Backdrop Creator In Photoshop

In this video, photographer Anthony Morganti demonstrates an upcoming feature of Photoshop currently found only in Photoshop beta which is called Backdrop Creator which allows the user to replace the background of any image with basically one click.

Backdrop Creator

AI is gaining more and more momentum in the image manipulation arena and the ability to select and replace elements in your shot is something that is becoming exceedingly common (we have seen sky replacement features from many leading companies as well as from Adobe itself) and now Adobe is working on taking this a step further and allow the user to replace the entire background.

Although this might be new to Photoshop and more specifically to the neural filters (again still only in Photoshop beta at the moment) it is not the first time that these sorts of features appear in this way on editing software and Canva, retoucher, and others already include one type or another of background removal/replacement features.

Still, Photoshop was and still is the professional software of choice for many image editors, and gaining a simple and easy way to replace background is going to help many users of the software.

So how does it work? At the moment you will need to download Photoshop beta alongside your existing Photoshop via the creative cloud for desktop>apps>beta apps (on the left pane) and choose Photoshop (Beta).

After you install it open your image and select your subject you will need to invert your selection (shift+ctrl+I) and then go to filters>neural filters and choose “Backdrop Creator”. You will need to download this tool the first time and then you can start using it.

You have two options – you can enter a text prompt and it will look in its database and try and match your text to an existing background. The other option is to click on popular prompts and try and see what other users have been playing around with.

It will show you 3 options on the side and you can click on the icon on one of them to see more from the same “style”. You can choose several ones by clicking on them and it will create a high-definition version of them to be applied to your image you can choose to create a layer with each version so you can either pick the best, mask/combine them together. Pretty cool.

While this new feature is still very much in beta and might improve before it arrives in the release version of Photoshop we would really like to see Adobe adding a simple one-click operation that will allow the user to choose the subject and go into the replacement feature without any extra steps (selecting the subject, inversing the selection and going into the neural filters).

You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips in our LensVid Lightroom section. You can more videos of Anthony Morganti here on Lensvid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.