Introducing the Adobe Photoshop APIs

Photoshop gives everyone the power to improve their digital images, from retouching photos to removing unwanted distractions in photos. We’re proud to announce that we’ve now moved the power and flexibility of Photoshop (and Lightroom) to the cloud via a new set of developer APIs. These APIs allow for powerful integrations including e-commerce generators and other content automation streams. Let’s take a look at what developers can add to their toolbox.

How to get started

Developers who want to try out the APIs have a few different ways. They can test things out using a free trial (up to five thousand calls), subscribe via AWS, or contact us for an Enterprise contract. You can find more details on the Pricing page.

Once signed up, you will be provided credentials that can be used for your integrations. Currently, there are no SDKs but the REST API can be used on any platform.

What can you do?

The Photoshop APIs are continuing to evolve, but there are powerful features already available and in production with our users. Here’s a brief look at what capabilities are included. In general, features are split between Photoshop and Lightroom APIs. For Photoshop, developers can:

• Create and edit Embedded Smart Objects
• Edit text layers
• Intelligently crop to an object
• Add depth blur
• Create renditions and thumbnails as well as convert to and from PSD and common image formats
• Edit layers, including toggling visibility and changing position
• Regular cropping and resizing
• Create artboards
• Execute complex user-defined Photoshop Actions
• Remove backgrounds using Sensei AI capabilities

For Lightroom, the APIs support:

• AutoTone and AutoStraighten operations
• Applying multiple different Lightroom presets to an image
• Applying multiple edits to an image
• Applying a preset contained in XMP

Here’s a quick example of how Photoshop APIs can use AI to detect and remove backgrounds. Given the image below, you can see the before and after of the operation:

Sometimes you may want to do the opposite, like create an image mask, which is just as easy:

Where to go next

Want to give it a try? There’s a wealth of really good information for developers to get started. Begin by perusing the documentation. This includes a high-level overview of working with the API, a basic example, and then a deep API reference. Of special note is that the APIs work with cloud storage providing for both reading in the input to an operation as well as writing out the result. This will require the usage of one of Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Dropbox. You will want to have access to one of these options available before you start.

Next, be sure to check the numerous examples. These examples demonstrate CURL calls to the various APIs and can be translated into the language of your choice. In our next blog entry, we’ll demonstrate a full sample using Node.js, but remember developers can choose whatever language they prefer. Sign up for the free trial today!