Adobe Lightroom Update Enhances AI Masks and Adaptive Presets

Adobe has announced new additions to the Lightroom suite, including AI-powered masking and better Adaptive Presets, which the company says will be rolling out to users this week. Adobe has updated Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and the iOS, Android, iPadOS, and ChromeOS versions of the software as well as added new features to Adobe Camera RAW (ACR).

AI-powered Masking

Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and ACR have received updates to the selective adjustment tools first added in 2021. The previous update added Select Sky and Select Subject, and today’s update to the suite adds Select People, Select Objects, and one-click Select Background.

These features have also been added to Adobe Photoshop in a separate update today.

Adobe says that Select People will automatically detect and create “high-quality masks” for people or groups in portraits. Additionally, the new tools allow for selecting individual body parts such as “face skin,” “body skin,” teeth, eyes, hair, and more. The new selection tools are designed to do more complicated edits with fewer steps and less brushing.

Like Select People, Select Objects is designed to make a detailed selection of complex objects in a scene simply by brushing over the object or selecting it with the rectangle marquee tool. Adobe says that the AI tools will refine edges automatically, creating “precise” masks.

While Lightroom previously required inverting a subject mask to select the background, now the AI-based Select Background can perform this task with a single click.

Adaptive Presets

An update to Lightroom in June 2022 introduced Adaptive Presets, or masks applied in a single click. In this update, Lightroom can now use these same Adaptive Presets to enhance a whole portrait at once or to select individual portrait attributes with the tools Enhance Eyes, Whiten Teeth, Darken Eyebrows, and more. These updated Adaptive Presets are available on desktop and mobile versions of the Lightroom Suite.

The mobile version of Lightroom also gains Sky and Subject Adaptive Presets, which allows for single-tap detection of subjects and quick mask selection based on the overall structure of the image.
Content-Aware Remove

Adobe has added the Content-Aware features of Adobe Photoshop to Lightroom, with Content-Aware adjustments of things like skin blemishes and marks based on the overall image and the area near the adjustment.

Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)

Adobe Camera Raw gains the ability to adjust curves for local selections and has added the ability to mask and refine adjustments directly in ACR. These adjustments will be “coming to Lightroom in the near future.”

HDR (Beta) support

Adobe is rolling out a beta of HDR support for users working on HDR displays. This is currently a Tech Preview in Adobe Camera Raw.

Additional Changes

In addition to these suite-wide changes, there are also some smaller updates to individual versions of Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom for Windows and Mac gains complete editing functionality on Compare mode. Lightroom Classic now has left/right panel swapping and faster import from portable devices.

As mentioned, these changes will be rolling out to all users starting today.