My colleague Ian attended Adobe MAX last week, and came back to the office excited about the new features Adobe has been developing. There's been a lot of buzz around tools such as Adobe's new image rotation tool and Illustrator's new AI tools, but some of the less shouty, headline grabbing tools may actually be more important to artists.
Project Know How is one such tool. With content credentials, information about an image or video can be built in to its creation so that this info can be accessed by anyone at a later date. This enables artists to get recognition for their work, something which is vital in the online age. The speaker Shruti Agarwal at Adobe Sneaks described these content credentials as "a nutrition label for your content" (watch the video below).
Shruti first of all showed off a Chrome extension that enables you to see any content credential information that's embedded in images or videos. She also said that Adobe's Content Authenticity web app will be available in beta soon.
The Sneak Shruti described was like a reverse image search, but for videos. She uploaded a video and used "video fingerprinting" technology to find the source for that video and see the content credentials associated with it.
She then showed how you can upload a short clip of a video and find the longer original video, the software can then show you where the clip appears in the video as well as show the differences between those videos.
This doesn't just work digitally. Another cool thing was how you can take a picture of piece of physical art and also scan it to find out if any content credentials have been added to that artwork.
The usefulness of this of course depends on how many people are actually adding these content credentials when they create their artwork. But if everyone using Adobe software started adding these, and it really is that easy to find them, then this demonstrates a smart way for creatives to protect their work, and is a really important step forward for artists, perhaps more so than other headline-grabbing tools.
For more from Adobe MAX, you can also explore Adobe's Project Concept AI and the "ton" of new 'creator-first' tools announced.
