What are Neural Filters | Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Step One

Open a Photoshop document and select an image

Step Two

Go up to the top and select Filter > Neural Filters

Step Three

The Neural Filters panel will load on the right side of Photoshop

On the left side of the panel are the Featured Filters and Beta Filters. These are the two distinctions to select from followed by the filters themselves and then the filter adjustments on the right side of the panel. On the bottom of the panel one can toggle the preview on and off to see the differences. As previously stated, every Neural Filter needs to be downloaded individually.

Filters Available

Featured Filters

Featured filters are filters which have completed the beta process and have new features or are unique.

Skin Smoothing

Skin Smoothing is the new filter to remove acne and blemishes within Photoshop. This works by adding in blur and removing some of the sharp shadows and utilizes content aware fill to give an approximate of the actual skin if there were no blemishes. While it does not always completely remove the blemishes it does work similarly to using concealer. It takes approximations of the skin tone and blends it on the harsher areas. A further tutorial on this can be found here.

Smart Portrait

Smart Portrait is a filter which enables you to adjust a multitude of options on a person’s face. This filter uses an AI system to at times, add teeth and wrinkles to a portrait. Smart Portrait also allows the designer to move the head or gaze of the subject.

Makeup Transfer

Makeup Transfer is a beta filter which takes a reference image of makeup and applies it onto the image using the filter. A short tutorial of this can be found on the site as it seems to be an interesting filter to work with. 

Style Transfer

According to Adobe this allows for images to adopt the style of a reference image. The images at the moment that can be chosen from include work Starry Night and The Scream. Aside from choosing the image, a few adjustment sliders are also given to the user. A tutorial breaking this down is available here.

Super Zoom

Super Zoom is another filter that is super beneficial to give variety to designers around one photo. This filter also utilizes content aware tools to add pixels into the image as the zoom increases to keep some fidelity.

JPEG Artifacts Removal

The final beta filter available for testing is the JPEG Artifact Removal filter. This filter is self-explanatory as it attempts to remove the compression of the jpeg file type.

Colorize

Colorize is an interesting and powerful filter which colorizes black and white photographs using algorithms. This filter also utilizes pins and colors selected by the user to get a more accurate result from the algorithm.

Beta Filters

Beta filters are filters which still need some tweaking before being fully released. Expect some changes to these filters (maybe none noticeable) from the testing results of the beta. The filters below are the current filters in beta. I will not update as time goes on but I will keep my eyes out for new filters that are useful.

Harmonization

Harmonization is a Neural Filter which seeks to match the lighting and color of two images to lead to perfect composites.

Landscape Mixer

Landscape Mixer is a Neural Filter which combines two images to change properties such as the season and time of day.

Depth Blur

Depth Blur is a Neural Filter which adds in haze between the foreground and the background. This will be updated soon with the latest May 2021 Update

Color Transfer

Color Transfer is a Neural Filter which seeks to apply the colors from one image into another, similar to how the makeup transfer tool works.

Photo Restoration

Photo Restoration is a filter which aims to remove scratches and increase contrast and other elements of the photo.

Experimental Filters to Vote On

Within the Beta Filters section of the Neural Filters panel there are filters on the bottom that can be voted on by the community to judge interest. Giving Adobe a system to judge priority on producing new filters for beta. A list of these so far are as follows.

• Portrait Generator: Uses specified characteristics to create a portrait.
• Water Long Exposure: Seeks to transform running water into a long-exposure version of the water.
• Shadow Regenerator: Regenerates the lighting and shadows of an image based on parameters.
• Latent Visions: Generate images based on unique text strings.
• Noise Reduction: Advanced noise reduction filtering.

Output Options

There are a plethora of output options within the Neural Filter panel.

Duplicate Layer

The first output option is to just put all adjustments flattened over the original image in a duplicate layer.

Duplicate Layer Masked

Next on the list of output options creates a new layer with all the adjustments on top of the original layer. Anything that was not altered is masked out from the adjusted layer.

New Layer

The third and probably my least favorite option creates a new layer merging the original and adjusted images. I would strongly advise against using this option for output as it is the most destructive form of outputting.

Smart Filter

The last, and definitely preferred method is outputting via Smart Filters. Smart Filters create a non-destructive option for output in that you can go back and tweak the original filters at any given time. This will be the output method I use for 99.9% of output when using Neural Filters in Adobe Photoshop.