Adobe is adding another AI-powered tool to its belt with the announcement of Generative Remove for Lightroom. As the name indicates, Generative Remove lets you get rid of any unwanted objects from a photo and then creates "pixel perfect generations" that make it seem as if nothing was ever there. These items could be anything from an ugly trash can in a beautiful photo or a lamp post that blocks an otherwise clear skyline. The new tool uses Adobe Firefly, a generative AI creation model launched in March 2023. Firefly trains on licensed content, such as that from Adobe Stock, and can improve image quality, create photos using a description and utilizes Generative Fill and Expand to add, remove or broaden the image.

Modern smartphone cameras have become better and better at dealing with low light, and their multi-megapixel image sensors routinely take sharp shots in full sun. But it's likely that you have hundreds of grainy older photos from older cameras--and that's where a new AI feature from Adobe Lightroom may prove useful. Adobe Lightroom Classic, as well as the modern versions for Windows and Mac and Adobe Camera Raw, are adding a Denoise feature. Professional photographers may benefit from how Adobe sees it--taking high ISO shots in low light. Doing so introduces the "speckles" where an image sensor struggles to present the image clearly, due to issues like pixel density, the size of the sensor, and shutter speed.

ImagenAI, a startup using AI to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production work, today announced that it raised $30 million in an all-equity growth investment from Summit Partners. The new capital brings Imagen's total raised to $34 million, and co-founder and CEO Yotam Gil tells TechCrunch that it'll be used to expand the startup's software-as-a-service offering through mergers and acquisitions and product research and development. Imagen's success comes as investors grow increasingly bullish on AI tools for generating and editing artwork, including photorealistic art. Cupixel, whose AI tech takes images to create outlines of the photo for drawings or paintings, recently raised $5 million. Meanwhile, Runway ML, which is developing an AI-powered creative suite for artists and which was a major research contributor to the text-to-image AI Stable Diffusion, landed $50 million in early December.

So you've heard of Adobe Sensei but don't really know what it is or how you can access it. Or maybe, you haven't even heard of it at all. With so much new software and tools constantly coming out, we know researching takes a long time and draws you away from your creative work. We've got all the answers right here to your questions about Adobe's artificial intelligence technology. Adobe Sensei is Adobe's artificial intelligence tool that integrates with Adobe software.

ON1 has announced its next-generation technology that is powered by what it calls state-of-the-art neural networks for image upscaling: Resize AI. The company says it can enlarge photos and create realistic details with spectacular results. The company says that the new ON1 Resize AI will give photographers great results and the highest quality photo enlargements. ON1 claims the all-new technology that powers it will allow any photographer to enlarge photos while quickly maintaining and recovering an incredible amount of detail and sharpness. ON1 says that existing methods of photo enlargement, or interpolation, make up new pixels for the increased resolution by copying those around them, which it says often leads to enlarged photos with less detail, soft edges, and more noise.

Adobe has revealed some new masking upgrades that are coming to Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw (or ACR, Photoshop's raw photo processing tool). The company calls it the "biggest change to providing control over selectively enhancing photos" since it released Lightroom 2 in 2008. The Adobe Research team wanted to bring AI-powered selection tools such as Select Subject and Sky Replacement from Photoshop into Lightroom and ACR, but the image processing engine used in the latter two was incompatible. The team had to make some big changes under the hood, which gave it a chance to change how selections are handled in Lightroom. Until now, ACR, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic have only supported vector-based selections (which are recorded as mathematical expressions), but the AI-powered masks need bitmap (or image-based) support. So, to bring the AI-based tools to those apps, Adobe had to make both approaches work together.

Powered by artificial intelligence, Imagga's Wordroom is a plug-in for Adobe Lightroom that'sees' images and recommends a list of up to 30 keywords based on attributes including objects, colors, shapes, emotions, timeframes, and events. With one click, keywords can be added to an image's metadata so that it's easily searchable. It was created for professional and hobbyist photographers who don't want to spend long hours assigning individual keywords to hundreds of thousands of images. Wordroom relies on machine learning algorithms that get smarter as more people use them. This means the more images it sees, the better it gets at accurately identifying keywords.

Gab Scanu works alone, with a special operating licence for his UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia. The 20-year-old's drone photography shows a new perspective on well-known locations such as Sydney's Bondi beach, Mona Vale and other famous coastlines on the country's east coast. He has also travelled abroad and shot the LA coast at Malibu. The son of a cinematographer, Scanu has inherited a keen eye for photographic composition, capturing both the dramatic and the picturesque qualities of the Australian summer experience. He has developed a unique style and feel, using a combination of post production and drone technology to capture often never-before-seen landscape views.

Lightroom users who sync their photos to the app's Web module can now test out a new and improved way to locate specific images: Search. As part of a new Lightroom Technology Preview series debuting today, Adobe is making the search feature available to Creative Cloud Photography Plan subscribers to test and offer feedback before finalizing it. As described in a blog post Friday morning, Search lets you type in a keyword to enable Lightroom to display all related images it finds in your library, even images you never tagged or labeled. Macworld got to test out the new feature early, and it worked quite nicely. Just log in to your account, and click on the Lr logo at the top left to access the menu. There, you'll find the new Technology Previews feature.