The words “generative AI” are on everyone’s lips at the moment. These technologies can create text, images, or video clips from simple prompts, and could change the media landscape as we know it. Adobe certainly thinks generative AI is worth further investigation, and is putting its marketing muscle behind Generative Fill, a new Photoshop feature that allows you to edit or manipulate your images in entirely new ways.

You can see for yourself how it works in the image below: drag the slider left and right to see the before and after. The blank areas were filled in–which is to say, extrapolated from what’s in the rest of the image–by Photoshop’s artificial intelligence. Thanks to technologies like this it has never been easier to transform images in portrait format into landscape format.

Generative Fill is still officially in beta. We’ve been using the Photoshop beta for several weeks now, and continue to be surprised by it on an almost daily basis. Some of the results are incredibly realistic. Others are so inaccurate they’re funny.

Installing and using the Photoshop beta

If you’d like to install the Photoshop beta, you’ll need a valid license for Adobe Creative Cloud and an active internet connection, as the Generative Fill feature requires cloud processing. Once you’ve got a license, open Creative Cloud and select Beta Apps in the lefthand tab. Select this and you can then install the Photoshop beta and start using it straight away.

Save 30% on Adobe Creative Cloud

Photoshop Generative Fill: Limitations

With great power comes great responsibility. Fortunately, Adobe knows that you can do great damage with AI, so there are many rules to maintain “the high quality of creative content.” Anyone who does not follow the Adobe Generative AI beta user guidelines risks having their account blocked.

Adobe prohibits the use of generative AI for certain purposes:

• Pornographic material or explicit nudity
• Hateful or highly offensive content that attacks or dehumanizes a group based on ethnicity, national origin, religion, serious disease or disability, gender, age or sexual orientation
• Graphic violence or gore
• The promotion, glorification, or threats of violence
• Illegal activities or goods
• Self-harm or the promotion of self-harm
• Depictions of nude minors or minors in a sexual manner
• Promotion of terrorism or violent extremism
• Disseminating misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive content that could lead to real-world harm
• Personal or private information of others (like full name, home address, phone number, email address, government-issued IDs, or any other information relating to an identifiable individual)

Photoshop Generative Fill: How to get started

The Generative Fill AI saves time. A lot of time. It retouches unwanted picture elements, enables new perspectives, and creates new things, all via text command. The possibilities are limitless. You simply select the area, using the appropriate selection tool (shortcut: M), in which the AI is to do its work.

To fill in the rest of an image, you’ll want to leave the search field blank to let Adobe’s AI scan the image and fill in the blank area. Photoshop then creates three different variants for you to choose from.

You can cycle between the different options. If you don’t like any of the options, you can try the process again or add some descriptive words to the search box.

Photoshop Generative Fill: False realities and extraordinary landscapes

At first glance, this appears to be a normal picture. At a second glance, you notice minor inconsistencies, such as the door handles and the house’s windows in the background. Things aren’t quite right.

Photographed Neuschwanstein Castle in portrait orientation, but want something more panoramic? No problem, Photoshop will fill in the rest.

Of course, the results have nothing to do with reality. Anyone familiar with the surroundings of Neuschwanstein Castle will recognize that the content created by the AI is artificial. It’s an image manipulation. But to the untrained eye, it’s pretty spectacular.

Photoshop still has big problems with people and animals. While the dog in the image below looks quite realistic, it’s immediately obvious that something is wrong with the man’s face.

Hands also pose a problem for Photoshop’s AI. The fingers are often distorted and look unnatural and occasionally have extra digits.

Realistic textures and large-scale AI content can also be problematic. It depends entirely on the subject. While AI can handle images from nature well, architecture is evidently more of a challenge.

AI manipulation is easiest to spot if you know the original image, of course, but large-scale changes can also be obvious. Small changes are the key to success. Would you even notice if we only extended the image by a few pixels? The AI proves particularly handy in cases where, for example, you want to turn a 3:2 image into a 16:9 one.

In another test, we took an image of a church tower (left), cropped it (center), and then set Photoshop to reconstruct the tower (right). Other than the church clock, the result is quite respectable.

This article originally appeared on Macwelt and was translated and edited by David Price.

Professional Software

The Mac is an obvious candidate if you’re looking for a computer with which to make music. The choice can be overwhelming, though, with devices ranging from a few hundred dollars or pounds to thousands more than you might spend on a car. In this article we compare them all and explain which Mac is right for you.

