10 AI-Powered Tools to Boost Your Efficiency and Creativity
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the buzzwords of the decade. Here are some great AI-powered tools to help you work with visual content.
These technologies are improving people’s lives across many industries such as medicine, management, ecommerce, marketing, content creation, design, etc. Fortunately, robots can’t yet fully replace human beings and imitate their experience, good taste, mindset, way of decision making, and skills. AI technologies have become our ally that automates or facilitates some of the routine tasks and even helps to make decisions or find inspiration.
Below are several amazing AI-powered tools to find or create images for your projects, remove the background from a photo, enlarge the small image while improving the quality, create a color palette, design icons, and more. You can let them take care of the boring tasks to save some time and effort for creative ones.
Generated Photos — AI-Generated Faces
This tool will help you to avoid pitfalls when using stock photos with people for any purpose including medical ads, apps, websites, mockups, etc. Generated Photos offers a collection of AI-generated faces of every type, gender, and age. As these people have never existed you don’t have to worry about a model release, sensitive use clauses, or your competitors using them.
The gallery is searchable and has a large variety of filters and tags. Generated Photos also collaborates with Reallusion, a 2D and 3D animation software that creates a 3D head from the photo.
Free version limitations: Pictures are free for personal use for just a link back to the website. The free version includes low-quality photos with no transparent background. High-quality photos for commercial use are available via API services and subscriptions. The website provides monthly and yearly subscriptions and bulk downloads as paid options.
Rosebud.ai — AI-Generated Faces
Another tool that provides a huge database of virtual models. Like the previous one, it helps to avoid using the same stock models by multiple brands. According to Rosebud founders, their algorithms are capable of creating up to 25,000 diverse AI models.
Users can pick up the face from an extensive library and put it into a free stock photo or choose their own images. The web-based editor allows you to change age, gender, hair, smile, nose size, skin tone, and many other parameters by creating almost infinite combinations.
Free version limitations: The free plan includes only watermarked images and has a limited model library to choose from.
Photo Creator — Custom Photo Maker
Photo Creator by Icons8 is a free photo collage maker. It has a huge diverse library with masked elements, objects, backgrounds, and models to create unique custom photos. In addition to integrated elements, users can upload and use their own content. Another great feature is face-swapping powered by AI and ML, it changes a model’s face.
Free version limitations: Images are exported for free in JPEG. JPEGs are free to use for a link. On their website, Icons8 provides clear guidelines for setting a link. PSD format is offered under a monthly subscription which lets you tune up and edit images.
Everypixel — Relevant and High-Quality Free Image Search Engine
Sometimes you have to go through piles and piles of dated stock photos which are all the same until you find the one you need. Everypixel is an AI-powered tool for finding free high-quality images faster and easier. It indexes 21 free stock image websites with photos, illustrations, and vector files letting you search across all of them at once.
The images are described and tagged by the AI-powered Image Recognition algorithm to get better search results. Everypixel Aesthetics neural network ranks images based on their aesthetic value. Thus, the search engine picks out the best and most relevant images and puts them forward in the search results.
Free version limitations: Everypixel search engine is 100% free, but you can use it to find both free and paid images.
Let’s Enhance — Image Upscaling and Quality Improvement
Let’s Enhance website promises to “make your images marketable & your prints professional in a matter of moments”. Thanks to the smart algorithm it automatically enlarges small pictures without the image getting pixelated and corrects color, texture, and clarity. AI is trained on thousands of images to process the objects that are hard to recreate such as facial features or fine details like animal fur.
Let’s Enhance has 16x upscale and automated preset features for image improvement in a few clicks which is far faster and easier than upscaling with Photoshop. It is applied in printing, ecommerce, real estate, and other businesses where high-quality images are the key to success.
Free version limitations: 5 images are free to upscale up to 256 megapixels. To get more credits for the image processing you can choose one of the subscription plans or make a one-time payment. Bulk processing is also available via API.
Remove.bg — Automated Image Cutout Service
Remove.bg’s name speaks for itself. It is a free automated tool for removing background from photos that will spare you from this tedious work. Remove.bg handles challenging conditions and delicate structures such as hair very well.
However, it is not perfect and the cutout may be less clean for the objects with fuzzy edges, so you may need to refine it manually. Though it’s still faster than removing backgrounds by hand. Remove.bg has a mobile app, the extension for Adobe Photoshop, and plugins for Figma and other popular platforms. Windows, Mac and Linux desktop versions have a butch image processing feature.
Free version limitations: With a free account you will get 1 full-sized image, unlimited free low-quality “preview images” up to 0.25 megapixels if you use the website, and 50 preview images per month via API and apps. The free version is recommended for personal use.
ClipDrop — AR Copy Paste
This innovative Augmented Reality solution from a machine learning company Init ML works as copy and paste for the real world. It allows you to catch any objects from your environment with the phone camera and extracts them from the background.
Then a user can drop them straight into Photoshop for further use. The mobile app is available on Android and iOS. ClipDrop also captures and recognizes text and has Windows and macOS versions which let you clip out the images directly from the desktop, then drag and drop them to the project you’re working on.
Free version limitations: The app offers 10 free clips to try it out.
Colormind — Color Palette Generator
Making color palettes for a freshly started project is not that easy. Fitting it into branding guidelines is even trickier. Instead of following your intuition and sampling hundreds of colors, you can rely on neural networks.
Colormind is the color palette generator using deep learning. Its algorithms are trained on color schemes from photographs, movies, and popular art. With one click it will create a random color palette for your inspiration. Or, if you already have a specific color or some good combination in mind, try locking it in the palette. The tool will automatically fill in the gaps with matching colors. It also extracts a palette from any image.
Free version limitations: Colormind has an API, that is free for personal and non-commercial use.
Fontjoy — Font Pairing
Too contrasting and too similar fonts won’t look good together. Using opposite font types creates a sense of haphazardness while pairing very similar ones makes a conflict. Based on machine learning, Fontjoy will help you solve this dilemma and automatically create perfect font pairing.
This simple tool consists of the text that demonstrates fonts combinations and a contrast-setting slider. Just click the button to generate random combinations or find a match for a specific font. You can also scroll through the top font pairings and change the fonts manually.
Free version limitations: None.
Autodraw — Fast Drawing Tool
As an experiment by Google Creative Lab, Autodraw combines machine learning algorithms with the artist community efforts. Autodraw’s suggestion tool predicts what users are trying to doodle and offers the best matches for their outlines from hundreds of drawings created by professional artists and designers. After clicking on a suggestion, you can choose colors, add text, shapes, and download the image as a PNG file.
Though Google created Autodraw to make drawing more accessible and fun for everyone, it may be especially helpful for creating icons for UI design. Even more, there is the Autodraw plugin for Sketch, so designers are able to make icons right in the editor’s interface.
Free version limitations: None. All the images are under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license that means they are available for use in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercial.
Conclusion
As a matter of fact, none of these tools is something that can replace designers and creators in their work process. Instead, they save their time and effort to spend them on the creative part of work.