P: New AI-powered Lens Blur (Early Access) available across all surfaces.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

This post applies to Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & the Lightroom Ecosystem products.

The Lightroom team is sharing an early look for AI-powered Lens Blur–giving you the ability to apply optical blur on any image regardless of how it was taken. Lens Blur is now available to try on all Lightroom surfaces.

How does Lens Blur work?

• Lens blur applies a depth-based blur effect, similar to what can be achieved with real-world optical lenses, by using AI-generated or device-captured depth data (when available).
• Lens blur will automatically prioritize focus for the detected subject, but you can also interactively adjust the focus distance. Precise focus range tuning is also available (currently desktop only: Lightroom Desktop, Lightroom Classic, and Camera Raw).
• You can also further customize the Bokeh shapes, highlight Boost (desktop only), and make depth map refinements (desktop only).

Will my Lens Blur adjustments on one surface be synced to other surfaces? I.e. mobile to web to desktop, and vice versa?

• Yes, all edits will sync. To revert settings, you can go back to previous versions or history steps, or un-apply Lens Blur settings.

Can I add Lens Blur settings to my presets?

• No, presets and copy + paste workflows are not currently enabled for Lens Blur during Early Access.

For more information, please check out Lens Blur. 

Please give it a try and share feedback in this thread as we continually improve this feature.

Lisa Ngo: Lightroom Product Manager

Current Popular Lens Blur Feature Requests:

• Add Noise Option
• Custom Bokeh

Stop by and give them a vote if they're of interest to you!

Posted by: 

[DaniBlanchette]

It's good, but it is slow and keeps freezing up. Would be nice to be able to slowly slide the depth of field and see the blur change in real time without having to move slider, wait for blur to catch up, move slider again, wait again.  Though I'm sure it will become faster out of BETA. But currently, the lag slows down editing time way too much. 

[PAToGraphy]

I would agree. I like the feature and favor a real time slider. Also an indicator that blur had been applied

[John28712076mj34]

I think the feature is ok, I think the masking ability engine is better at picking the subject however. Some featuring aspect should be added.

[geethac33739979]

i would be great to think of  not to analysis of the subject on click of apply. For some systems which are slow this takes a little while, so if that is not done on click but apply based on user selection that would be great, also think about applying this in masking section that will help and improve the process.

[Jonben99]

Working well on some outside portraits where I wanted to obscure some background. My guess is batching/syncing will/may be available with full release?  Didn't work on team photo-masking group issues.  Win11, i9, 64gram, RTX 4070Ti. Images are on NAS. No blank screens. takes about 10 seconds.  

[grantr48388729]

May have already been said, but using Heal after applying the Lens Blur isn't quite right.  Have started applying the Lens Blur as the final step in editing as a result.   Other than that... "wow" is all I can say.  

[karlyn241767857pto]

The effect works amazing on my subjects, but one has a feather on their hat and it is being blurred. The feather is included in the automatically generated "subject" mask, so im not sure why it's blurred! It doesn't seem very intuitive on how to fix this sort of problem. 

[karlyn241767857pto]

I figured out how to use the brush! Nevermind. Works fantastic. 

[John Tristan34416992vidp]

id like to use lens blur (early access) .its so amazing

[KDearing01]

Lens blur is looking great. The only reason I haven't been able to use it yet is because the masking is never right and the brush and stuff under Refine are great but if you could jsut add some more masking tools to help get edges right that would be great!

[raktdy]

So far liking it r/

[sb2314]

It would be nice if they included aperture f-stops to stimulate what they would show the photograph as to be more realistic rather than a fake blur which can be overdone.

[Ian34430476obfx]

Over all, not a bad tool. It could do with a "brush" to recover areas where it hasn't got quite right, but as I said, Not Bad

[EastTexas44]

I running LR Classic (13.0.1) on a 2019 iMac (Sonoma 14.1.1) and find that Lens Blur works nicely until I try to use it on narrow elements  like  butterfly antennas;  then it usually eliminate parts of the these narrow appendages - as you can see on the right antenna on this fritillary.  The left image doesn't have Lens applied, while the right image (a virtual copy of the left image) does.  

[carlynd25901776]

Lens Blur is awesome.. what I'm really wishing for is a toolbar of my favorite brushes as small buttons/icons to access them quickly rather than having to scroll down. 

[Thomas344391356jm2]

this feature has been a complete game-changer for me. 

when it works, it often has issues with blurring subjects' ears, especially in busier backgrounds. 

[windhover_uk]

Worked well for me... terrific new feature. As already mentioned maybe a small icon to say which images have had Lens Blur applied. Good work guys...

[mastier]

In my case it removed the hand from person having the suit. Also adding some car in the back.
Beyond that, pretty ok.

[Bryanakers]

Love this tremendously - it's a great effect. What I'd like to see is the ability to add a little noise to the blurred area for reality. I have some low light images that were somewhat noisy. Applying the lens blur has out-of-focus that are free of noise and just don't look right.

[Hemant344405247z4l]

Hello, for me this worked once, but any subsequent attempt leads to "something went wrong"

[defaultudnvq8n1bokp]

Great concept. Needs a lot more work.
The main problem I have is that it has trouble diffrentiating between main subject and backgraound when the colours are close, i.e. green leaves at the underside of a flower, same distance as flower from camera, gets selected as background.

It will be great with more fine tuning 

[krakozavr@gmail.com]

Manual masking is absolutely must-have. Depth map may be mistaken. Sometimes, the objects are split in two and partially blurred, and it is impossible to correct with the current tool.

[Dwight McCann]

After applying radial blur to the background of a family photo on a PC Win10 machine of a Sony A7R4a body, when clicking on the image to resize it, the screen went to black and was unresponsive, and then to "normal", still unresponsive, then to black, and then to the correct resized version, and then repeated this pattern.  This feature is clearly not ready for prime time. I am running the very latest version of Lightroom Classic. Filesize restrictions prevent me from providing the RAW file.

[sb2314]

I enjoy using this feature in certain pictures and have been learning about
it since it was released. My Windows 11 computer with 32 GB RAM and 10 GB
graphics card on an i9 processor has not had any problems. There is a
little jerkiness on the sliders and it takes about 5 seconds to render, so
I am assuming you need more 'power' on your computer. I wish you luck!

--
Sent from Gmail in PC

[Kayla34477102qkl0]

Im loving it.