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: 

[simonsaith]

In situation like blurred stray hair, The first thing I would try on the desktop, is to tweak the focal range control to extend the focus range a little bit to see if it helps; if not, try the brush based refinement tool.

The current workaround to add back grain is to create a mask and add local grain effects.

[Marek32840225fik2]

It looks very promising, but in my case it seems to cause a GPU processing error, when I change the blur amount after the initial value.    

[ProduzerPlayer]

I have a pretty fast computer with plenty of ram and a good video card.  Using this feature, every time I make any type of adjustment, it temporaraly crashes lightroom and says up in the corner, "not responding", then after a few long seconds, it comes back and seems to be okay.  But this will be a huge problem if it continues without and update fix.

[simonsaith]

Windows or Mac? If on Windows, follow https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/troubleshoot-gpu.html , especially Solution #4 to update to the latest GPU driver.

[simonsaith]

If you encounter GPU driver issues while using ML features in LrClassic/LrD/ACR, please try to update to the latest macOS version or if you are on a Windows machine, follow https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/troubleshoot-gpu.html to update your machine to the latest GPU driver and  see if the problem resolves itself.

If the OS or the driver is not available or possible and the problem persists, then try the following workaround method as a last resort. The method provides a mechanism to allow LrDesktop/LrClassic/ACR customers to force the ML inference to always run on CPU instead of default. See details here https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html#lens-blur.

[irapp]

It's amazing, if you can blur the edges when you rack the foreground obect out of focus, it would be great. Right now its sharp edges it needs to blend with the background.

[irapp]

The edges do not blend naturally into the background from the foreground.

[Sam Babus]

Possibly have lens blur in the drop down on the AI masking tool so it selects the background automatically 

[Rodel3284121573j7]

A big help since i am using clarity to blurry my backround.

[JLobert]

Interesting new feature, which seems to be catering to the portrait crowd mostly. It works quite well there.

One bug: When I check "Apply", nothing happens (no spinning wheel / GPU processing on bottom right, no action). I need to adjust any of the sliders at least a tad to make it kick in. Lightroom, latest everything.

Where it falls short is for images that do not contain a person. I assume it is currently optimized to find people and blur the background. For anything else, it needs to machine learn from many more photos. I attached a photo of the Unisphere at night and whereas the rings are clearly part of the foreground sphere with distinct contrast to the sky, the blur interprets it as background, regardless of how tight I set the focal range. The algorithm doesn't know any night photos and not enough photos that don't contain people.

[simonsaith]

The refinement brush would be a very good use case for this photo since the dark sky does not have much details and a few brush stroke should clean it up.

>which seems to be catering to the portrait crowd mostly
Not really.

[Berrerter.Photo]

Very Goof Function for Creative Photo

[chriswesselmanphotography]

One thing comes to mind: now that we can adjust backgrounds very easily with Len Blur, there will be less need to oversharpen and oversaturate the subject or foreground to create the perception of separateness that we've (even subconsciously) been hoping for all along. I'll probably be using Len Blur early in my workflow, before adjusting the subject(s) or foreground. Maybe I'll be able to stay closer to how I remember the subject/foreground actually looking, as opposed trying to setting it off. Yes, LrC masking accomplished a lot of this, but Lens Blur is much closer to an f/stop or focal plane or bokeh adjustment, and already on one test image, it looks a lot more realistic. I've wanted to do this for a long time, this easy and this fast. Well done!

(In my image here, I haven't backed off on the Sharpen or Sat yet.)

[felixv78147520]

In lightroom right now it shows the F stop that the picture was taken by the camera. e.g. my photo read F:2.8. It would be nice if the new Lens Blur showed what it took it too. So my 2.8 would reflect that it was changed to: 1.4 when using Lens Blur.  

[En tus Brazos Foto]

I'm Loving it! totally fangirling about this one! I will need to explore it further but at first glance would love to have a tiny indicator as of which photos I have enhances with depth blur. 

Thank you for making our work easier

[Fredy32843097aixo]

les falta mejorar en cuanto al cabello

[stv4]

Lens Blur took way too long to analyse the scene, I hit cancel.

[simonsaith]

What is your machine configuration? Lightroom>Help>System Info...

[McBoatPhoto]

Works great. Super Easy to use.

[davidr52813095]

Crashed my computer once

gave me a message "Something went wrong" twice

[joser36987010]

Tengo una fotografia que me corta muy tajante el area del pelo el desenfoque y se ve que no es natural, ademas tengo otra que en alguna pose el area del brazo que no deberia tener tiene, esperamos que agreguen una brocha y/o una pluma para agregar y o quitar para perfeccionar, pero a estas alturas poder agregar aunque sea un poco de desenfoque es una maravilla, excelente trabajo porque nos emocionan junto con ustedes.

[simonsaith]

Please the refine option a try for you to brush in more blur or focus to select areas.

[groodo]

The new feature is magnificent, but I think it's missing a parameter that I can't understand why it wasn't included from the start, which is to add noise. I can't believe any kind of lens blur if it doesn't have any noise. It's blatantly obvious that it was done in post-production. It's a basic thing that should be added.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@groodo  You might want to vote for this feature request: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-lens-blur-add-noise-option/idi-p/14142655 

[groodo]

yes, thank you