Using Neural Filters in Photoshop

Nigel French

This article appeared in Issue 31 of CreativePro Magazine.

Look up neural in the dictionary, and you will find this definition: “of or relating to a nerve or the nervous system.” Look up the term in Adobe Support, and you find Neural Filters. The promise of these evolving and aptly named Photoshop filters is that they are part of a connected network, powered by a machine learning model, known in Adobe parlance as Adobe Sensei, that will dramatically reduce difficult workflows to just a few clicks. Should we believe the hype?

In practice, Neural Filters are like a modernized version of the old Filter Gallery. Some are gimmicky; others have practical applications. Most require a lot of processing power. I’d been reluctant to dive into Neural Filters after my early forays resulted in a lot of spinning beach balls and few tangible results. But I felt I could ignore them no longer. While still changing, the offerings have solidified, and although not totally stable, they are more stable than they were.

The examples I’ll discuss later are Neural Filters I consider “successful.” Although I must confess, I had a low bar for success: I didn’t hate their results. Before we dig into individual filters, however, consider some Neural Filter basics.

Experimental

To begin, choose Filter > Neural Filters. This switches you to a new workspace where all the normal tools and panels are hidden, and the entire window is devoted to working with Neural Filters (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Neural Filters workspace

The first time you use a Neural Filter, you need to click the cloud icon to the right of the filter name to download the filter’s code from the cloud. Next, turn on the filter and adjust its options to your liking.

There are three categories of Neural Filters:

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