Adobe adds impressive new AI technology to its Lightroom ecosystem

Adobe has announced significant updates to its entire Lightroom ecosystem, including the popular Lightroom on desktop, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Camera Raw applications.

Many new features rely upon improved artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which has been a major focus of Adobe's for a few years now, with all its apps receiving more sophisticated AI-powered features seemingly with every major release.

The primary new features of Lightroom include expanded Adaptive Presets, new masking tools for Select People, AI-powered Denoise, and the ability to use Curves adjustments in conjunction with masks.

Let's start with the new masking tools underpinning the new Adaptive Presets. When using "Select People" within Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), users can now make precise edits to clothing and facial hair with new mask-generation tools. Users can easily select just facial hair or just what a subject is wearing. This allows photographers to adjust the color and tone of someone's beard or shirt in just a few clicks.

This masking technology informs the new portrait-oriented Adaptive Presets. Users can now utilize Darken Beard, Enhance Clothing, or Polished Portrait presets. These one-click solutions spruce up a portrait by making a beard darker, making clothing more textured and saturated, and performing skin smoothing.

Another general improvement to masking is the ability to utilize Curves on a mask in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and ACR. Suppose you create a mask of just the sky, or just the foreground, or perhaps a specific person in the frame, you can use a point curve to perform highly customizable adjustments to a specific region of an image.

Changing gears, Adobe added video editing to Lightroom on desktop, Lightroom Mobile, and Lightroom on the Web last year. This feature allowed users to adjust video with many editing tools photographers have long used on their photos. However, only some adjustments were present at launch. Adobe has now added black-and-white video editing to Lightroom.

Concerning Lightroom on the Web, that's another app that Adobe is actively developing to include more features from the standard Lightroom and Lightroom Classic desktop apps. To that end, Adobe has added AI masking for Select Subject, Sky, and Background to Lightroom on the Web, greatly expanding the browser-based photo editor's capabilities and performance. There's a lot you can do within Lightroom on the Web.

Utilizing AI technology is Adobe's new Denoise AI tool inside Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and ACR. The new noise reduction technology promises improved results thanks to the power of AI. It's currently available just for raw images but will be available for additional file types soon.

Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is an important part of the company's plan to improve transparency and honesty in media. To that end, Content Credentials are now available for Lightroom and ACR as a "Tech Preview," allowing users to enable a tool to track edits, activity, and attribution information associated with an image.

There are more updates to Lightroom, including improved exporting on Lightroom on iOS, new travel photography-oriented presets, better copy and pasting functionality within Lightroom on desktop, better performance, and more.

All the new Lightroom updates are available now. For full details, visit Adobe's blog. 

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Image credits: Adobe