I Asked Photoshop AI to Zoom Out Infinitely. Here’s What Happened. 

Are you telling me one man built this entire youtube channel from scraps in a CAVE?

I don’t need photoshop, I expand myself with McDonalds

Aren't you afraid people will just watch the video in reverse and find your cave ?

Quick technique for the expansion to be perfectly smooth : use an expression on the scale property of the layers and type in "[100,100]*Math.pow(3,-value)" where you replace "value" by a link to a slider control effect, varying from 0 to 100.

The weird thing about this, and I've tried it, is that after _200_ expansions, you will end up outside a Chuck E Cheese in San Bernardino. Every time. The same Chuck E Cheese. And it's actually there, I found it on the map, at least, last time I checked.

14:30 What flat-earthers think will happen if you gave them the best Nikon camera.

I remember seeing this "infinite" zoom effect in Contact (Zemeckis, 1997, film's opening sequence) and in Limitless (2011). I think it was also used in other films, but hey, at those times and without the incredible tools we have now, it was already stunning!

Now Joe is 1/1000 the size of his mom.

Now we know where Joe's secret hideout is... In a cave, in a mountain, at the bottom of the sea, in the middle of the universe, in a rock, in a desert, in a road, in a pebble, in a bay on the side of a cliff, in a lagoon

I like the "stuttering" effect because it lets you keep track of how big each expansion is (or how many there are). It is very trippy though, I'm glad it wasn't much longer than it was.

Dude. I see and understand the smoothness factor you weren't 100% happy with, but syncing it with that music beat made the world's best lemonaid out of the lemons you were given. Nicely done!

Fun! I’m an editor and dabbling more and more in Photoshop and After Effects. I was chatting with a colleague the other day about an endless zoom out video shared by NATO that was breaking my brain. I wonder if the finger pinch zoom out helps avoid that stutter-step problem your friend had. Lastly - have you ever done a video about early “photoshop”? Like photo manipulation done in the time of early photography? Like those famous photos of Grant and Lincoln at civil war battlefields (but it’s actually their heads were cut out and placed on a person in the shot) or cards displaying “mediums” performing their talents (like ectoplasm coming from nostrils - although maybe that’s a very different video). Good stuff, keep it up Joe!

To be honest, the app "zoom out" looks like a pre-generated effect, with your photo placed in the middle. There is barely any overlap or continuation of the original photo - it immediately went cyberpunk for no reason at all.

🤯 what do you mean that's not an actual photo of a wooly mammoth !?!?! 😂😂😂😂

The stutter is absolutely fire. Great combo with the music 👌

Man this legitimately messed with my eyes. I looked down at my dinner right after and it freaked me out a bit.

Right after the zoom, just when he says "Is my face all swirly now", stare at something in the room other than the screen and it will swell up bigger and bigger. Joe has effected your brain.

There is a huge debate in universities right now about how to handle AI because it’s too easy for students not to learn the information being presented in classes and use AI to cheat on assignments instead. My professor was agonizing over the fact that she may need to start doing oral exams with students 1 on 1 in order to combat AI.

WOW Joe! That video is haunting knowing you are always in the middle of the shots👍. A few frames made me think the image was going to fold over on itself. I think you owe your good friend something better than a few beers. Great show!

Mark, thank you for the time you put in on this. That's really above and beyond. Joe, thank you for testing this and the time you committed. It was fun!

Good lord I’ve never made it to a video 37 seconds after it came out the oven. I’m gonna need the oven gloves.

For AI to put you in a cave, as if you lived in a cave or under a rock was beautiful. It knows us humans too well

Towards the end, I was reminded of a Mandelbrot Fractal. Glad that you are doing something JUST FOR FUN!! ❤

Dude the zoom out was FANTASTIC! Editing was awesome, great music choice, gave me chills ❤️

Scaling tip! In After Effects you can parent all your objects to a Null object, and scale only that. Think of it like a train pulling all the railcars that are attached to it, but you only need to animate the train. Essentially you create your null object, it will be auto centered. Parent your first photo to the Null. Now add your second photo on top, set the blend mode to Difference. Scale your Null down to where you see the photos align. Now parent Photo 2 to the Null. Import Photo 3, repeat the process. You’ll have to animate opacity of the overlaying layer from 0 to the 100 during the zoom to make the transition be smooth. Also set your layers back from difference to normal between each new layer setup. Null objects are the best!

