Adobe Researchers use puzzles to teach an AI model to retouch photos

We all take photos with our phones and cameras—and those photos often need a few touchups for lighting or other details. But getting a good result can be a challenge if you’re not trained on all of the features your editing tool has to offer. And if you give your image to a generative model, you might get something back that doesn’t even feel like your photo anymore.

So Adobe Researchers, in collaboration with University College London, developed a new, data-efficient approach: using carefully crafted puzzles, they trained an AI agent to identify the things a user might want to fix in an image, explain each of the steps, and let the user choose which edits to make. This could help novice users retouch their images without sacrificing control, and it can be tailored to professionals’ own style so they could edit batches of images more efficiently.

The team, consisting of Principal Scientists Duygu Ceylan and Niloy Mitra along with first-year PhD student Nildari Dutt, presented this work in a new paper at this year’s prestigious SIGGRAPH conference.

Learn more about the behind-the-scenes story here.