P: New AI-powered Generative Remove (Early Access) available across all surfaces.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

This post applies to Lightroom Classic and the Lightroom Ecosystem products.
Post Camera Raw feedback here

This thread is now closed. Please update to LrC 14.x or LrD 8.x. If you wish to provide feedback, please go to the new article.

The Lightroom team is sharing an early look at Generative Remove, which makes it easier to remove unwanted objects and distractions, even on complex backgrounds, with a simple brush stroke. Generative Remove is powered by Firefly AI.

How to use Generative Remove on a desktop:

• You can find Generative Remove under the newly renamed Remove panel (aka “Heal”).
• Make sure the “generative AI” checkbox is enabled before you start brushing (note: when unchecked, Lightroom will use Content-Aware Remove to fill your brushed spots). 
• By default, you will be given a moment to refine your selection with an add or subtract brush. Remember to include shadows for a more accurate result! You can also skip this step by holding down ‘CTRL’ on windows or ‘CMD’ on mac as you finish your brush stroke. 
• Once you’re ready to apply and have accepted the terms, Generative Remove will use Firefly AI to remove your distractions and intelligently fill in the space that’s left by the removed objects. 
• Note: stable internet connection is required to use this feature.
• Generative Remove also lets you choose from multiple variations, so you can pick the one you like best, giving you full creative control. 
  
  Checkout the FAQ and Best Practices

Please give it a try and share feedback and/or report variations in this community forum. It would greatly help to include details like which app you are using (i.e., Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw) and other system details. Our team will continually monitor this thread to track issues to improve the future experience.

Lisa Ngo: Lightroom Product Manager
Posted by: Rikk Flohr 

Update (Dec 2024):  With the new release, it is no longer necessary to perform Generative Remove Operations prior to Cropping. 

Update:

Here are some tips if you are having issues with the feature replacing your object instead of removing it. 

• Enlarge your selection - if your brush stroke is too tight, you will have unexpected results.
• Remember that removing an object means painting over it, its shadow, its reflection, and any non-contiguous pieces. If you leave behind a shadow, a reflection, or a disconnected piece (e.g., a hand on a shoulder), the AI will attempt to create something to cast the shadow, reflect, or complete the unbrushed discontinuous item. You can avoid these issue by following the guidance provided in this linked tutorial. https://www.lightroomqueen.com/generative-remove-replace

The recommended order for applying edits is:

1. Denoise 
2. Heal (includes Generative AI Remove)
3. Crop (includes traditional Cropping, Lens Correction, Transform, or any operation changing the geometry of the image, including round-tripping to PS to use Gen-Expand)
4. Global Edits
5. AI Selective edits (Sky, Person, etc)
   
   If you deviate from that, you may see the removed object remain as a ghost image. If this occurs, you will have to use Update AI Settings, which can be found under the Develop module 'Settings' menu.

[UNFOTONY]

WTF?

[Chris R.]

I'm sorry but it didn't do squat. It just erased a black part on a shoulder instead of removing the shoulder of another person that's in the corner of the shot. 

[Vicky245874466phc]

works good for alot of things however just trying to remove a recycle bin and all it removes is the writing on the bin, tried twice

[Ian Lyons]

You need to select/mask the entire item to be removed. This includes any shadows, refelections or projections. If you checked both Generative AI and Object Aware boxes, then also try with only Generative AI checked.

Can you post a screenshot of the image before and after using Generative Remove? 

[Pierre37614772ags8]

Améliore et facilite le travail parfois. Un renfort notable 

[Dreken1963]

I removed a pole with a sign in a rather difficult landscape and it worked perfect. Great job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[daniel32511027rd6h]

Funciona muy bien, igual de bien que en photoshop. Es una cosa que veia necesaria en lightroom desde que empecé a usarla en photoshop. La única pega es que tarda muchisimo mas tiempo en procesarlo que en photoshop. Estaría bien que pudiese procesarlo en segundo plano mientras se hacen otras cosas en otras fotografias. 

[beatricet86631357]

funktioniert nicht!

[Matthias27169645vy3s]

das generative Füllen in Lightroom habe ich getestet. Auf die Ergebnisse hab ich gar nicht erst gewartet. Habe nur eine ca 5 mm x 15 mm großen Bereich markiert (Baukran). Ich bin eine Etage tiefer gegangen und habe mir Kaffee geholt. Als ich wieder vor dem Rechner saß, war Lightroom immer noch nicht fertig  Nein, macht ihr euch keine freunde.

Schneller geht ist, wenn man mit Rechtsklick das bild in Photoshop öffnet, dort bearbeit und zu LR wieder speichert. Solange die Schnelligkeit fehlt meine Empfhelung: auf diese funktion verzichten!

