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.

[Alejandro37602070ha2a]

Hola, solo queria saber si esto consume creditos firefly porque parece que cada vez que lo uso en lightroom esta consumiendo. es correcto? 

[Alain37654892v42f]

Merci pour la description de la procédure à suivre, le résultat est là et plutôt convaincant ! 

[ThierryH]

Great feature. I would love feathering, as well as the object rectangle selection for this tool. After a few times the Refresh option is missing.
I don't see any information in the documention/responses about what de-selecting the checkboxes "Generative AI" and "Object Aware" do. Is it correct that you must also uncheck the latter to remove that person/object/etc.? Maybe some people do not see that. Being aware of selecting everything etc., I had an issue with removing an intruding elbow from the border on a non-cropped image.

Selecting a person's glasses with "Object Aware" off, I get the person without her glasses which is the purpose. However, the person eyes looks at the camera now, from an extreme angle and the eyes are weird (too big, ugly, angrilly) every time. There should be at least some variations with the eyes looking as the original.

[John R Ellis]

@ThierryH: "I don't see any information in the documention/responses about what de-selecting the checkboxes "Generative AI" and "Object Aware" do. Is it correct that you must also uncheck the latter to remove that person/object/etc.?"

No, the two options are independent. The Generative AI option says to use the new Adobe Firefly service to generate a replacement for the selection.   The Object Aware option controls how to make the initial selection -- when unchecked, it's exactly what you've brushed, but when checked, it uses the same algorithm as Object Mask to identify an "object" that becomes the selection to be replaced.

[John R Ellis]

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@ThierryH: "I had an issue with removing an intruding elbow from the border on a non-cropped image."

Generative Remove did a very good job of quickly removing the elbow from the JPEG you uploaded:

 

That indicates you were working with a raw to which Lens Corrections or Transform had been applied, or in less frequent cases, the Camera Raw engine had automatically cropped a border of 8 - 12 pixels around the edge. In all cases, Remove is (confusingly) looking at those hidden pixels. Temporarily disable Lens Corrections and Transform and then do the remove.  See here for more details:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/generative-remove-replace/

If that doesn't help, upload the original raw to Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar and post the sharing link here.

[John R Ellis]

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@ThierryH: "Selecting a person's glasses with "Object Aware" off, I get the person without her glasses which is the purpose. However, the person eyes looks at the camera now, from an extreme angle and the eyes are weird (too big, ugly, angrilly) every time."

With your low-resolution JPEG, I got better results using Object Aware.  I looked at over 50 variations, and here are some of the better ones (hard to know if they'd be acceptable on the full-resolution raw):

        

The Refresh button never disappeared for me, but maybe there's a difference when using raws.

[ThierryH]

The disappearing of the Refresh was probably due to me creating snapshots to make the point. There is definitelly a difference between Raw/CR3 and JPG in the results. Even in my JPG examples, the person looks at the camera 99% of the time. Looking at the position of the head, it is not a very natural nor elegant result. I would be happy with 50%.

[John R Ellis]

@ThierryH, perhaps you could attach a full-resolution JPEG version of the photo here. With the low-res screenshot, Remove was generating a large fraction of replacements with the eyes looking forward.

[ThierryH]

A full-resolution JPEG unedited version is attached. However, some edit should be applied to fully see the results, as the woman's face is in the shadow.

[John R Ellis]

@ThierryH, using Object Aware to select the glasses and then lightening the face, here are the best 10 out of the first 33 variations (the first one was the first-generated variation) -- to my taste, they look acceptable, especially when looking at the entire photo:

[John R Ellis]

@ThierryH, The best one to my taste is this one -- I like how the man and woman are looking away from each other:

[gary_sc]

I was trying to remove my shadow of a photo I took. It replaced it with a different looking shadow nine times.

 

 

 

Working on the remaining shadow, it took three more runs, each time selecting the "least" of the remaining shadow to finally remove the shadow. In other words, three on the initial shadow and three more for each remaining shadow.

[John R Ellis]

@gary_sc, please attach a full-resolution JPEG exported from the original unmodified photo. Also, are you editing a raw or a JPEG original? If a raw, which exact camera model?

[gary_sc]

Here is the JPG from the raw (DNG). This was a Canon 30D.

I tried sending you the raw as well, but it failed from your end.

Best,

Gary Coyne

[gary_sc]

Well, that's interesting, it failed. That was send via email since when I clicked on the "Reply" button it shifted to email. Now that I see I'm here, let me try again. If you want/need the raw, let me know.

[John R Ellis]

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@gary_sc, Remove with options Generative AI and Object Aware immediately removed the shadow on the first try:

 

This usually indicates that there are pixels along the edge that have been cropped out. Did you apply Crop, Lens Correction, or Transform, all of which can crop out pixels?  If so, temporarily disable all three tools and redo the Remove.  

If that doesn't help, please upload the raw to Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar and include the sharing link here. (The forum platform doesn't accept raws!)

[Barry Young]

Filling empty space is something on our backlog. Thanks for the feedback.

Barry

[silversnaps]

Hate it! A simple spot removal that used to take a second now takes several minutes to process. Totally unacceptable.

Please put it back the way it was.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@silversnaps  I would not be using Generative Remove for a simple spot.

None of the existing tools were removed. I recommend using the previous Heal/Clone/Remove tools for simple spots and leaving Generative AI off.   They are very different tools for very different purposes. 

Here is a nice guide: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/generative-remove-faq.html 

[MackeyRJ]

Agree. 2 + minutes to remove a minor small glare on a window with a blue background is unaccepatable. In Photoshop it takes less than a few seconds.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@MackeyRJ, I don't see significant time differences between PS and Lr on Generative Remove on the same image. Can you post a video showing equivalent edits on similar images, demonstrating the difference in time? 

[Oliver Scheffer]

Same here. Progress bar takes about as long as in photoshop, but then after reaching 100% it takes a few minutes to display the result.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

It would be helpful to mention which Lightroom Application you use when seeing this delay. Lightroom Classic? Lightroom Desktop, Mobile, Web?

[thomass6867199]

YesterdayI saw this behavior in Lightroom classic. Progress bar as quick as in photoshop, but it takes a few minutes to display the result.
Surprisingly today  the complete processs was as fast as  in Photoshop.  
 

[Mark Smyth]

Running LR Classic (13.3.1)on a Mac Mini M2 Pro running Ventura 13.6.7

In general, remove object works very well. However, fairly often a random image is inserted in the image. The original object to be removed is correctly done and the background is created correctly but then an image is inserted in that masked space. Often it is a bird or birds. In the image I'm working on, I wanted to remove an object on the far left left of the image. That was some light equipment against the backdrop of a stage. What I should have had was pretty much a dark fill. Instead I got a half of a drinks cup inserted. Half as in vertical.