Adobe’s Lightroom software now uses new artificial intelligence technology to select objects, people, clothing and facial features in an attempt to make photo editing faster and more powerful. The new technology is available for Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and smartphone versions of the photo editing software, the company said Tuesday at its Max conference. The new tool for selecting objects and people extends earlier artificial intelligence tools for selecting subjects and skies. The new technology shows how quickly artificial intelligence technology can evolve to speed up tasks that were once completely out of the computer’s hands.
Artificial intelligence is trained to discover patterns after examining vast amounts of real-world data and behaving more like the human brain, free from the constraints of strict programming. From detecting fraud to generating art, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything. Analyzing photos was one of the earliest successes of AI technology. Carefully labeled training data to highlight pupils, lips, eyebrows, hair, clothing, or other features can teach AI models to isolate elements of a photo that you might want to brighten, whiten, or otherwise beautify.
Lightroom now has AI-driven tools to select a person’s face, eyes, lips, teeth, and other parts for more precise editing. Here, selected areas are shown in red before editing. The new Lightroom also includes other selection tricks. It can separate out specific individuals. With doodling gestures on photo subjects, you can guide the AI to better select tricky subjects. There’s also an updated Fix Tool option that automatically selects an element and replaces it with an image from elsewhere in the scene.
In addition, at the company’s Max conference for creative professionals, Adobe announced relevant improvements to its venerable Photoshop image editing software. Among other things, the automatic masking tool has been retrained to select more elements in a photo, including plants, roads, mountains and water. A special artificial intelligence tool has been trained to distinguish hair from other elements in the scene, a particularly difficult and time-consuming selection process if done manually. Photoshop also has a one-click delete and fill feature that uses artificial intelligence to select an item and then replace it with an image selected from elsewhere in the photo. This process used to take several steps.