The new capabilities in Adobe Lightroom 2022 focus on making it simpler to choose individuals or things and change their colors or altogether delete them. Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Camera RAW all provide two main capabilities, AI-powered masking, and content-aware removal.
Since Photoshop has traditionally been the preferred tool for editing or removing objects, Adobe last year added AI-powered masking to Lightroom. It is now developing on that with more focused capabilities that make it simple to quickly choose individuals or even particular body parts, objects, or backdrop.
The first of these is called “Select People,” and it employs Adobe’s AI Sensei to pick out certain people, teams, or even bodily parts like the skin on the face, the skin on the body, the eyes, the teeth, the lips, the hair, and more. It’s surprisingly easy to use: after loading a picture, Adobe’s AI instantly recognizes and categorizes every individual in a scene as “All People,” “Person 1,” “Person 2,” “Person 3,” etc. Then, if you choose, say, Person 2, you may choose their face skin, body skin, teeth, and so on. From there, you may adjust colors, improve clarity, or change whatever else you desire.
While Select Objects facilitates doing exactly that in a few different ways. You may just paint over an object to choose it, such as a rose, or you can draw a rectangle around it, and the AI will automatically sharpen the edges to produce a perfect mask. In a similar spirit, you may now choose the complete backdrop of a picture with just one click rather than needing to flip the subject selection as you did in the past.
And thanks to Content-Aware Remove, doing so is now simpler than ever if you’re more interested in completely getting rid of anything (sometimes known as “healing”). To do this, just create a roughly outlined mask around the item to be eliminated, and the AI will fill in the backdrop in an adaptable manner depending on the nearby content. For more precise control, you may choose the sampled region and use the Refresh option.
This type of thing, as usual, may be effective with certain photographs while being less effective with others. Additionally, the masks may need to be manually adjusted, especially when the backdrop is intricate and difficult for the AI to discern from the foreground. However, in certain circumstances, it offers you a solid head start and often chooses the full topic accurately on the first attempt.
Along with GPU speed improvements, other new features for Lightroom on desktop include “Compare while editing,” which enables you to load two pictures for better comparison. Lightroom Classic receives a new left-right panel switch functionality if you’d prefer to view your color settings on the left, plus quicker imports from mobile devices (Windows only) (Windows only). Adobe is integrating masking curves and HDR support for displays in Camera Raw, but the latter is currently only available in a tech preview.
