Adobe Lightroom Has AI-Based Selection Tool, Stronger Object Detection

Adobe plans to add capabilities in the Select Subject feature. (photo: doc. adobe)

JAKARTA - Adobe plans to add a new Select Subject or masking feature to its Lightroom software in October. The company's goal is to help photo editors get the image results they want.

This artificial intelligence-powered feature allows photographers to highlight photo subjects such as people, buildings and animals with a single click so they can fine-tune color, lighting, and other characteristics.

Citing Engadget, Wednesday, September 29, this feature relies on AI to identify a specific subject or other point of interest in a photo, such as the sky, after the user selects a portion of the photo. Selection, called masking, helps photographers edit photos of objects to stand out or brighten a faded sky color.

"(The) masking feature now allows you to make complex selections with one click and then refine those selections with accuracy and ease," said Lightroom team member Pei Ketron.

Adobe is building the technology into Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) in Photoshop. And will be available on Windows operating systems, Android phones, iPad, iPhone, and Mac. However, the new masking feature will not be present in the web version of Lightroom.

The new Lightroom incognito technique demonstrates the increasing power of AI in the computing industry due to its ability to handle the complexities of real-world data. Usually AI systems are trained on large amounts of carefully annotated data, for example photos with human faces that get more attention.

With this feature, it means photographers don't have to select their photos in Photoshop for detailed editing and are more likely not to switch to rival software, such as Phase One's Capture One which has more complicated tools for masking.

This technology can recognize various types of subjects based on how Adobe trains its AI system, "Select Subject uses a specially trained saliency detector to identify the main subject in a photo and has been trained with more than 500,000 photos covering a variety of people, artificial structures, animals, and natural objects," explains Adobe.

Adobe is building a variety of other AI tools in addition to masking features into its software. Lightroom uses AI to zoom in on photos, and Photoshop now includes neural filters for jobs like smoothing skin, blurring backgrounds, and adding color to black and white photos.

"We also have some fun new technology builds that we really like that will take further advantage of bitmap-based masking that we'll be releasing sometime next year," Adobe said.