There was a time when music production required hiring a studio, but technology moves fast. During the 1980s, there was a revolution in analog home recording kit; then the 1990s saw home computers gradually take over. Today, you can do everything from recording pop songs to mastering movie soundtracks on a Mac. But which Mac? That’s the question we’re here to answer!

Why use a Mac for music production

Whether you choose a Mac or PC for music production is largely down to the platform you prefer and who you’re collaborating with. However, there are a few reasons why musicians who choose to use Macs do so.

One reason is the simple fact that Macs are incredibly easy to use, so musicians don’t get sidetracked trying to set things up or fix problems. The recent addition of the M-series of Apple-made chips also means that they are very powerful, often outperforming Intel-equipped PC equivalents. Mac laptops are also slim and light, with superb build quality – a benefit if you are carrying them around to gigs as well as using them in a studio. 

Best Mac configuration for music production

If you are going to make music with a Mac then there are a number of things that you need to consider. We’ll run through each of these below to help you make your final decision.

Software

The software you use – your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) – is as arguably as important as the computer you choose. There are plenty of options available on macOS, which you can read about in our round-up of the best music recording software for Mac.

Two impressive packages you can only find on Macs are Apple’s own Logic Pro and its enthusiast-focused cousin GarageBand. (Read our Logic Pro and Garageband reviews.)

GarageBand is essentially an audio sketchbook, albeit a powerful one in the right hands. It’s great for quickly getting down the bones of songs or compositions, with plenty of support for plug-ins. We know of several professional musicians that use it for creating demos of ideas, which they can then share with other musicians in the early stage of writing. Best of all, GarageBand comes free with every Mac, just another good reason for using Apple’s computers to create your music.

When they want to get serious though, there’s a good chance they’ll switch to Logic Pro X, which is the far more powerful and feature-rich DAW.

RAM 

Music software is notoriously hungry for memory. A lack of RAM (in Apple terms this is referred to as Unified Memory) becomes a serious bottleneck in any pro-level project. You’ll be able to run fewer instruments and fewer effects; you’ll spend more time rendering and less time doing things live.

Consider 16GB your minimum. This shouldn’t be difficult, all Macs and MacBooks can be equipped with 16GB RAM – and we recommend that you do configure your Mac to at least this level, if not more. Note that M2 and M1 Macs ship with 8GB RAM as standard. The M2 Macs can be updated to 16GB RAM and top out at 24GB, while M1 Macs could only support up to 16GB RAM. If you think you might need 32GB RAM then you will need to upgrade to the M2 Pro (an option in the MacBook Pro or Mac mini), which comes with 16GB as standard and supports 32GB. For 64GB or 96GB RAM, you need the M2 Max (an option for the MacBook Pro or Mac Studio). And for 128GB or 192GB RAM you’ll need to look at the M2 Ultra (in the Mac Studio or Mac Pro).

Storage

Storage is likely to be an important factor in your decision. All Apple Macs use SSDs and have done so for many years now. This is a benefit because hard drives can be a bottleneck due to their relatively low speed compared to SSDs, and they can be noisy.

However, SSDs are far more expensive per GB than hard drives. Entry-level Apple notebooks have 256GB SSDs, but pro instrument and effects collections when installed can require hundreds of GB, and that’s before you even start to add your own music files. So you probably want a minimum of 512GB SSD with your Mac. Another reason to avoid the lower-capacity Macs is that we’ve found the smaller SSDs to be slower than their larger-capacity counterparts.

You must figure out what you’ll need, and whether assets will be stored internally or externally. External drives can be fine for large sample libraries and the like, especially when connected using Thunderbolt, but you then need to determine how to take everything with you if you’re a musician who works with people in many different locations. Cloud storage might be a good option here: check out our Best Cloud Storage Services for Mac.

Portability

Speaking of being at different locations, you must decide whether you need the Mac to be portable or not. If you’re always moving around, working with various musicians in different countries, a Mac Studio probably won’t fit in your hand luggage. But if you’re a solo musician who only ever creates music in a home studio, you could get more bang for your buck with a desktop machine such as the M2 Pro Mac mini.