9:25 - Some of those Hand hallucinations are fantastic. 🤣 You owe your friend more than a few beers for composing that zoom sequence. That was awesome.

That might be the coolest thing i have seen in a while Joe.

Should try turn these into a infinite zoom vid so you get from weird thing to landscape to rock to cave to bomb shelter to you or smthn

Far out man i was not expecting that swirly face thing haha... i was like dude did you know i was not 100% sober right now? Haha

The interesting thing to me was that actual expansion seemed to stop very quickly, replaced by backing off. In other words, instead of zooming out it moved away from the subject in z space. Especially in the one you did in Photoshop, I kept waiting to see the curvature of the Earth, followed by the entire planet, then the rest of the solar system, etc. But nothing like that happened - instead it just showed more landscapes entering the picture at basically the same scale.

At one point the beat of the music matched up with the studder which did work for that short period. Cool trip bro!

This is truly amazing, I am probably on the same skill level as you Joe. Thank you for sharing this. I can't image the work involved for you both.... Awesome!

Im so tired of hearing advanced algorithms being called A.I. by big tech to market them. How about a video explaining the difference?

I'm into photography and the Generative Fill tool on Photoshop is very useful. While I find the generation of an image via prompt (ala Midjourney or Firefly standalone) to be underwhelming and a novelty, the ability to take my own photos and improve them with the tool is a game changer. Usually it's just dealing with a distracting element or removing tourists from a landscape photo of a rock arch in Utah. But there's also fixing the edges and crops. but like I said, there's nothing fulfilling about generating an image from a text prompt. Sure, I can generate a flawless portrait, but the experience of finding someone to be my model and having an actual human interaction during the shoot process is deeply fulfilling. AI is going to flood the world with disposable, endless images and music and text. Because of that, work created by actual humans will gain scarcity and there's always value in scarcity.

The ideal case: you end up recreating the 'Royksopp - Eple' music video

I appreciate this video. As much as this term upsets some people I know, this is one of those "how the sausage is made" videos and I'm glad these get posted. 5:41 Even the lighting is decent.. 6:32 Is that a fridge to the right, or some sort of post-apocalyptic "life-pod"? 7:02 It's looking more and more like some sort of WWIII era self-sustaining bunker.

You did a reasonably good job of covering why firefly is different from the other generative AI platforms, however there’s one thing you didn’t mention, and it’s sort of important. After complaints, Adobe did provide payment for contributors to Adobe stock. It’s unclear if that Money will be repeated, or if it’s just a one time payment. Also, after complaints, Adobe also included the ability to have your art removed from their training material if you want. However… If you remove your works from the training system, you can no longer sell your work on Adobe stock. What this means is that it’s kind of like a sort of extortion. If you want to make money off of one of the most popular stock services in the world, you have to allow AI to scrape your images and create competing work. For a lot of people, that’s going to be a very difficult decision. do you leave your work somewhere where it is the easiest to find, but risk helping this service make you obsolete? Or do you take your work off of the service, making it significantly more difficult for people to find your work? What’s more, I’m fairly certain that once the lawsuits about artist’s work being used in generative AI systems has been resolved, I would imagine that every stock photography site of any size will follow Adobe’s lead. While this is in theory a more ethical way to train a generative AI, the way that Adobe is doing it effectively forces artists to submit their work to make themselves obsolete. A better policy would be to allow artists to opt out but still sell their work. I would even consider limitations on either number of works, repetition of similar works, or some other reasonable limit to be fine so long as the artist could choose to not be included in the training, but still be able to sell on the platform. As of my writing this comment, I’m unaware that Adobe has made such a change. Additionally, it is still unclear if Adobe is going to pay artists more than once. At minimum, if they are going to require works to be used in training, there should be an ongoing payment for either every month or every year that an artist’s work is being used to train firefly.

Always learn something intriguing when I watch Mr. Joe Scott. Keep up the great work/content! Great channel!

As an artist who has used all traditional media, especially airbrush for over 3 decades, including Photoshop since the early 90's, I have no intention of using Ai features and have avoided even checking them out. I work on my pieces down to the pixel with brush and pen tools as though I'm using what I call analog techniques which is how I differentiate traditional methods from the digital. To me it's just a cheat, as for me "Artists that can, make art while those that cannot, use Ai".

