• Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

The Adobe Lightroom AI feature fixes a big problem with photos

The Adobe Lightroom AI feature fixes a big problem with photos

with a Update Tuesday to its Lightroom software, Adobe applied AI technology to one of the most persistent problems in digital photography: multi-colored speckles of image noise. It’s not always perfect, but it works and can sometimes save terrible photos.

Digital photos taken in blurry conditions are often plagued with noise, especially when you need a fast shutter speed to avoid blurring on moving subjects. But Adobe trained an artificial intelligence model to clean up photos, adding it as a new feature called denoise.

It’s a striking example of how AI can breathe new life into old software and services. Microsoft, Google and other companies have a similar idea, with improvements planned to improve tools such as searching with Bing, writing with Word, and drafting emails with Gmail.

I’ve been testing Adobe’s denoise AI feature in a pre-release version of Lightroom and can confirm that it works in some cases. It saved portraits by smoothing skin while preserving hair detail in early morning photos I took with my DSLR at a very high ISO 25,600 sensitivity setting.

A shot of my mother with the birthday candle lit only by light is similarly vastly improved. I’ve also found it useful for photos of birds, wood carvings in faded European cathedrals, and Comet Neowise in the night sky in 2020. It’s especially useful for enhancing photos that I can never reproduce, like my young son reading an e-book in the dark, lit only by the glow of a phone screen.

It’s not perfect. The skin will look plasticky and artificially smooth, especially if you turn the noise removal slider too far. Sometimes it seemed to inject some kind of motion blur detail. The pairs of thin cables that stabilize San Francisco’s Sutro Tower have been distorted into distorted streamers.

And this is not the first time. Topaz denoise and new Photo AI from Topaz Labs It has attracted a following, for example, among bird photographers who regularly struggle with high noise with high shutter speeds. Photo AI also has AI-based sharpening tools that Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop lack.

Based on my early tests, I think Lightroom’s denoise feature is useful for making photographers more comfortable shooting at high ISO and giving them more latitude in editing, for example brightening the shadow areas of photos. Lightroom’s Denoise feature is built right into Lightroom.

“Our overall goal now is to make it easy for people to edit photos like a pro so they can really achieve their creative vision,” said Rob Christensen, Lightroom’s director of product. “AI is a real enabler for that.”

Artificial intelligence technology today refers to systems trained to recognize patterns in complex real-world data. For the Denoise tool, Adobe has created millions of photos that contain both the original with reduced noise and a version with artificial noise added. Although Adobe created the noise artificially, the company based it on real-world noise profiles from real cameras, Adobe engineer and colleague Eric Chan said in a blog post.

“With sufficient examples covering all kinds of subjects, The model eventually learns to reject real photos In a natural yet detailed way,” Chan said.

Lightroom denoise limitations

The Denoise tool has some limitations. JPEG support is in the works, but it only works with raw images, Christensen said. It doesn’t yet support all cameras, including raw shots from the Apple iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones I’ve tested. Raw images of my Pixel 7 Pro worked.

Another caveat: the denoise tool creates a new DNG image. Because it creates new pixel-level details, Christensen said. It’s not an undoable change like most things you can do with Lightroom’s non-destructive editing process.

Most photographers who try the denoise tool like to use it early in the editing process, Christensen said. That makes sense to me because editing choices like increasing brightness in shadow areas can be limited by noise.

If you prefer Lightroom’s older tools, they’re still available in the “Manual Noise Reduction” section below the new Denoise button. The denoise tool is available in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, where it takes advantage of the AI ​​acceleration hardware built into the new processors, but not in the mobile versions for phones and tablets.

Other new Lightroom capabilities

The new version of Lightroom adds a few other tricks:

  • You can now edit selected areas of a photo using Lightroom’s Tone Curve tool.
  • Lightoom’s AI-powered selection tools can now detect facial hair and clothing, so you can edit only parts of an image.
  • Adobe added three new Adaptive presets, AI-boosted tools for special situations like teeth whitening. A range of tweaks are applied to portraits, skin smoothing and lighting adjustments. Others make the clothes more colorful, another darkens the beard.
  • Lightroom now supports a preview version for testing Content authentication initiativeAbility to record editing changes to photo metadata called content credentials. The technology is designed to help bring more transparency and trust in the world of doctored, now AI-synthesized photos.
  • Lightroom’s new AI-powered masking tools, which let you select photo areas like the sky or a subject’s face, now work in Lightroom’s web-based version.
  • You can make the videos black and white if you want a more artsy or retro look.

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