Apple unveils photorealistic Image Playground at WWDC

Apple announced a major overhaul of its Image Playground app at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, introducing photorealistic image generation for the first time and significantly expanding the tool's editing and integration capabilities. The updates, part of a broader push under the Apple Intelligence banner, aim to make the built-in AI image generator more competitive with standalone services.

Senior Director Leslie Ikemoto demonstrated the revamped app during the keynote, showcasing how users can create images from natural language prompts and incorporate people from their personal photo libraries into generated scenes. New editing features allow users to modify existing images or AI creations by describing changes or using touch gestures to circle, tap, or brush objects to move, resize, or alter them. The app now supports multiple aspect ratios, such as landscape for websites or portrait for flyers, and generated images can be used directly as Lock Screen wallpapers, Contact Posters, Messages backgrounds, and more.

A central upgrade is the new generative model powering the app, which Apple says produces higher-fidelity imagery with better coherence and detail....