Mad respect for the efforts!

Joe's office is his man cave. So putting him in a cave makes sense. That last expansion was cool! I was expecting it to end up showing the entire Earth.

I should have listened when told not to drop that Orange Sunchine in the early 70"s. But seriously, Joe is the only one that can keep me attentive when he slides into a commercial.

Hi Joe! I really liked this video! It's a very nice change from your usual way of presenting your videos and that felt both new and interesting! I still like the usual way just as much, so this is absolutely not a bash on it! :) The change was good in the way punctuation in a big chunk of writing is good!

That was a very interesting idea and video, cheers to you and Mark for putting it together for us

That phone app thinks your studio is in Night City.

The stagger/stutter actually works well when synced up to music! imo.

Just a heads up you can hold shift + alt while scaling something so have it scale from the center equally, alt just scales from the center in general. That will speed you up even more! Also as for the expansion thing, it's because you manually moved the picture to the middle and it doesn't seem like you had grid snapping turned on. If you turn on snapping and use the shift +alt trick it would be better. You could also then use Photoshop Actions to completely automate the whole process and Photoshop will just repeat it as long as you want. I can walk you through it all if you want! It's pretty satisfying to watch.

Thanks Joe, very interesting and some very good information on things to peruse.

As a life-long adobe addict and tech enthusiast, this video is like catnip And yes modern AI tools are terrifying

The infinite expand i feel is what you'd see in your last living moments. Or during the most heroic lsd or murshroom trip

I am a huge Adobe nerd, after effects being my favourite! I love your channel, such a treat to have an episode about Adobe hell yeh

Totally awesome! Now it might have been even cooler to have resolved on the original image, making an infinite loop.

The problem is our supply-side economic model is going to turn A.I against us all. The centralisation of wealth and power will be extreme.

I like how it turned into barn tin for a minute lol

This is an excellent visual example of what is going to happen as AI content becomes more ubiquitous, and new models are trained off that content. AI content feeding AI content....an AI content entropy.

Fun video. It's nice to see a bit of how you do your work. That AI graphics stuff is pretty amazing.

Goddaaamn! This was trippy. Very, very trippy.

Damn it, I wish RU-vid had a backward play option, the Zoom IN would have been epic!

Love this experiment, Joe! Also, I may have a solution for you relating to stitching your zoom together. I've been doing digital animation since '98, and I could see this being knocked out relatively easy in Adobe Animate... I'd build it backward (zooming in), and keep stacking layers as you would in Premiere or AE. There would be some slight scaling to fine tune, and an alpha drop (to mimic a cross dissolve on the seams). Export the above in an uncompressed video format, drop it in Premiere, reverse it, and add some time ramps to get a bit of dynamic flavor in zoom effect. Also, I think I'm stealing your idea and recording an action out of it. This will be fun to do with a ton of images. Great stuff as always, man!

This was a VERY interesting experiment. And it was basically zooming out. So cool.

I can’t honestly say that any of this stuff shows any signs of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. The photo edges are expanded using an algorithm that essentially copies what is already in the image. Later, larger, expansions are simply matching the image content as closely as possible to another image in a stock library of images. Given that the majority of images in photo libraries are landscapes of one sort or another, it is to be expected that all images will eventually expand into a landscape. So what we have is a complex algorithm and a huge library of images but certainly no intelligence necessary to produce these results.

This was a cool experiment. Thanks for sharing.🧑‍🔬

Joe you really do live in the middle of nowhere :D I like that at one point the blue sky changed to ocean and the expansion continued without interuption. Editing videos is a pain in the ass, I have nowhere the experience as you or your friend, but it makes me appriate videos more because of that

The expansion stuttering could be solved by pre composing the composition and time remapping the pre-comp. Would love to have a crack at it when I get the time to! Also, I don't think the AI imaging started with Dall-E, there was an earlier online tool where you could paint an image with basic colors, like using MS Paint, and then it would generate your painting into a "realistic" image. I remember you could do animals, landscape and for some reason.. purses. This was a couple years before Dall-E was revealed, and was most probably one of the earlier cases of AI imaging. Loved the video, Joe!

should've too a top down photo to see if it would expand into space and larger instead of a rolling landscape

To smooth the expansion, make sure that your seed images are exactly the same size and perfectly centred. Expand your first image by 200%. Start your zoom out, with your overlay next image expanded at 200% ready to CUT (not fade) in over the old when the old hits 100%. That way you might reduce the jittering you experienced in your first attempt.

