I really enjoy a good AI gone wrong. My favorite being when Keenai put a photo of my sister and I under the label birds (Instantly thinking of Notebook "if you're bird, I'm a bird")

As I was trying to research the best method for smoothing skin, I came across Neural Filters. As someone who really only uses the RAW processor to batch edit photos and rarely actually opens up an individual file in PhotoShop, this was all new to me!

The skin smoothing feature is actually pretty impressive, and I do like that it focuses on the face as opposed to trying to make your whole image look soft and glowing. For my use case, the person actually wanted smoothing on their legs, so my best option was still to use the quick selection tool and then use the RAW editor to decrease the texture.

But another student athlete wanted some more significant changes to smooth the skin on their face and bring down their hair.

I thought I'd see if this was something the neaural filters could do. I saw the Beta of "Smart Portrait" a filter that processes images in the cloud. The featured options are happiness, facial age, hair thickness, and eye direction. Between the regular "Skin smoothing" and the beta "Hair thickness" it was actually quite a quick edit to get something the student-athlete was pleased with. 

For my own curiosity, I wanted to test out the "happiness" filter. What does AI think makes a person look happier. I tested it on the student-athlete's image and was impressed if not surprised, at how it altered their smile. Although this is editorial use, I figured it wouldn't be kind to use a student-athlete's image as a sample, especially a student-athlete who is already insecure (as they put it) about their image. So instead I am posting the Beta test of Colin and I on Beta. Because it's hilarious.

Somehow we went from our regular smiles, to me having some spooky looking teeth and my glasses somehow also getting involved. Colin's face got a little more saturated and his lips took on quite a rouge.

This might work well on standard and true portraits, but I can see why it's still listed as in Beta.