Adobe brings Photoshop tricks directly to your smartphone camera

Adobe has showed off a preview of a new app called Photoshop Camera at its Adobe Max conference that brings Photoshop editing tricks and AI directly to your smartphone's camera. Like most camera apps, you can use it to capture, edit and share photos on social media networks. However, it also brings powerful Photoshop-grade tools, along with automatic AI adjustments, custom lenses and other tricks.

Adobe seems to be mainly pushing this app to influencers and social media users rather than pro photographers. For starters, Adobe said that it uses its Sensei AI to recognize the subject in a photo (portraits, selfies, good shots) and can give recommendations and automatically apply the best adjustment for a given shot. "It also understands the technical content (ie, dynamic range, tonality, scene-type, face regions) of the photo and automatically applies complex adjustments," Adobe wrote in a press release.

The image above shows how this will work, with a series of mostly creative (ie, artificial) filters that transforms landscapes, a dog shot and a selfie into pieces of comic or pop art. Another image of the Golden Gate bridge applies a more conventional "scenery" filter to make the shot pop a bit better, in much the same way that regular camera apps can change settings for a given subject.

Moreover, the app lets users access lenses (these could potentially be in-app purchases) "made by well-known artists and influencers," Adobe said. For instance, it showed off some lenses created in conjunction with pop artist Billie Ellish (top), that add colorful backgrounds and whimsical pop art style filters.

All of this sounds more like Snapchat than Photoshop, but it does seem like Adobe has integrated some pretty powerful AI techniques. Adobe is releasing Photoshop Camera into a public preview on iOS and Android starting today -- to sign up, click here.