At Adobe Max Japan, the company is announcing some new updates to Lightroom. These are coming in the form of removing distractions, HDR enhancements, getting rid of duplicate photos, etc. Specifically, the company states that these are all powered by AI. These features will be available in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom for web, and Adobe Camera Raw.
Adaptive Profiles: Presets, but Better?
The HDR (high dynamic range) adjustments are coming in the form of adaptive profiles. These were introduced in Camera RAW a while back, and are not like presets. Instead, they adapt to your image. Adobe claims that using these profiles, the AI will deliver an effect similar to changing exposures, shadows, highlights, color mixer, curves, etc. However, unlike presets, the adjustment sliders won’t be manipulated.
Distraction Removal in Lightroom
Additionally, they’re introducing Distraction Removal. According to Adobe, it’s going to be able to detect and remove distractions and unwanted people. In fact, they speak of removing people from your vacation photos. At a certain point, we can imagine that the images just wouldn’t be telling the truth. Further, we see how this could be used in a very disingenuous way. We sincerely hope that Adobe decides to put content credentials into everything exported by their software someday soon because tools like this can seriously be misused.
On top of that, we hope that the web eventually learns how to accept and use Content Credentials as a whole.
Of anything here, it’s probably the most concerning because it can be used to tell a story that isn’t at all true or real and the tools to verify the authenticity of the image aren’t as prolific as far as we’re aware. We’ll need to test this out for ourselves though, and we plan on updating our Adobe Lightroom reviews accordingly.
Find Duplicates and Clean Up
Perhaps most notably, Adobe is also making organizing your photo library a lot easier by using AI to remove duplicate images. There surely have been times where I’ve shot in JPEG and RAW and didn’t need to have either or. So this feature will let a photographer easily get rid of whatever they need. The company states that this experimental tool has been used in Lightroom on the web,
Better Tethering Support
Introduced in Lightroom Classic, this feature allows photographers who work with tethered cameras to click on the screen to tell the camera where to focus and shoot an image. Currently, it’s only enabled for Sony, Canon, and Nikon cameras that support the feature. This is fascinating because the medium format Fujifilm options aren’t even mentioned.
It’s a nice feature for studios and commercial photography settings. We’re very curious to see how it would work with a touchscreen PC of some sort. Most importantly, though, it might actually make the photo booth process a whole lot simpler if someone is running the booth.
However, most of that market is deeply embedded with Capture One and receives tech support and so much more. And we’re curious to know how this will work with the autofocus point selection fails.
On top of all this, Adobe speaks about new performance updates for Lightroom Classic, the ability to select a background easier, dual monitor support, and more. More can be found at Adobe’s Blog post.