On-device Select subject in Photoshop, improved ai selections without the cloud
Excellent auto selections in Photoshop, right on your device
Five months ago, Adobe made some huge improvements to their auto selections in Photoshop. Select subject and remove background got a new algorithm, but only for cloud-based processing. This means your photo is (invisibly, behind the scenes) uploaded to the Adobe cloud and processed (this has been around a long time, but the algorithm was new). Many people dont want to have their images transferred to the cloud, or they have slow or no internet. Today there is good news. Currently only in Photoshop Beta, the on device algorithm received a much wanted update.
Let’s test it out and see how good it is. Watch the video for more detailed comparisons.
We will begin with the current Mainline Photoshop to see the difference.
Let’s use this picture of a woman and a bicycle. Spokes are very difficult to select normally.
Choose the Object Selection tool.
In the options bar, change the setting next to Select Subject. Choose Device, to test the old on-device model. This will keep all the processing on your computer and not pass anything to the cloud.
Click on Select Subject.Â
As you can see, the selection didn’t even select the bicycle. The selection it made is poor, with jaggy edges and chunks missing. Â We won’t use Cloud, because we already know it works well and the cloud option is exactly the same as in the Beta.
Note: Initially, I dragged the Object selection tool to also select the bike, just for comparison. But I decided not to include that in this test because it uses a slightly different algorithm and might have caused confusion.
Open the same image into Photoshop public beta. Choose device.
Notice the result is vasty better.
Let’s change the setting to Cloud for comparison.
Choose Select Subject
And we also get a great result.
Compare On device to Cloud with Photoshop select Subject
Comparing the two side by side, it looks like the new Device settings rivals that of the cloud setting.
Examining different parts of the image, it still looks great, The Device version is on the left in these examples.
We can safely say for this type of image, the on device processing is just as good as the cloud processing.
Selecting people in Photoshop
Let’s try a different type of image to test the capabilities further.
The on device version is on the left.
Closer up, you can see the results are very similar.
Let’s try a lower contrast photo, with strong back lighting.
If we examine the results, we can see the back of the chair is a little better on the cloud version, on the left.
As you can see, the results are very similar.
My verdict. I think the Cloud processing is slightly better, but not by much and not in every case. Adobe has done a great job of improving on device processing of select subject and remove background. At this point I feel like I can confidently use the on device processing for making initial selections in Photoshop.
Also bear in mind, this is just the first step of a cut out. Usually, we will go into select and mask and refine the edges of the selection before use.
Great to see you here at the CAFE
Colin
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6 thoughts on “On-device Select subject in Photoshop, improved ai selections without the cloud”
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Thanks for the update information Colin. Look forward to the next. Kudos.
Rob
Happy to help!
Another fun way to compare instead of just “eyeballing it” is to:
Make a selection with cloud and jump it to its own layer.
Make a selection with device and jump it to a new layer.
Turn off the original and drop a solid black layer under the two selections.
Switch the top layer to difference mode to see exactly what’s not exactly the same.
Thanks for your work, Colin!
Yes, the difference mode is something I will do next time.
Great Job Colin, I tried it on one of my bird images that had a shadow, I wanted to get the shadow as part of the selection also, I use select subject and also select object with both cloud and device, but it failed to select the shadow.
Usually the object selection tool in lasso mode will easily add a shadow.