Hurray – The Summer tech announcements drought is over! 

Google. Pixel 9 and GenAI. Google started to kick off the holiday tech announcement season with the reveal of its Pixel 9 lineup and a slew of new AI features. Too much to cover here, but more about the Pixel’s new cameras, including a beefed up ultra-wide camera, you can read here and the new AI camera features are described here.

On the AI image generation side of things two new features jumped out at me:

Add Me enables you to create a group photo in which a person (e.g. the photographer herself) was originally missing. Users must leave a physical space for where the missing person should appear, take a second photo of the missing person with the right pose and, voila, Add Me then merges the two images into one photo in which all subjects appear together.  

[Add Me is different from Best Take, which combines into a single image the best version of each person captured through a burst of photos – as John Fisher of Google Photos highlighted at Visual 1st last year]

Autoframe is a new feature that lets you reframe subjects in your photo “in post.” Your subject appeared near the left edge of your photo instead of in the middle? Autoframe then outpaints the background to the left of your subject and, voila, it plops your subject right in the middle of your image.

Halide. Stripping away that iPhone camera AI processing. The iPhone camera is too aggressive in noise reduction? That was the thought behind Halide’s new “Process Zero” mode, which uses "zero AI and zero computational photography” and turns " your phone into a "classic camera," according to the company. You just set your ISO and shutter speed, press the capture button, and that's it. It snaps a single exposure and does no post-processing. 

Procreate. Keeping away that generative AI. Procreate, a popular iPad illustration, photo, and painting app pledged to not add generative AI features – and is being applauded by many in the creative community.

Why staying away from generative AI? “Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.”

The English Premier League. iPhones joining the party. What – the big $ (£) soccer league is going off-the-shelf? Later this season, the English Premier League will replace its controversial VAR offside-detection system in favor of a phalanx of iPhones (at least 28 per game) to capture high-frame-rate video from multiple angles. Coupled with custom machine intelligence software, the smartphones supposedly can then effectively communicate and work together to process all the visual data and hash it out whether that player was offsite or onsite.

Deep-Live-Cam. In the category of wow, wow – but fun and a bit worrisome. An open-source software package called “Deep-Live-Cam” is going viral for its ability to extract a person’s face from a single photo and apply it to another individual during a live webcam video. The AI software replicates the individual’s pose, lighting, and expressions on the webcam in real-time. Turn yourself into JD Vance, Hugh Grant, Mark Zuckerburg, and George Clooney. Check out the video! 

Flux. In the category of wow, wow – but very worrisome. Forget Midjourney — Flux is the new king of AI image generation, based on early reviews. Praised for its image quality, Flux is an open-source solution from a new startup, Black Forest Labs, founded by former Stability AI engineers, along with other leading figures in the development of diffusion-based AI models. The startup is freshly funded with $31M from Andreessen Horowitz among others. 

Grok. Flux going unhinged. And what happens when GenAI images get more and more realistic? You’ve got it – they fuel deepfakes. So, no surprise, Elon Musk’s “anti-woke” Grok AI chatbot on xAI already launched an AI image generation feature reportedly based on Flux with very zero safeguards featuring politicians.

Subscribers to X Premium, which grants access to Grok, have been posting everything from Barack Obama doing cocaine to Donald Trump cuddling a pregnant woman who resembles Kamala Harris.

Skylum. Luminar Neo upgrades. Previous Visual 1st Best Technology Award winner Skylum announces the Fall Update to its signature photo editing program, Luminar Neo. New features include Color Transfer, which enables users to transfer colors from a reference image to their own photos. This way they could match colors between similar objects, such as sky-to-sky or car-to-car, or – a controversial benefit when Adobe launched its Color Transfer Neural Filter Photoshop feature in the past – to mimic their favorite photographers' styles. 

Luminar Neo’s GenAI tools have been updated with new algorithms for its GenErase, GenSwap, and GenExpand features, enabling users to generate more detailed and realistic images with a higher success rate, according to the company.

Mediaclip & Adobe Commerce. Enhanced connectivity. Longtime Visual 1st supporter Mediaclip announces version 2 of an extension that connects Mediaclip's backend services with Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento). By supporting the Adobe Commerce Headless architecture, Mediaclip enables its customers to independently manage their product personalization storefront(s), accelerate development, expand multi-brand capabilities and achieve overall performance enhancement, according to the company.

Best,

Hans Hartman