Cloudinary’s New Generative AI Features Help Brands Maximize Impact of Images

Cloudinary, the image and video technology platform that powers many of the world’s top brands, today announced generative AI enhancements to its Programmable Media API and enterprise digital asset management (DAM) solution, Cloudinary Assets. Cloudinary’s generative AI capabilities offer the easiest and most powerful way to edit images at scale, enabling technical and non-technical users to accelerate time to market for their most valuable assets while improving employee autonomy and productivity. The company also revealed the results of its first independent web developer survey on the demand for and practical application of evolving AI capabilities.

Study: Developers trust AI to improve productivity

Advanced image editing and optimizing assets for accessibility and SEO often leads to resource bottlenecks, costly reshoots, and time-intensive manual editing processes. Generative AI can alleviate these barriers. In a recent independent survey*, 58% of web developers said they viewed AI tools as “very” or “extremely” trustworthy, citing improved efficiency and productivity (68%) as a top benefit. The survey also found that 64% use generative AI tools to streamline the development process, 54% for workflow automation, and 99% believe these tools have the potential to improve the developer experience overall.

Generative AI Upscale for Faces boosts impact of user images

Cloudinary’s new Generative AI Upscale for Faces capability offers a clear example of generative AI’s impact. Images with faces have been found to attract attention and build trust at higher rates and are the most important element of any image in which they appear. Similarly, user generated content (UGC) is particularly valuable for increasing conversions, but ensuring necessary quality of human subjects when using those assets can be a challenging and time-intensive proposition.

Generative AI Upscale for Faces solves this by leveraging advanced facial recognition technology to detect faces and automatically optimize the image to ensure the faces remain visible and in focus, even when the original photo needs to be cropped and/or enlarged. This vital feature reduces the risks associated with UGC or other assets when the brand has no control over the original quality, improving usability, and accelerating time to market.

Generative Restore now available for non-technical users

Cloudinary is also making more generative AI features available to marketers and creatives with the next update to the Studio feature of its enterprise digital asset management (DAM) platform, Cloudinary Assets. Studio users, who already enjoy no-code access to Generative Fill, Replace, and Recolor capabilities will be able to use Generative Restore to automatically improve and optimize many low-quality images at once. Studio users also gain the ability to build repeatable, automated workflows to apply these transformations and deploy the upgraded assets across channels with confidence.

Cloudinary’s proven generative AI features become even more effective

Cloudinary continues to enhance its existing set of generative AI tools, including Generative Fill, Replace, Restore, Remove, and Recolor. Since launching earlier in 2023, these tools have already proven instrumental in simplifying complex image editing tasks for hundreds of customers, delivering substantial time savings while ensuring high-quality outputs. The latest feature enhancements include:

• Improved overall performance for generative features;
• New input parameters for fine-tuning requests; and
• Feature-specific enhancements, such as better shadow removal for Generative Replace and Remove.

“We have curated the best of generative AI to bring practical and powerful solutions to our customers to automate and streamline image editing at scale,” said Nadav Soferman, co-founder and chief product officer at Cloudinary. “We have been incorporating AI into our solutions since our inception and we are now enhancing our solutions further with generative AI and LLM to further help customers unleash the potential of their images and reduce repetitive and manual creative tasks.”

Explore Cloudinary’s full range of generative AI capabilities in the hands-on demo environment of the Generative AI Playground, or visit Cloudinary’s website to learn more about Cloudinary AI and the opportunity presented by generative AI specifically.