AN INTRODUCTION TO NEURAL FILTERS

Ashok Kandimalla has been in the photographic field for over three decades and has extensive experience in both film and digital photography. Being an electronics engineer by profession and a photographer, he possesses a unique and deep insight into the technical aspects of digital photography and equipment. He has published more than a 100 articles on photography and some of his writings have also been published in the well-known international magazine Popular Photography. An avid collector of photographic books and vintage cameras, Ashok has a keen interest in the history of photography and a passion for sharing his knowledge on photography through teaching and writing. He is the only Indian photographer to be featured on the Nikon Centenary website. He is presently working as a Management and Engineering consultant. He can be reached at [e-mail].

- Ashok Kandimalla

Artificial Intelligence (or AI for short) is a new buzzword that you encounter everywhere. Its application is widespread from medical diagnosis to self-driving cars, banking and even warfare. In many cases, we may not even know that the solution offered to us was underpinned by Al. As you would expect Al has already made its appearance in photography. Several advanced cameras use it for subject detection and software powerhouses like Adobe have started to use it in their post-processing applications like Lightroom and Photoshop.

Those who are using these applications must have used 'canned' processing options. These are called by Adobe as 'Profiles' (Picture 1) and give you a variety of choices like vibrant, portrait, cross-processing, monochrome, sepia, etc. These are presented as thumbnails to you.

Profiles are not to be confused with Presets or Actions that users can themselves create. The latter two are a group of settings that are applied in one go (like a macro), but, they do not take into account the nature of the image or its contents. In other words, these are 'dumb'! Though the names may sound similar, the technology behind Profiles is very different and highly sophisticated. Profiles operate under the control of Sensei which is an Al engine developed by Adobe.

Many of you are already familiar with 'Filters' that are available in Photoshop. A very popular filter for example is the 'Unsharp Mask'. As time has progressed, filters have become increasingly complex and sophisticated. An example is the Adaptive Wide Angle filter which requires intensive processing and hence a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is needed for execution. There is even the Camera Raw filter that gives almost the same functionality as the Adobe ACR (which is nearly the same as the Develop module of Lightroom Classic) but operates as a filter.