The Adobe Max virtual creativity conference has just kicked off, with the revelation that a pair of smart new AI masking features are coming to Adobe Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.
The new AI-powered masking tools for Adobe’s photo editor are RTX accelerated, so those with Nvidia GPUs benefit from snappy performance, and they come in the form of ‘Select Sky’ and ‘Select Subject’ tools.
These will automatically capture skylines and isolate people (subjects) from any given image, with AI delivering what Adobe describes as “highly refined masks” in seconds. Neat.
These new features are supported by Nvidia’s Studio Driver for October, which is available today, and also delivers app updates for photograph denoising and livestreaming (cleaning up images in DxO PhotoLab 5, and adding the ability to set different noise removal levels by separate audio sources with Gamecaster, respectively).
You’ve been reframed
Adobe also announced that Premiere Elements will get a neat feature drafted over from Premiere Pro, namely Auto Reframe which, as the name suggests, automatically frames the most important part of a video when adjusting aspect ratios to post on social media. Doing this reframing is up to three times faster now when using an RTX graphics card than when using a processor alone, Adobe boasts.
Adobe further highlighted that with the Substance 3D Stager – which is used in staging 3D scenes for product shots – seriously ups performance using RTX ray tracing with photorealistic image rendering, with speed increases of up to 11x faster, no less, than when using just the CPU (with an RTX 3080 used in comparison to just a Core i9-11900K working alone, or rather with its integrated graphics).
Analysis: Watch and learn about major AI benefits
Adobe Max is free to watch online (you just have to register), and comes with a trio of Nvidia Studio tutorial videos anyone can view, and that includes a clip about the new AI-powered masking features, teaching users all about these fresh tools in Lightroom. The ability to have this taken care of automatically, rather than having to go through a painstaking manual masking process, will clearly be a boon for Lightroom users.
The other clips are on the topics of working faster with real-time (RTX) ray tracing in Adobe Substance, and ‘creating amazing landscapes’ in a matter of seconds using Nvidia Canvas, the AI-driven painting app that lets you sketch rough shapes and forms, with the AI morphing those into a fully realized and detailed image. Again, the latter is another huge time-saver, and a further great use of AI to refine software and make it way more helpful to the user.
