From Sketch to Reality: Let’s Test Drive Adobe’s "Structure Reference"

How does it work? What can you use it for? How many questions can fit in a subheader?

Happy Thursday, structural sketchers,

In February 2023, we got access to a free ControlNet space on Hugging Face. This allowed complete beginners to use ControlNet to condition Stable Diffusion on an input image. The resulting picture would then retain the characters’ poses, locations of objects, and so on.

It’s pretty damn neat, but the Hugging Face implementation was slow and buggy.

Last week, Adobe Firefly implemented a strikingly similar feature called Structure Reference.

Now it’s even easier to turn a starting image or sketch into any scene you want.

Let’s take a look at how it works and what you can do with it.

What is Adobe’s Structure Reference?

Structure Reference works a bit like the starting image in Stable Diffusion or an image prompt in Midjourney.

But unlike them, Adobe doesn’t simply take inspiration from the source image. Structure Reference res…