Adobe Comes For the Google Pixel 8’s Magic Editor With Project Stardust

Ahead of Adobe's annual Max conference, where the company behind Photoshop shows off new features coming to its content creation apps, it has teased a new tool, Project Stardust. Similar to the Magic Editor feature Google announced for the Pixel 8 on Oct. 4, Project Stardust can instantly disassemble a photo so users can re-arrange, erase and even replace whatever parts of it they want.

Adobe shared a sneak peek at Project Stardust earlier this week. The tool is already being compared to many of the automated photo editing capabilities on Google's latest smartphones, including Magic Eraser, which intelligently removes unwanted objects from a scene. Magic Eraser has been around since the Pixel 6, but the Pixel 8 upgrades it to Magic Editor, which can not only remove objects but also move them around.

In the short video tease, Aya Philémon, the Product Manager for Adobe's Project Stardust, demonstrates how the photo editor relies on object awareness to streamline the editing process.

A single click is all that's needed to reposition a yellow suitcase in an example photo, or delete it entirely. Project Stardust automatically crops out the suitcase so it can be moved around, removes the shadow it cast on the ground and fills in the missing area behind the bag. The results aren't perfect: there's still remnants of the suitcase's handle in a tourist's hand even after it's deleted. But that's quickly remedied by using Adobe's AI image generator to replace the hand with one holding a bouquet of flowers—something Google's Magic Editor can't do.

In another example, out of focus people in the background of a photo are automatically identified and removed by clicking a "Remove Distractors" button on a taskbar. The user doesn't need to identify which people in the scene to delete—Project Stardust determines which need to go automatically.

The last example demonstrates how Project Stardust's object awareness can easily change what a person in a photo is wearing by clicking on a specific garment and then describing what they should be wearing instead. An AI image generator (presumably Adobe Firefly) handles the rest, performing an outfit change with just a couple of clicks.

Adobe hasn't shared any info on when Project Stardust's capabilities will be introduced into the company's existing tools like Photoshop, or if it will be introduced as a standalone application with a streamlined and simplified interface of its own.