What you should know before using Adobe’s latest photo-editing tools

Disclosure: DPReview attended Adobe Max, with Adobe covering travel and lodging expenses.

This year at Max, Adobe’s annual conference, the company announced a handful of updates to both Photoshop and Lightroom. Some were featured in the larger keynote, while others flew under the radar. In both cases, though, details weren’t all that plentiful.

Thankfully, during the conference, I had the opportunity to get demonstrations from product managers for both programs, giving me a closer look at what’s new and how those features work.

Photoshop features

Relight

Abby Ferguson

Relight is a tool that lets you change the apparent lighting in a photograph. It allows you to add up to three lights, with controls for location, depth, color, diffusion and more.

During my demonstration with Stephen Nielson, Adobe’s senior director of product management for Photoshop, he showed how you can control how much of the original lighting remains. You can retain some of the existing light for a more blended look, or replace it entirely for something dramatically different.

What stood out to me most, though, was that the changes also extend to reflections. Nielson said Relight can remove reflections associated with the original lighting or blend them with the new effect. The AI processing behind the tool is doing far more than adjusting brightness in different parts of the image.

The image on the left is the original file (converted to JPG from Raw with no additional edits), while the one on the right uses the Relight feature.

One key point to keep in mind for those interested in using Relight: there’s a difference between your photograph’s resolution and the resolution of the generated content. According to Nielson, Relight generates its output at 2K, then upscales it to match the image’s resolution. Your document’s pixel dimensions remain unchanged, but that doesn’t mean all of the original detail survives. Nielson acknowledged that the process can lose some detail, as is typical of generative AI.

When I tried Relight myself, Photoshop also displayed a warning that hadn’t come up during the demonstration: ‘Relight operates on 8-bit image data; fine color detail may be lost.’ So resolution isn’t the only potential compromise; the tool also has a limitation on the color data it processes.

I was also curious what happens when you use Relight to reveal a subject in deep shadow, and whether the tool would generate facial details that weren’t visible in the original. Nielson said it probably wouldn’t completely make up a person, but he hadn’t tested that specific scenario, so it remains an open question.

As a highly generative feature, Relight does require Adobe’s generative credits. It costs 30 credits (the number you get varies by plan, but the Photography 1TB one comes with 1,000 per month), but Nielson specified that you can preview the lighting as long as you want and make as many changes as you want during that step without spending any credits. It’s only when you click “Done” in the Contextual Taskbar that you spend the credits.

Generative Restyle

Abby Ferguson

Generative Restyle can also adjust lighting, but it goes far beyond that. It’s a multi-step process: start by writing a prompt in Photoshop’s Contextual Taskbar, then click the “Generative Restyle” button that appears in that taskbar once the image has been generated. Then, you’ll have access to a slider to adjust the effect. Lastly, you need to click “Capture as layer” to get a higher-resolution, final version.

Restyle can generate a completely new interpretation of photographs, whether that be changing the time of day, weather, season and more. Because of the reliance on generative AI, details can fall off when using Restyle. Faces can become distorted, while small people in the distance and text can also trip it up.

The adjustable strength gives you some control over the result, but it doesn’t solve the fact that it can change things you didn’t want changed. Nielson’s demo showed adjusting a wedding portrait, and the woman’s facial features were changed when asking for a different look for the background. After all, the tool is generating the image as a whole, not just parts. With one prompt, it also completely changed the forest the couple was in, so that it looked like a totally different location.

Nielson pointed out that you can mask out unwanted changes to preserve parts of the original, but that leaves you cleaning up after a tool that was supposed to make the edit easier. An adjustable effect amount is useful, but it isn’t the same as being able to tell Restyle which details it must leave alone.

On the left, the original image, on the right, the Restyled image, using a prompt to turn it into a snowy scene at dusk. The generated image added some pink flags and, while it’s hard to see here, lowered the quality substantially.

It’s also important to know that the output resolution of Restyle is even lower than that of Relight. While Nielson didn’t know the exact resolution, he guessed it was around 1K, so there will be detail loss. Indeed, when I tested the tool on my own, I noticed a substantial loss of detail. For example, branches in the forest became just blobs of texture instead of being able to see each individual one.

There’s also the question of consistency across a series, as I could see situations where a photographer may want to use this on a set of images. Nielson suggested that results should be consistent, but the demo didn’t establish how reliably you could apply the same treatment to multiple photographs without introducing different changes in each. For now, I’d be more inclined to treat Restyle as a creative experiment than a dependable way to give a set of photographs a cohesive look.

All in all, if you’re hoping to change the mood of a photograph without altering its content, or need to retain fine detail and consistency, these could be deal-breaking limitations. And that’s not to mention other implications about changing the reality of the photograph, but that’s a subject for another day.

In terms of generative credits, Restyle is much more costly. It’s a very generation-heavy process and requires 80 credits to use.

Lightroom features

Blemish removal

Mitchell Clark

One of the few Lightroom features that Adobe mentioned in press materials at Max was Blemish Removal. This tool was previously available in Lightroom Mobile, but it’s now available on the desktop version. During my demo, I was told that the initial mobile version was good enough for casual use, but it wasn’t at the level that professionals would need, which is why the team delayed its rollout to desktop.

Blemish Removal is an AI-based tool that can detect blemishes and automatically remove them. It retains natural skin texture, instead of just smoothing things over, and it can substantially speed up the retouching process. What’s nice about this feature, though, is that it allows you a fair amount of control over the results.

Left: the original image. Right: blemishes automatically removed.

There’s a slider to adjust the intensity of the retouching, which, crucially, doesn’t just fade the edits across the entire face. It works by hiding the most prominent blemishes first, then removing progressively subtler marks as you move the slider. You can also manually go into the mask to remove things that were missed or add back in things you want to keep.

The tool also allows you to adjust how permanent marks, like birthmarks, piercings and scars, are handled. You can choose to retain them or have them edited out alongside the temporary blemishes. Lastly, it recognizes different people, so you can make per-person adjustments with the above controls.

Customizable UI

Mitchell Clark

Finally, the cloud version of Lightroom now allows for quite a lot of customization of the UI. You can choose between a default view and one that’s meant for power users. Or, you can also choose the Classic UI, which may make it more enticing for those who have stuck with Classic to move over to the cloud application.

The favorites panel is dedicated to the controls you use the most.Mitchell Clark

But perhaps more useful is the Favorites panel, which allows users to essentially create their own Edit panel. That means you can hide the adjustments and controls that you never find yourself using and make the ones that you use constantly more prominent.

While I use Adobe Camera Raw (and Photoshop), not Lightroom, I find myself constantly scrolling past things that I don’t use in ACR, which takes time and does get a bit annoying. I’d imagine there’s a similar situation in Lightroom, so having the option to set up a UI based on how I work is very enticing and would make the editing process a little less painful.