[Steven21811266971j]

90% of the time I use this, I want to just remove the object and replace it with a better understanding of the background that the remove tool.  But this tool seems to constantly want to replace the object with a random other object that I have no say in.  Very strange.  

[Jpa19]

Hello,

Works very well to suppress a bin in the background.

But trying to suppress :

- a person in the background : the IA replaces by another person

- a person's head in the foreground : the IA replaces by another head.

[Alessandro Pietrosanti]

That's my 2 cents about Lightroom Classi "removing" (do not remove anything) function....I'm trying to remove a bag of chips from an image...but it just generated other things...see images attached

[cizekgraf]

Hi, in my cast the tool doesn´t work, when the green bar it stays on and doesn´t finish. In Photshop Beta it works alright.

[Dave Paul ACS]

Rikk and Ian,

I appreciate your repeated advice about being sure to select "shadows, reflections or projections" in order for Generative AI to cleanly remove an object rather than replacing it with some other (typically random) object.

However, you're probably getting an accurate sense from numerous other messages here that for anything but the most basic removal tasks, the average Lightroom Classic user is not going to do this intuitively, and even if they do my experience so far has been that it's a roll of the dice as to whether G-AI actually removes the object or attempts to replace it.

I'd also propose that if G-AI is smart enough to detect shadows or other artifacts and to take that finding as a signal that it should go about the intensive process of generating a synthetic object to replace the one being removed, it should also be smart enough to instead expand the selection to include the artifact and to remove it along with the selected object.

I suggest (again) that the choice of whether to "remove" the object (replacing it with a plausible, synthetic background) or to "replace" the object with an AI-generated surrogate for the removed object should be an option available to the Lightroom Classic user.

[kayl46517980]

Removing sensor spots used to be really easy, now it's become impossible to do it decently. Why does everything have to be AI when things worked really great before? Is this some marketing stuff to sell your product?

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@kayl46517980  It is not recommended to use Gen Remove for simple spots - especially sensor dust. The previous tools are still there and far more efficient for simple corrections. 

Please see: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/generative-remove-faq.html 

[Lens-Flares]

In the most cases the AI-Removal works flawles for me, in one case it changes  a Powergridpole with a different type of Powergridpole. 

[richardb60793086]

It did not work so well for me.  I tried to remove an individual from a photo with 3 persons.  I highlighted the person to be removed and the new Generative Remove AI tool simply replaced the person to be removed with another person, origin unknown.  I have attached a before and after photo. 

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@richardb60793086  I had no trouble with your image. Are you selecting a wide enough area to get all extraneous parts? Shadows? Reflections? 

[richardb60793086]

Thank you Rikk, I tried it again.  Per your suggestion I included a little more than the subject in my selection, and it worked perfectly!  It removed the person and perfectly filled in where the person was, even keeping the pattern of the curtain consistent.  This is pretty astonishing feature.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Always remember, if you leave behind a shadow, a reflection or a leg under a table, the AI will try to make sense of it by inserting something to create the shadow, reflection or the leg....

A little wider is always a little better, too, as it blends the scene better. 

Perfect? No - better than all the previous tools? Yes!

[Bradley37621785yg8y]

This will be a great tool for removing objects, but the few times I have used it so far I notice that sometimes it just tries to replace the object with a similar object and it is not removing the object.  For example, I had a rope in a picture and when I selected the rope to remove it just replaced it with another AI drawn rope.

[t.linn]

One thing that has always frustrated me about any form of removal in LrC is how it performs along the images of edges. This poor performance continues with Generative AI. If I have an image of sand—just featureless relatively uniform sand—and in the corner is a small shadow cast by the photographer, I can completely select the shadow with borders around the small shadow, Generative AI will generate a different shadow. Maybe the newly generated shadow has a different shape or is smaller, but LrC can't seem to figure out that I want that tiny corner to look like the rest of the image. Ps never has this problem. This applies to rock or other distractions on the edge of the image that I try to clean up. Ps removes the distraction while, more often than not, LrC just generates a different version of the distraction. (macOS & LrC latest versions)

[MPDAEF]

Seems to me the tool is misnamed--it doesn't remove something selected so much as it replaces that something.  There is perhaps a need for Adobe to decide which of these functions is the primary one.  The "generative" part suggests replacement more than removal, but many of us seem to be looking mostly for removal, since that's what the tool is called.  Perhaps there could eventually be a way for the user to choose between replace and remove?

[SasaShoots]

What an absolute perfect tool that s been added into Lightroom.

I have always used the removal tool with my Samsung phone because it never worked for me with the Adobe applications but this new feature in Lightroom........It's Just.......... Brilliant! Keep up the great work and can't wait for the final result.