Amazing!!! The final video came out great!

You do not need a copyright holder's permission to look at a copyrighted work. You need their permission to create and distribute copies of it.

Wow, that zoom out is awesome!

19:17 "Is it just training off of itself at this point?" Whenever it gives you three options to choose from, I suspect the choice is fed back for further training And so might be the usage (versus lack thereof) of the generated stock images

After watching this, everything looked like it was expanding, lol. Nice work!

I really, really enjoy this video style of "let's go on a journey of discovery with Joe"!

You can't say "I'm not a photophobia expert" and then drop the bombshell that you've been making your own thumbnails this whole time. Much smaller youtubers have dedicated thumbnail artists. That's insane! Excellent work.

I like the "wobble" effect very much in the video. I think I like the unintended effect better than a smooth zoom-out.

Eight minutes into this video… I love this so much! Very entertaining.

Everytime I've seen this expanding image effect, it had this wobble between transitions. In any case, your friend did a great job with this weird AI journey.

AI audio - did 1960s artist Tiny Tim singing "Fairies Wear Boots" by Black Sabboth with ukalalees. LAFFS BIG LAFFS!

Photoshop definitely has one of the most impressive real-life applications of neural nets so far. Really cool stuff, and I dare say jaw-dropping for a LOT of people on first introduction.

As I recall, the new ToS for PS and the ACS include allowing them to harvest your creative process and anything you make in the suite to train their Ai... so if you paint, it'll use your process to train Ai to do it the way you do it. Then, it pushes that out to it's other users. Meaning that your creative process and any assets you create are being taken, added to their Ai's dataset, and then reused when called upon by other users' prompts. Good or bad, it's something users should be aware of.

not me with a massive smile on my face as the zoom out played. Awesome video Joe! Love it.

I have heard that Firefly MAY not have been trained as ethically as they claimed. User beware! I choose not to use these products as an artist not just because of the ethics of the training (AND THE ENERGY COSTS?), but also the broader picture of propping up companies/industries that are trying to exploit artists and devalue our labor. I dont use Photoshop and am increasingly choosy about where I post my art.

Happy Monday! Also “All videos for thumbnails”? 1:50

14:31 - woah, dude! That was genuinely beautiful. Greatbtrack pick too.

You undersold that effect. It was awesome. I want to see it in reverse.

Use this comment if you in fact, did not know.

AI scares me.

You zoomed so far out you could see the brane layers! Awesomeness. Oh, yeah, you can do this in Midjourney with perhaps smoother results...

That was so cool Joe, so cool!♥♥

Amazing effect on the final edit!

09:23 - IF A COMPANY MADE a silicone '2 handed wrist - hand shaker' (bottom right of the 4 pics)... I'd PROBABLY buy it for a laugh! 🤔🤣🤣🤣 😎🇬🇧

Great job changing the title and thumbnail, that did it for me ;)

Nice. I love the last few frames where it turns into a corrugated Sheetmetal.

would love to see more of this with the zoom out effect! i think it would work a lot better if you didn’t expand the crop so large next time

It's like traveling backwards away from you... and then you end up pulling out of it all like some kind of Men In Black "the size of the world is relative" locker aliens scenario... and then it was like some kind of many worlds thing. Actually came out pretty cool.

for a smooth transition you want to scale the images exponentially rather than linearly since the size triples each iteration. It seems like that's what you were approximating with your curve in premiere, but of course doing it by hand won't be accurate enough. You'd need to mathematically define the curve. If the adobe programs don't have an option for that, I would write a python program to get the individual frames and then stitch them together into a video with ffmpeg.

To get rid of the stutter, you could cut the last frames of the expansion of each stitch and then use RIFE interpolation to smooth out the transition. you would get some artifacts, but most likely would work.

that is pretty amazing . Mad lad Marc

That stutter effect actually goes hard with the beat

11:52 You can also press and hold the "rope" simbol for every single image, and attach it to the first one, so that when you zoom out the first image continiously, all the othrr will too At that point just keyframe the zomming out in that one first layer chossing the velocity, curves and size until it looks good

The efects are properly WOW. Love that - zooming out into virtual (invented) reality - homm - oxymoron