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Paul Thurott (0:00)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, I'm going to take a look at some of the new AI image editing features that are coming to Copilot plus PCs in photos and Paint.
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Paul Thurott (0:17)
This is twit. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows, Paul Thurat. And this week we're going to take another look at finding Photos and Paint because I can't stop talking about these apps. Ever since Microsoft started its big AI push now a couple years ago, we've seen update after Update in Windows 11. So we're getting things in Paint photos elsewhere in the system notepad we talked about recently. But there are different waves of these things and there are of course, different ways of deploying them as well. So people who just have Windows 11 and kind of a normal PC will get some set of functionality. Those AI features run against the cloud. But if you have a Copilot Plus PC running a Snapdragon X ARM chipset or a AMD Zen 5 chipset, or an Intel Lunar Lake or newer chipset, you will also get additional features and functionality in Windows 11 in specific apps that will run against the MPU in that chipset. Right. It will run locally. It doesn't have to go to the cloud. So there's this set of features. It's a little complicated, but if you think back to the initial set of AI features in Copilot PC that impact images from last year, co creator and Paint is a good example of one. Restyle images and then the background there's blur and removal and replace, I think as well in Photos. So there's some interesting kind of AI capabilities in these, you know, image editing apps that are built into Windows. And now there are going to be more. So we're going to take a look at the, the features that are coming soon as I record this. So probably sometime in the first half of 2025 to Windows 11 PCs, that or Windows 11 on Copilot plus PCs. Okay. Okay. So the. I'll start with Photos, right? The Photos app. So if I, I showed this in a recent episode as well. But I can open this image of my dad and I with Photos. The Photos app is what it is. But. And if you go into Edit, you will recognize some features that have been around for a little while, like this background blur removal, replace, like I said earlier, and then some new ones we'll talk about in a second. But there's also this toolbar that's happening out here. They've been adding more and more apps up here, this one is just about brand new. As I record this in early 2025, it says edit with Designer. And what this does is it loads the Microsoft Designer web app inside of photos, a fairly complete version of it, too. You could also go to the web and upload this image and do these things there. But there's a whole set of AI editing features that are unique to this app. Selective Edit, Auto Enhance is a fairly obvious one. There's things like the background features which are just duplicates of what is already in photos. But there's other things in here as well. So you can, because this is a design tool, you can add stickers and images and do other things. Because the end result, if you're using designers, you're creating a design of some kind. Maybe it's a, you know, a, a handout or something, or it, more likely it's going to be a social media post or whatever it might be. So this is actually built into the app now, which is kind of interesting. So instead of just exporting it to another app, which in this case is on the web, they're using this integration model just to bring it right into the app. So that's pretty cool. There's also this little guy down here. So this is that visual search with Bing. I did show this off in a previous episode, actually. That begs the question, let me go to a different image so we can have a different result here, so I can do a visual search. This is again, me and my dad. Sorry to keep showing that, but. And it's opening in the wrong browser tab. So let me just bring that guy over here. So this is the search results. So again, the, this is me, small child, my dad and at a water fountain, probably in Boston, I would imagine. And here are similar images of a small child, usually not with a dad, always, but at least a small child at a water fountain. Right. And I, I, I still struggle in a way in my own existence to understand, like what I would use this for. Exactly. But it's, it's in certain use cases, you know, you're looking for particular image. I have this idea, or I have an image. I don't want to use this exact image, but I want something like this. This is where this visual search thing comes into play. It's, it's, to me, it's kind of fascinating. I, like I said, I'm not sure how I would use this for work exactly. But it is amazing how many images there are that are a lot like this. So that's pretty cool. Okay. So going back into the editor experience. So this is the Photos app editor, right? A lot of this stuff has been here for a long time. It's, you know, we've used this for a while. I skipped over this one earlier. So this is Generative Erase. This is the type of thing you see like Magic Eraser on a pixel. Apple Intelligence on an iPhone has a similar feature. Samsung has a feature like this. So the idea here is that you want to erase something that's in the image, like this person here in the background. So it does its little thing and it's, you know, it's pretty good. It's. You can make the smallest look. Still a little bit of a glitch in there. I might want to get rid of that. And, you know, depending on how big the change is, it takes a certain, you know, a couple seconds. It's not. Not too bad. So that's actually. Yeah, that's pretty nice. But there are these other tools here too, as well. So. Restyle Image. This is one that debuted late last year. So we've talked about that. But still kind of cool. You can go over to these style choices. It does its little, you know, AI Halo effect. Now we have an impressionistic version. It looks like an oil painting or some type of painting version of that image. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I don't actually want that, but. But still very interesting. So there's a lot of different styles you can play with. And then there is this new feature called Super Resolution. So this is particularly good for this kind of an image. This one is actually not super small, but a lot of these scans I have like this were things my dad did. They're lower resolution. The photos we take now on our phones are almost an order of magnitude bigger and of course, higher quality as well. And this gives you a way to upscale this image to a higher resolution. I found that if you go way up on the scale, it takes a really long time. So I'll just do a double size. So it's doubling the resolution in each axis. And that happened very quickly. Now, this is something I see fairly universally. Right. So you can see the original on the left. You can see the upscaled version, the super resolution version on the right. To me, these are identical. So there is no improvement in quality. Right. It's not. It's not correcting the little dots on the red jacket there. It's not fixing things, but it is creating a bigger version of this, which would then be better to work off of because, you know, you're not losing any quality at least. Right. These look to me identical. So I'm going to save that as a copy. I will call that sr. And if you go out to the file system here, let me just get them next to each other. So you've got the. The original version. I will open that. Actually, let me just do it. My normal app here. Because this goes full screen. Yeah. So this is this image at 100% resolution. Right. This is a 1080pmonitor, so it doesn't really have much to go. So this is the bigger version. Right. And what I can do with this is just zoom in. Again, it's not doing anything with the quality and I would want to go in here and probably edit some of these things. But this is twice as wide, twice as tall. I guess that's technically 4x, 2x 4x, whatever it is. But it's. It's a much bigger image. And so as this thing zooms in, the quality is just as good as it was when it started. Whereas with the original, if I zoomed in, you would start to see the blotches and all the little artifacts and stuff. So not as. Not as good.