Hands-On Windows 129 transcript

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0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
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 Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-on Windows. I'm Paul Theriot and this week we're going to take another look at photos and paint because I can't stop talking about these apps.

Ever since Microsoft started its big AI push now a couple of 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, 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 Renewer chipset, you will also get additional features and functionality in Windows 11 in specific apps that will run against the MPU in that chipset. 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 plus 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 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 features 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, um, the I'll start with photos, right, the photos app. So if I uh, 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, 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. Result. If you're using designers, you're creating a design of some kind. Maybe it's a you know, 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 thing. 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 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, 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 waterfront, 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. To me. It's kind of fascinating. 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 Phot 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 genitive. 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 pretty good it's. You can make the smallest still a little bit of a glitch in there. I might want to get rid of that, and you know, depending on, uh, how big the change is, it takes a, you know, a couple seconds. It's not not too bad. So that's actually. Yeah, that's pretty nice. Um, but there are these other tools here too as well. So restyle image this is one that debuted actually 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 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 axes, 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's no improvement in quality, right, 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'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 original version.

I will open that. Actually, let me just do it in my normal app here, because this goes full screen. So this is this image at 100% resolution. This is a 1080p monitor, so it doesn't really have much to go. So this is the bigger version, 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, twice as wide, twice as tall. I guess that's is that technically 4x, 2x, 4x, whatever it is, um, 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, um, not as, not as good, so pretty good, especially for something that works off of the mp array. It's not going out to the cloud to do that work, so to me that's that's not horrible, okay. So that is photos.

Now the other big photo editing app, or image editing app. Really. I think the distinction here is this app is typically used for non-photos, although not exclusively, whereas Photos is for photos. Microsoft has been adding little AI bits and bobs here and there for two years now, right. So we have this background removal, which works very effectively. We've shown that before. But now we're getting enough of these new features that they've decided to make a co-pilot menu over here to kind of hide them all, right. So co-creator was one of the original co-pilot plus PC features and actually maybe this would make more sense.

If I actually opened an image, I'll open another image of me as a little baby. So Co-Creator brings up this tab here on the side or a pane on the side and I can draw over here and it will. And then also I should say I can draw and or I can create this text prompt and it will apply these things together and impact the image over there. I'm not going to do that here, but, like the feature we looked at earlier for restyle image in photos, it has these different styles that you can apply as well. So there's all these different ways you can edit that image with Co-Creator.

Image Creator is a feature that is just available to anybody with paint. Right? This actually goes out and hits the cloud. You can see this little. This is a stack of change. If it's not clear what that is, you're using AI credits each month. If you have a Microsoft account, if you have a Microsoft 365 consumer subscription, you can do a certain number of these every month for free. So I've never actually run into the limit. So it seems like it's pretty liberal right now, but very interesting. But again, text-based prompt get the styles and you can create an image. This is not so much for editing this image, but rather for creating an image. Remove background is literally just this feature over here. It's just this here twice. So this is something available to all people with paint.

But generative erase is new and actually there's going to be a generative fill coming as well, which will add information to images that I don't have yet in this particular version of the app. So as app updates come out, I will eventually get that. But the idea behind generative fill is, I might say well, I want this thing to be. This is going to resize it. Yeah, no, I've got this empty space over here. I want this image to be widescreen fill to the right and then it will use the information in the photo to add to the photo and make something that looks like it was there in real life, which all I can do is talk about it because I can't do it yet. But you've seen things like this.

Generative fill is kind of an interesting idea, but generative erase is where you draw over parts of the image that you want to get rid of and you use this slider to determine the size. So this thing is like a really small little thing and it gets bigger as you go up on the slider. So, for example, I'm gonna make that a little smaller. Maybe I just want to get rid of this item here. Uh, in this case, I have to. It doesn't just do it like it does in photos. Apply it, does you know, thinking it's hitting the mpu and, you know, not too bad. Yeah, a little bit of a. That might have been just me clicking the wrong thing. I got into that little board game thing there, but I'll try it one more time. And you know we this is again magic eraser We've done this sort of thing on our phone. In this case, you know, maybe that's all I want to do.

I might want to go, and you know, remove other items in the background, but fascinating that this type of thing is just being made available for free in Windows now, right. So it's just that the feature set you're going to see will vary depending on what kind of computer you have. So again, looking at the capabilities here image creator and remove background Every PC is going to get that. But if you have a co-pilot plus PC, you will have now co-creator. That's already there. And then generative fill and erase are both coming soon. So pretty cool, right. And then I would assume these things are just going to keep improving over time. So it seems like every three to six months we start getting this new batch of features.

Microsoft talked about the things I just showed you Originally in late 2024, they're starting to roll them out in the Insider program in early 2025. And I would imagine by mid-2025, they'll just be broadly available for everyone, so you can look forward to that, all right. Well, thank you for watching. I hope you found this interesting. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv slash hrw. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members.