If you are studio based you may think that you need an iMac so that you can take advantage of the large display, but you can plug in an external display to any Mac, so even if you had a laptop Mac you could happily use it with a 30-inch screen when you are at your desk.

Ports

You also need to consider the other kit you want to use. If you don’t have any extra kit (if all of your music-making happens inside a Mac) then this won’t be a concern, and, in theory, any Mac might do. But if you have a pile of audio interfaces, USB instruments, headphones, monitors, and other vital hardware, trying to get by the two USB-C ports found on the MacBook Air and entry-level MacBook Pro models will drive you to despair. (In which case you might want a USB hub to use with your new Mac).

Luckily in recent times, Apple has added more ports to its newest Mac laptops, so you will find SDXC, Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, and more on the side of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. The Mac mini and Mac Studio also have a nice selection of ports.

Processor

High-end audio work can be extremely processor intensive, especially when using professional plug-ins and effects. If your demands are great, you’re going to need a Mac with fairly serious processing power. Ergo, whichever Mac you decide to buy, avoid low-end models that seem to lurk in the line-up to enable Apple to say ‘from’ and use a lower price-tag in marketing material. That said, the current crop of entry-level Macs with their M2 Chips are proving to be quite formidable.

For the ultimate option turn to the MacBook Pro, Mac mini or Mac Studio with the M2 Pro or M2 Max. The M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio and Mac Pro might also appeal, but would likely be overkill.

Graphics

There’s also the question of the GPU. Historically, recording and editing audio didn’t utilize many graphics card resources, unlike 3D design and video editing. Things are more complicated these days as some audio software is GPU-accelerated. It’s also a factor should you require additional displays. Apple’s M2 Macs offer 8 or 10-core GPUS and should suffice in most cases.

If you think you will benefit from more graphics prowess then look to the 14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro (16 or 19 graphics cores) or the M2 Max (30 or 38 graphics cores). The Mac Studio and Mac Pro go further offering the M2 Ultra with 60- or 76-core GPU.

Display support

Speaking of external displays, note that if you want to plug in more than one additional display the standard M1 and M2 MacBooks won’t officially support more than one additional display (although there are ways around this, see: How to connect two or more external displays to Apple M1 or M2 Macs). The Mac mini, Mac Studio and all other MacBooks support a number of external displays. This could matter if you wish to use graphics with the music you play.

Best Mac for musicians

Mac, Professional Software

At the heart of every Apple device is an Apple processor. Apple has been using its own chips in its iPhones and iPads for some time, while the Mac lineup has finally completed its transition away from Intel chips. Every product Apple makes is powered by a home-grown chip.

What’s remarkable about Apple silicon is its performance and power efficiency. But all chips aren’t created equally. Understanding the performance differences between each chip will help with your buying decisions, especially when you’re deciding between iPhone 14 or MacBook models. Knowing how each chip performs gives you a better idea of what products to buy and whether or not it’s worth your money to step up to a higher model.

Let’s take a look at how the new processors compare with the rest of the processors in the iPhone, iPad, and Mac lineup and see how each performs and what that means to you. For the sake of consistency, we’ve used Geekbench 6.1 benchmarks. Here’s every chip and how the benchmarks compare with each other.

Updated 6/21/23 with Geekbench 6 scores and M2 Ultra score. To see these scores, click the pop-up menu under the title of each chart.

Every processor compared

Before we get into the individual processors, let’s let the chips fall where they may. We’ve only included chips in Apple devices that are still for sale and it’s a somewhat predictable chart, with the fastest Mac chips at the top, followed by a mix of iPads and iPhones. But there are still some fascinating results: owners of the iPad Pro can say their tablet is about as fast as a MacBook Air and that wouldn’t be much of a reach. And the difference between the $399 iPhone SE and the $899 iPhone 14 isn’t as huge as their price difference indicates.

Read about how Apple’s M1 and M2 processors compare to Intel in our Mac processor guide.

Apple’s Max chips have the same CPU configuration as the Plus versions; the key difference is the GPU. The Max can have double the GPU cores as the Plus, so its graphics performance is much improved.

The chip that started it all, the good ol’ M1, may seem slow compared to Apple’s more current chips—but that’s not to undermine Apple’s original Mac processor. Remember, the M1 blows past the Intel processors it replaced, resulting in a significant price/performance value.

CPUs and Processors, iPad, iPhone, Mac