy man.

I think you get the idea now - accept those adjustments and jump back in to make more adjustments. Photocopy that photocopy! I decided I wanted to take some years off this guy so de-aged him by a few units. Look at that silky smooth skin. Beautiful. I don’t really mind that you can see the join on my neck.

Next, I spent a couple of rounds playing with the ‘expressions’ sliders. This guy is plus 50 surprise, but minus 50 anger, which seems to have resolved on this face into a wry acknowledgment of “the facts”. (also throwing another +/- 50 to a bunch of other sliders seems to have made human-readable emotions ‘challenging’ here)

Sadly, it’s time to wave goodbye to the entity I’ve come to call ‘Recognisable Dan’ and time to summon in the ghoul I call ‘The UnDanny Valley.’ You might have thought that we were already deep inside that gloomy place but you were really very wrong.

Badly wrong.

So despite the fact he’s expressing Be Happy! at a value of somewhere over 1000 at this point, I can’t help but feel that this is a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

So, I did what any normal person would do. I cranked hard on those sliders and spent a few moments cherishing each monster that slithered out from the machine.

Now, you are probably asking yourself ‘why lord why’ and ‘where is the unsubscribe button’ and ‘surely this raises ethical questions’ and stuff like that but in all seriousness, do you know what this filter will do if you just continue to feed it? I lean hard on the Be Happy! and the head and eye direction sliders.

I really identify with my hat at this point. I too want nothing to do with this. Regardless, in the name of exploration and trying to find a great Halloween costume for next year, I push ahead, putting a lot of effort into the Be Happy! and Surprise sliders.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly found this surprising. The scarring across the eye socket, the cheeky goatee peeping out from under the chin, the eye filling up with blood, the gaping void where the soul used to be.

I really admire that hat. The only one of us here with any conviction, any fortitude to stand up and say NO THANK YOU, NOT FOR ME.

Genuinely upsetting. Let’s go back to my original choice and see how the hat behaves;

It’s a kinder hat. A hat that wants to be part of the image. A hat that has chosen to grow out of this guy’s head like hair. (ignore that phantom hat floating away from the hair-hat, that ruins my point)

Anyway, Photoshop’s neural filters are absolute guano-bananas and are a lot of dumb fun to play with.