Adobe “Moving Stills” Tech Automatically Adds Parallax Effect to Photos

What do you get when you combine Adobe’s content-aware tech with automated 3D-mapping and Ken Burns photo slideshows?

Adobe’s Moving Stills tech previewed at Adobe MAX this week gives us a sneak peek at the future of easy photo slideshows.

While this effect is easy enough to create manually with layers and the pen tool in Photoshop or After Effects, it’s still quite tedious and time consuming. And, if you have a stack of dozens or hundreds of images to edit, chances are that you’ll roll with a basic Ken Burns effect for your video project unless the budget and time are there for a more engaging effect.

Moving Stills has the potential to really change the game for editors. However, it’s not available yet and we don’t know when we’ll actually see a product available for editors to use. Moreover, I suspect the use cases will be limited and the results will vary from image to image in the early versions released in Adobe products, which is much like what we saw with early versions of content-aware fill. It was great when it worked but certainly was not a universal tool for every image.

Ideally, editors would be able to open a Moving Stills image/video up in After Effects with rotoscoped objects and layers available to fine tune. This would give users a massive head start in making a batch application of Moving Stills more useful and effective for a larger number of projects. The tech just isn’t going to automatically work every time so that you have professional results. In the above video, for example, you can see some artifacts along the balcony rail in the first image he demos the effect on. While the overall demo is amazing, the results shown won’t cut it for professional use and we’ll need the ability to fine tune edges for the 3D mapping and content fill areas where Moving Stills is actually creating new pixels.

Even with these caveats, Moving Stills is simply the amazing tech that we’ve come to expect from Adobe. I can’t wait to see the vision progress over the next few years and make this process faster and more accurate. We’ll all benefit from more engaging content created with Moving Stills.