New Lightroom AI tools

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These new AI tools were unveiled last week with LR’s latest upgrade. I only had a chance to play around with them a bit, but here is a brief description of how they work.

First, my favorite is the AI Denoise tool (looks too much like Denise I think). It did a fantastic job of reducing noise for an image taken at a high ISO (6400 in this example). The three examples are 1 - full image, 2 - image without noise reduction, 3 - with traditional LR noise reduction and 4 - with the new Denoise tool. I think you will agree that the Denoise tool does an amazing job of reducing noise, smoothing out flat areas, and maintaining sharpness in the details. So, if you are taking some photos at low light and have to boost the ISO really high to get a good exposure, you will now be able to clean up the nasty-looking noise that comes with those high ISOs, and even be able to print them quite nicely I would guess.

Click on images below to see best results

Second, I tried the new AI fine-tuning abilities located in the People mask. This new feature allows you to select and mask specific portions of a person such as hair, face, facial hair, eyes, and so forth. I chose Hair, Teeth and Lips in my example then applied the edits specifically to each of those areas. It worked well but I was not able to really select detailed areas of the hair as precisely as I would have liked. I didn’t see any way of adjusting or refining the mask’s borders, but I’m sure that will be possible in the future.

Lastly, not an AI feature, is the ability to now use Curves with any masks you create in order to do even finer tuning of specific areas of an image. Here is an example of a recent shot I took of a white pelican, which can be tricky to expose for and still keep details in the very white feathers. I used the Object mask to first select the bird and then reduced the highlights just a bit. That worked OK, but when I then used the Curves option I was able to set control points to only affect very specific exposure areas and then selectively reduce the highlights to get a nice overall balance to the photo.

Overall, these are terrific new features or additions that are only going to get better