Photoshop's new AI tool made my composite images look real in one click - and now I'm hooked (www.zdnet.com)

Adobe rolled Harmonize into the Photoshop beta: a one‑click AI tool that automatically matches lighting, color temperature, shadows and even reflections between a pasted element and its destination photo. Users install the Photoshop beta via Creative Cloud, remove a subject’s background with the Contextual Taskbar, then hit Harmonize to generate multiple harmonized variants. In hands‑on tests (product shots, toys, drones, and staged scenes) the tool reliably softened mismatched highlights, added coherent shadows and warmed/cooled tones so composites looked realistic at normal viewing distances. For the AI/ML community, Harmonize is a practical example of learned scene‑relighting and appearance transfer applied in a consumer tool: it infers global lighting and local shadow geometry to synthesize consistent photometric adjustments without re‑positioning or rescaling the pasted object. It speeds workflows for product photography and visual effects and exposes tradeoffs—minor fringing, some resolution loss, and imperfect local shadow detail on close inspection. Like other generative-features, it offers multiple generations and iterative refinement, pointing to continued improvement as models and training data evolve. The feature highlights both productivity gains and new UX/ethics questions around creative control, ease of manipulation, and expectations for photorealism in generated composites.