By Sam Ingram, photographer/videographer
Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be the boogeyman for the photography community (and creatives as a whole). Many fear it will continue to devalue our craft rapidly, eventually replacing the need for photographers altogether. But, at least from my perspective (let’s not revisit this statement in 5–10 years), AI is a very helpful tool for image editing.
The Adobe ecosystem, Photoshop and Lightroom in particular, seem to have embraced numerous AI features that have really increased my productivity in the post-production world. Here are some of the features that I have found the most useful since just scratching the surface of our new AI overlord:
AI-Generated Masking
The masking tool in Lightroom has been around awhile. Now, with the help of AI, it can be used to automatically detect and isolate specific elements within a photo such as the sky, the background, or even an individual person. It can detect multiple people or isolate just one, while also selecting a person’s skin, eyes, lips, hair, clothes and much more. This allows photographers to make very detailed edits to these masked off areas without manually painting them on each individual element, saving time and increasing precision.
Before this AI enhancement, you’d have to do all of that work manually. If you were doing it for an entire gallery of photos, it could take forever. Now I literally apply the AI-generated mask that I want for one photo, and then copy/paste the same edit to a batch of photos with the click of a button.
Sky and Subject Selection
Using AI, Lightroom can automatically select and isolate the sky or the main subject in an image with a single click. This is very useful for landscape and portrait photographers, enabling quick and targeted adjustments to enhance skies or emphasize the subject. It can also select the entirety of the background of a subject, which is great for making your subject stand out on the screen.
Noise Reduction
These days, camera technology is rapidly advancing. Many are beginning to incorporate AI tools built right into the camera. Some newer camera models have built-in AI camera noise reduction. On the editing side, Lightroom’s AI-based noise reduction tool can analyze an image to even further reduce grain or digital noise while preserving detail, even in low light or high ISO shots. Again, noise reduction has been around for a while, but the complete teardown and rebuild of a single photograph to get almost all the noise out while retaining this level of sharpness/detail is something wholly new. It works particularly well on RAW images, where clarity and detail are critical.
Content-Aware Healing and Generative Fill
This might be the most impressive and is probably my favorite. The Healing Brush can now use AI to replace unwanted objects or spots in photos by blending nearby textures and colors. While the Healing Brush has long been a useful tool of photo editors, it now offers the added benefit of generative fill.
Generative fill can fill in spaces in your photo, elongate the edges of your shot, or completely remove/change unwanted objects in your frame. It can also add photorealistic objects to your image through text-based prompts or existing image references. Simply being able to add to your image on a whim without having to go into a heavy composite style edit is very convenient. Something as simple as removing a person from the background or adding a few extra stars to a night sky on a whim is nice. This is not an AI feature exclusive to Adobe products either, it seems to have gone mainstream, being offered on many apps/websites, even being built into some smart photos right in the default photos app.
With AI capable of generating highly realistic images while completely streamlining photo editing, there’s concern that it could make authentic photography feel less distinctive. For right now, I’m choosing to embrace AI as an incredibly useful tool for photographers, automating many tedious tasks that have historically bogged down my editing workflow. As for the future, well, I’ll probably need to have AI generative fill me into a new job.
